Читать книгу Berlin Game - Len Deighton - Страница 8

‘I thought you must have missed the plane,’ said my wife as she switched on the bedside light. She’d not yet got to sleep; her long hair was hardly disarranged and the frilly nightdress was not rumpled. She’d gone to bed early by the look of it. There was a lighted cigarette on the ashtray. She must have been lying there in the dark, smoking and thinking about her work. On the side table there were thick volumes from the office library and a thin blue Report from the Select Committee on Science and Technology, with notebook and pencil and the necessary supply of Benson & Hedges cigarettes, a considerable number of which were now only butts packed tightly in the big cut-glass ashtray she’d brought from the sitting room. She lived a different sort of life when I was away; now it was like going into a different house and a different bedroom, to a different woman.

‘Some bloody strike at the airport,’ I explained. There was a tumbler containing whisky balanced on the clock-radio. I sipped it; the ice cubes had long since melted to make a warm weak mixture. It was typical of her to prepare a treat so carefully – with linen napkin, stirrer and some cheese straws – and then forget about it.

‘London Airport?’ She noticed her half-smoked cigarette and stubbed it out and waved away the smoke.

‘Where else do they go on strike every day?’ I said irritably.

‘There was nothing about it on the news.’

‘Strikes are not news any more,’ I said. She obviously thought that I had not come directly from the airport, and her failure to commiserate with me over three wasted hours there did not improve my bad temper.

‘Did it go all right?’

‘Werner sends his best wishes. He told me that story about your Uncle Silas betting him fifty marks about the building of the Wall.’

‘Not again,’ said Fiona. ‘Is he ever going to forget that bloody bet?’

‘He likes you,’ I said. ‘He sent his best wishes.’ It wasn’t exactly true, but I wanted her to like him as I did. ‘And his wife has left him.’

‘Poor Werner,’ she said. Fiona was very beautiful, especially when she smiled that sort of smile that women save for men who have lost their woman. ‘Did she go off with another man?’

‘No,’ I said untruthfully. ‘She couldn’t stand Werner’s endless affairs with other women.’

‘Werner!’ said my wife, and laughed. She didn’t believe that Werner had affairs with lots of other women. I wondered how she could guess so correctly. Werner seemed an attractive sort of guy to my masculine eyes. I suppose I will never understand women. The trouble is that they understand me; they understand me too damned well. I took off my coat and put it on a hanger. ‘Don’t put your overcoat in the wardrobe,’ said Fiona. ‘It needs cleaning. I’ll take it in tomorrow.’ As casually as she could, she added, ‘I tried to get you at the Steigerberger Hotel. Then I tried the duty officer at Olympia but no one knew where you were. Billy’s throat was swollen. I thought it might be mumps.’

‘I wasn’t there,’ I said.

‘You asked the office to book you there. You said it’s the best hotel in Berlin. You said I could leave a message there.’

‘I stayed with Werner. He’s got a spare room now that his wife’s gone.’

‘And shared all those women of his?’ said Fiona. She laughed again. ‘Is it all part of a plan to make me jealous?’

I leaned over and kissed her. ‘I’ve missed you, darling. I really have. Is Billy okay?’

‘Billy’s fine. But that damned man at the garage gave me a bill for sixty pounds!’

‘For what?’

‘He’s written it all down. I told him you’d see about it.’

‘But he let you have the car?’

‘I had to collect Billy from school. He knew that before he did the service on it. So I shouted at him and he let me take it.’

‘You’re a wonderful wife,’ I said. I undressed and went into the bathroom to wash and to brush my teeth.

‘And it went well?’ she called.

I looked at myself in the long mirror. It was just as well that I was tall, for I was getting fatter, and that Berlin beer hadn’t helped matters. ‘I did what I was told,’ I said, and finished brushing my teeth.

‘Not you, darling,’ said Fiona. I switched on the Water-Pik and above its chugging sound I heard her add, ‘You never do what you are told, you know that.’

I went back into the bedroom. She’d combed her hair and smoothed the sheet on my side of the bed. She’d put my pyjamas on the pillow. They consisted of a plain red jacket and paisley-printed trousers. ‘Are these mine?’

‘The laundry didn’t come back this week. I phoned them. The driver is ill … so what can you say?’

‘I didn’t check into the Berlin office at all, if that’s what’s eating you,’ I admitted. ‘They’re all young kids in there, don’t know their arse from a hole in the ground. I feel safer with one of the old-timers like Werner.’

‘Suppose something happened? Suppose there was trouble and the duty officer didn’t even know you were in Berlin? Can’t you see how silly it is not to give them some sort of perfunctory call?’

‘I don’t know any of those Olympia Stadion people any more, darling. It’s all changed since Frank Harrington took over. They are youngsters, kids with no field experience and lots and lots of theories from the training school.’

‘But your man turned up?’

‘No.’

‘You spent three days there for nothing?’

‘I suppose I did.’

‘They’ll send you in to get him. You realize that, don’t you?’

I got into bed. ‘Nonsense. They’ll use one of the West Berlin people.’

‘It’s the oldest trick in the book, darling. They send you over there to wait … for all you know, he wasn’t even in contact. Now you’ll go back and report a failed contact and you’ll be the one they send in to get him. My God, Bernie, you are a fool at times.’

I hadn’t looked at it like that, but there was more than a grain of truth in Fiona’s cynical viewpoint. ‘Well, they can find someone else,’ I said angrily. ‘Let one of the local people go over to get him. My face is too well known there.’

‘They’ll say they’re all kids without experience, just what you yourself said.’

‘It’s Brahms Four,’ I told her.

‘Brahms – those network names sound so ridiculous. I liked it better when they had codewords like Trojan, Wellington and Claret.’

The way she said it was annoying. ‘The postwar network names are specially chosen to have no identifiable nationality,’ I said. ‘And the number four man in the Brahms network once saved my life. He’s the one who got me out of Weimar.’

‘He’s the one who is kept so damned secret. Yes, I know. Why do you think they sent you? And now do you see why they are going to make you go in and get him?’ Beside the bed, my photo stared back at me from its silver frame. Bernard Samson, a serious young man with baby face, wavy hair and horn-rimmed glasses looked nothing like the wrinkled old fool I shaved every morning.

‘I was in a spot. He could have kept going. He didn’t have to come back all the way to Weimar.’ I settled into my pillow. ‘How long ago was that – eighteen years, maybe twenty?’

‘Go to sleep,’ said Fiona. ‘I’ll phone the office in the morning and say you are not well. It will give you time to think.’

‘You should see the pile of work on my desk.’

‘I took Billy and Sally to the Greek restaurant for his birthday. The waiters sang happy birthday and cheered him when he blew the candles out. It was sweet of them. I wish you’d been there.’

‘I won’t go. I’ll tell the old man in the morning. I can’t do that kind of thing any more.’

‘And there was a phone call from Mr Moore at the bank. He wants to talk with you. He said there’s no hurry.’

‘And we both know what that means,’ I said. ‘It means phone me back immediately or else!’ I was close to her now and I could smell perfume. Had she put it on just for me, I wondered.

‘Harry Moore isn’t like that. At Christmas we were nearly seven hundred overdrawn, and when we saw him at my sister’s party he said not to worry.’

‘Brahms Four took me to the house of a man named Busch – Karl Busch – who had this empty room in Weimar …’ It was all coming back to me. ‘We stayed there three days and afterwards Karl Busch went back there. They took Busch up to the security barracks in Leipzig. He was never seen again.’

‘You’re senior staff now, darling,’ she said sleepily. ‘You don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to.’

‘I phoned you last night,’ I said. ‘It was two o’clock in the morning but there was no reply.’

‘I was here, asleep,’ she said. She was awake and alert now. I could tell by the tone of her voice.

‘I let it ring for ages,’ I said. ‘I tried twice. Finally I got the operator to dial it.’

‘Then it must be the damned phone acting up again. I tried to phone here for Nanny yesterday afternoon and there was no reply. I’ll tell the engineers tomorrow.’