Hammer to Fall E-Book

John Lawton

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 524

Beschreibung

It's London, the swinging sixties, and by rights MI6 spy Joe Wilderness should be having as good a time as James Bond. But alas, in the wake of an embarrassing disaster for MI6, Wilderness has been posted to remote northern Finland in a cultural exchange program to promote Britain abroad. Bored by his work, with nothing to spy on, Wilderness finds another way to make money: smuggling vodka across the border into the USSR. He strikes a deal with old KGB pal Kostya, who explains to him there is a vodka shortage in the Soviet Union - but there is something fishy about Kostya's sudden appearance in Finland and intelligence from London points to a connection to cobalt mining in the region, a critical component in the casing of the atomic bomb. Wilderness's posting is getting more interesting by the minute, but more dangerous too. Moving from the no-man's-land of Cold War Finland to the wild days of the Prague Spring, and populated by old friends (including Inspector Troy) and old enemies alike, Hammer to Fall is a gripping tale of deception and skulduggery, of art and politics, a page-turning story of the always riveting life of the British spy.

Leseprobe

Also by John Lawton

1963

Black Out

Old Flames

A Little White Death

Bluffing Mr. Churchill

Flesh Wounds

Second Violin

A Lily of the Field

Sweet Sunday

Then We Take Berlin

The Unfortunate Englishman

Friends and Traitors

First published in the United States of America and Canada in 2020 by

Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

This hardback edition first published in Great Britain in 2020 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © John Lawton, 2020

The moral right of John Lawton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 61185 635 4

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 463 3

E-book ISBN 978 1 61185 905 8

Printed in Great Britain

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per

Marcia

You cannot fold a flood

And put it in a drawer,

Because the winds would find it out,

And tell your cedar floor.

—Emily Dickinson

I

Peanut Butter

§1

East Berlin: July or August 1948

Das Eishaus: The Egg-Cooling House, Osthafen

“So, Sadie says to Doris—”

“Doris? Что такое дорис?”

“Doris is just a name, Yuri. A woman’s name. Doris, Debbie, Diana . . . doesn’t matter. Just a fuckin’ name.”

“Da. Da. Еврейское имя?”

“What?”

Frank turned to Wilderness, the exasperation beginning to show in his face. Wilderness translated.

“He’s asking if it’s a Jewish name.”

“Oh. Right. Yeah. If you like. It’s a Jewish name. Anyway . . . Doris says to Sadie—”

“No,” said Wilderness. “Sadie was talking to Doris.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake. Who’s telling this gag? You or me? So . . . Sadie says to Doris, ‘My Hymie’s such a gentleman. Every week he brings me flowers.’ And Doris says, ‘Oh yeah, my Jake is such a putz, if he brings me flowers it can mean only one thing. I’ll be spending the night with my legs in the air!’ And Sadie says, ‘Oh, you don’t got a vase?’ ”

Frank laughed at his own joke. All but slapped his thighs. Wilderness managed a smile. He had heard it before. Three or four times, in fact, but Frank was never one to preface a gag with, “Stop me if I told you this one already.”

Yuri looked nonplussed.

The kid next to him, one of those string-bean youths they had nicknamed “Yuri’s Silents,” was smirking. He looked to be about the same age as Wilderness himself, but Wilderness was twenty going on thirty, and this kid was twenty going on twelve. He always looked nervous—scared shitless, as Frank would have it—and perhaps he, a mere corporal, thought it only prudent not to laugh at a dirty joke his boss, a gilded NKVD major with shoulder boards as wide as landing strips, couldn’t get.

Yuri got swiftly back to business.

“Sunday? One hundred pounds?”

Frank glanced quickly at Wilderness. Wilderness nodded.

“Sure. One hundred pounds of finest PX Java.”

Yuri stuck out his hand. He liked to shake on every deal. Even though they’d been trading coffee, butter and anything else the Russians had on their shopping list for months now, he shook every time as though resealing a bond between them. Wilderness did not think Yuri trusted Frank Spoleto, but then he wasn’t at all sure he trusted Frank either.

They were about halfway back to the jeep. Wilderness could see Swift Eddie at the wheel, deep in a Penguin paperback, oblivious to all around him. And he could hear footsteps running behind them.

He turned.

It was the “Silent.” His great flat feet slapping down on the pockmarked tarmac.

“I am sorry. I mean not to surprise you.”

He was a Kolya or a Kostya . . . one of those abundant Russian diminutives foisted onto children and rarely abandoned as adults. He had the look of an adolescent, features scarcely formed, his face dominated by bright blue eyes that seemed far too trusting to work for an NKVD rogue like Yuri. His Adam’s apple bobbed above his collar. His long fingers disappeared into a pocket to produce . . . an empty jam jar.

Frank said, “What’s on your mind, kid?”

“Can you get me this?”

Wilderness said, nipping in ahead of Frank, “Our deal is with Major Myshkin. We don’t undercut him and we don’t deal without him.”

Frank rolled the jar in his hand, showed Wilderness the label.

“I don’t think Yuri will give a damn about this, Joe.”

The label read,

COUSIN KITTY’S GEORGIA PEANUT BUTTER

And then, egregiously,

YUM, YUMMY YUM YUMS

“Is true,” said Kolya/Kostya. “The major will let me buy.”

Wilderness shrugged. Who was he to stand in the way of a deal, however petty?

“Can you get it?” he said to Frank.

“Sure. If not this brand, then something like. If there’s one kind of peanut butter coming out of Georgia, there must be fifty. If this is what he wants. I’ll find something. God knows why he wants it. The stuff sticks to your teeth like Plasticine.”

“Is . . . личное дело . . . personal, yes?”

“Whatever. Fifty cents a jar, OK. And greenbacks. Capisce? None of those Ostmarks you guys print like toilet paper. US dollars, right?”

“Of course,” the kid grinned. “Grrrrinbaksy.”

“How many jars?”

“Hundred.”

“A hundred?”

“A hundred . . . to begin with.”

“OK, kid, you got yourself a deal. Now shake on it, just like your Uncle Yuri, and me and my partner here will head back to civilisation.”

They shook, and Kolya/Kostya said, “Major Myshkin not my uncle. I am Kostya—Konstantin Ilyich Zolotukhin.”

As they climbed into the jeep, Frank had his moan.

“Do any of them have a sense of humour? ‘Uncle’ was just a tease. And Yuri . . . what in hell happened to him? It was as though I’d asked to fuck his grandmother.”

“Maybe he doesn’t like Jewish jokes.”

“Never thought of that. Do you reckon he’s Jewish? I mean, what kind of a name is Myshkin?”

“A Russian name,” Wilderness replied. “And you can bet your last dollar it’s not his real name. By the bye . . . how much does a jar of peanut butter cost back home?”

Frank’s hand sliced the air, tipping an imaginary fried egg onto an imaginary plate.

“Around twelve cents.”

“That’s quite a markup.”

“Markup from what? We steal the stuff. And how would the kid ever know the right price? He’s going to hop on a plane to Shitcreek, New Jersey, and hit the local grocery store?”

“I meant. Fair play. That’s all.”

“Fair play. Jeezus. Joe, this is no time to grow a conscience. If he’ll pay fifty cents then we collect fifty cents.”

§2

The problem had always been their own people. The military police of the French, British and American occupying forces. The Reds left them alone. Wilderness assumed that they’d all been told by Yuri not to mess with his “Schiebers” . . . his smugglers. Since the airlift began, the MPs did not cross the line to East Berlin, but on occasion they were not past demanding the odd, random search—and on occasion producing papers showing they were in Intelligence cut no mustard and a half-hearted, odd, random search took place. None of them had ever thought to open the jerry cans mounted on the jeep—all packed with contraband.

There was no room in the cans for the peanut butter, so it sat in a sack in the footwell. So what if it got confiscated? The goods that mattered were the ones that passed for currency . . . cigarettes and coffee. And who among the English MPs would know what this stuff was? If needs be, Wilderness was prepared to swear it was bunion ointment or pile cream.

Come Sunday, they delivered the coffee.

Yuri paid up, in the usual manner, as though each dollar was flayed from his own back, and disappeared.

They were left alone with Kostya, who beamed with delight at his purchase, and paid without pain.

“I even got you the same brand,” Frank threw in.

“Da. Most happy. Cousin Kitty. Most happy.”

“To begin with, you said. A hundred jars to begin with.”

Wilderness would not have offered to extend this deal. It could not be long before crossing West to East became a logistical impossibility. They had far bigger concerns than piddling amounts of peanut butter.

“I will . . . let you know.”

“Kid, you sound just like a New York theatrical agent talking to a Forty-Second Street hoofer. ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ ”

“At the club. I call at the club. At Paradies Verlassen.”

“OK. But time and tide wait for no man, as Shakespeare says.”

“Chaucer, you dimwit,” Wilderness said as they left.

“Chaucer, schmaucer. I should care.”

§3

Later that week, the Schiebers gathered at the Paradies Verlassen club, as they did three or four nights of seven. Wilderness thought they must look odd—odd to any onlooker. A bit like the enlisted version of the Three Stooges, none remotely resembling the other: Frank in his US Army olive green, Eddie in his Artillery khaki and Wilderness in RAF pale blue. One captain, one lance bombardier and one corporal who knew in his bones he’d never make officer. If they only had a Frenchman handy they’d be a representative cross-section of the occupying powers of West Berlin, but Frank had a thing against the French, and Wilderness knew from experience that the French would be the last to forgive and forget and hence would never make good Schiebers. Neither forgiving nor forgetting was essential to smuggling, which entailed trading with the likely next enemy and the certain last enemy, but a self-serving indifference to old wounds was. Occasionally they would add a splash of dirty-brown and a little brighter blue to the mix—the NKVD uniform of Yuri, Major Myshkin . . . all jackboots, epaulettes and red stars—but Yuri rationed his visits.

Tonight, the dirty-brown and blue was worn by a woman—her uniform far better tailored than the baggy sacks that Yuri wore. Wilderness caught sight of her across the room just she yanked on the cord of the Rohrpoststation and sent a note hurtling through the pneumatic tubes that crisscrossed the ceiling to land, half a minute later, in the net above his head. She waved, blew him a kiss that meant nothing.

Wilderness unfolded the note.

“That damn Tosca bitch?” said Frank, part statement part question, squirming in his chair to look across the room.

But Tosca had picked up her book and resumed reading, and Frank seemed to look right past her.

“Yes,” Wilderness replied. “Seems she wants a bit of a chat.”

“You kill me with phrases like that. The English art of understatement. When she rips off your balls with a bayonet, try understating that.”

Wilderness, as with so many of Frank’s moans, ignored this. He crossed the floor, past the man tinkling idly at the piano, to her table.

“Major Tosca.”

“Corporal Holderness.”

Whilst she was always “Major Tosca” to him, usually he was just “Wilderness” to her. Once in a while, he was Joe. If Tosca addressed him by his real name, let alone by his RAF rank, he was probably in trouble.

She beckoned to a waiter. Ordered two vodka martinis, and Wilderness (real name Holderness) sat, waiting to hear what was on her mind.

“You guys don’t give up easy, do you?”

Wilderness loved her voice. New York. Raspy. Like grating nutmeg. There was much to love about Tosca. Everything Frank would fail to appreciate. Thirty, maybe thirty-five at the most, with eyes like conkers and tits like Jane Russell.

“Do we need to give up? The blockade isn’t working. We both know that.”

“Plenty of you Schiebers have given up.”

“The ones who have given up are the ones your people have shot. And so far they’ve all been civilians. You don’t shoot at uniforms.”

“You got a good shield in Yuri.”

“I know.”

“It might not be as wide a shield as you imagine.”

“Meaning?”

“You been going East more often than usual. You have a new deal, a new customer.”

Wilderness said nothing.

“In short, you got Kostya.”

“And he works for Yuri.”

A brief silence as the waiter set glasses in front of them, and Tosca took a first sip of her martini.

“I’ll miss these if they ever drag me back to Moscow. New York, London, Moscow. I have to ask myself. Am I on a losing streak?”

“Kostya,” Wilderness prompted.

Tosca pushed a note across the table to him:

Can you meet me Tuesday 7pm at the Café Orpheus in Warschauer Straße opposite the station? K.

“I don’t mind playing the messenger for you. But make this the last time.”

“I’m not happy about these deals to begin with, so . . . yes. We complete on this one and we’re out.”

“Good. I do not want Kostya hurt, so do not hurt Kostya. Do not get Kostya hurt. He’s the son of my oldest friend. Besides, he’s just a kid.”

“I’m just a kid.”

“No, Joe, you’re not just a kid. You were born old. Make this the last time you sell anything to Kostya. The shit will hit the fan one day soon. I want Kostya kept clean. If he works for Yuri, OK. Yuri can bullshit his way out of anything. He’s a survivor. And Spoleto? Do we any of us give a fuck what happens to Frank?”

“He’s my partner. I care.”

“Admirable. Don’t let caring get you killed. Above all, don’t let your caring get my Kostya killed. Capisce?”

“Capisco.”

§4

The Warschauer Straße U-Bahn station was just within the Soviet sector, a boundary defined at this point by the River Spree. It was the easternmost stop on a line that began out at Uhlandstraße and crossed the river on the upper deck of the Oberbaumbrücke, a Victorian monstrosity, not unlike Tower Bridge in London, that had taken a pasting at the very end of the war—not from the Allies, but from the Wehrmacht, who had blown the central spans to slow down the Russian entry into Berlin. The lower deck was for vehicles and pedestrians, and had been the scene of a couple of shootings in the last few weeks.

They crossed without incident. They were less than two hundred yards from the Egg Palace and most, if not all the guards would be on Yuri’s payroll.

There was no Café Orpheus.

They parked the jeep in front of the Café Unterwelt. A cultural slip of tongue or memory that made sense to Wilderness and Eddie but was wasted on Frank.

“I hope the kid doesn’t turn out to be total fuck-up. Orpheus . . . Unterthing . . . who knows?”

The café was aptly named. A pit of a place lacking only brimstone and sulphur, presided over by man wearing a grubby vest and several layers of grease. He said nothing, just jerked his thumb in the direction of the back room.

Kostya was not alone. He stood up as they entered, gestured to the woman seated next to him, and said, “This is Major—”

Frank cut him short.

“Are we dealing with you or with some major we never met? What is this? Does your army have more majors than grunts? Everyone’s a fucking major!”

“Со мной будете говорить.”

“What did she say?”

Wilderness said, “Calm down. She says to deal with her.”

The woman looked up. Dark-skinned, thick black hair falling in ringlets to her blue epaulettes, nut-brown eyes like Tosca, but sadder eyes, far, far sadder. She looked to be roughly the same age as Tosca but perhaps she had not worn so well. God alone knew what life she might have led—women like this had driven tanks from the Urals to Berlin only a couple of years ago. Women like this had taken Berlin and crushed the Nazis.

She had a jar of jam and a jar of Cousin Kitty in front of her, and was spreading what looked to be grape jelly and peanut butter onto a slice of black bread.

“Oh, God. That’s just disgusting,” Frank said.

“В один прекрасный день будет бозможно купить такую смесь в одной и той же банке.”

Kostya translated. “The major says one day you will be able to buy grape jelly and peanut butter in one jar. Progress.”

“Yeah, well it’s disgusting. Like eating ice cream and meatballs off of the same plate.”

Wilderness said, “Frank, shuttup and let them get to the point.”

“The major asks this of you. We are wish to buy one thousand jars.”

“Not possible,” Wilderness said.

He felt Frank touch his arm, watched the major bite into her gooey feast.

“No so fast, kid. Could be doable, could be.”

“Even if you can get hold of a thousand jars, we don’t have enough hiding places in the jeep for a thousand jars of anything.”

“Excuse us,” said Frank, with an uncharacteristic show of good manners, and hustled Wilderness to a corner by the door.

“It’s a cool five hundred, an easy five hundred. Are we going to turn down money like that? Who cares if we have to carry it out in the open? Our guys are lazy, the Reds don’t give a shit and if we’re caught, we throw ’em a few jars and carry on. It’s not as if it’s coffee. It’s not the brown gold. It’s sticky kids’ stuff in a fucking jar. You think anyone’s gonna start World War III over peanut butter?”

Wilderness said nothing for a few moments, looked back across the room, catching the major with a look of pure gastronomic delight on her face.

“OK. But that’s it. No more irregular runs after this.”

“Irregular?”

“We stick with coffee and butter. We stick with what we know pays and we deal only with Yuri.”

“OK, OK.”

Frank approached the table.

“One thousand it is. Fifty cents a jar. Five hundred dollars.”

The major wiped her mouth on the back of one hand.

“Двадцать центов за банку.”

Wilderness said, “She’s offering twenty.”

“No way. I might go to forty-five.”

“Скидка для навала.”

“She wants a discount for bulk.”

“Are you kidding? This is bullshit.”

The major got to her feet.

“Twenty-five,” she said, suddenly no longer in need of an interpreter.

“Forty.”

“Thirty-five.”

“Done,” said Frank.

She spoke rapidly to Kostya, so rapidly Wilderness could not follow, but Kostya said simply, “Noon, Friday?”

Then she bustled past them before either Frank or Wilderness had answered.

“Well, I’ll be dipped in dogshit.”

“That would be justice,” said Wilderness.

“Kid, your buddy drives a hard bargain.”

“Buddy? What is buddy?”

“You know. Pal, chum . . . mate . . . fukkit . . . tovarich.”

“No, not my pal. Это моя мама.”

“What?”

“He said she’s not his buddy, she’s his mother.”

“I don’t fucking believe this.”

“Yes. Yes. My mother, Volga Vasilievna Zolotukhina.”

As Tosca had called her, “my oldest friend.”

“Volga?” Frank said.

“Da. Like the river.”

Frank rolled his eyes, a burlesque of incredulity.

“Would you believe I have an Aunt Mississippi?”

Kostya looked to Wilderness for help, baffled by Frank.

“Ignore him, Kostya. We’ll be here at noon on Friday.”

§5

At noon on Friday, they pulled up by the Café Unterwelt. Eddie drove. Wilderness and Frank sat awkwardly with knees almost to their chins and their feet atop small mountains of jam jars. It felt ridiculous. It looked ridiculous. Wilderness was amazed they hadn’t been stopped for the sheer fun of it.

They parked behind a Red Army half-track, purring diesel fumes into the summer sunshine. Two Silents stood by the rear doors. But these were not Yuri’s Silents—young men with scarcely flesh on their bones, chosen for their brains, not their brawn—these were hulking bruisers, as tall as Wilderness or Frank and twice as wide. True to type, neither spoke, and the Schiebers made their way to the back room.

Major Zolotukhina was at the table, playing patience with a frayed deck of cards. Red Queen on black King. Black seven on red eight.

There was no sign of Kostya.

“Тысяча, да?”

“She wants to know if we got her the thousand jars.”

“I got nine hundred and thirty-six.”

“Не важно.”

Even Frank understood that—an easy carefreeness close to universal de nada . . . di niente.

Suddenly she shot to her feet, as rigidly to attention as a short, stout woman could be. She saluted. Fingertips touching the peak of her cap.

The Schiebers turned. A tall, slender figure had appeared silently in the doorway.

Wilderness could hear Frank revving up to say something and got in first.

“Just salute, you idiot. And hold until she returns it.”

Frank raised his hand, whispered, “What the fuck is this?”

“It . . . is a full-blown NKVD general.”

“Are we busted?”

The general was looking them up and down, assessing, deciding . . . hands clasped behind her back like a member of the British royal family. Then she quickly returned the salute for all three of them, stepped past the men and spoke softly to Zolotukhina.

“Ты здесь пряталась, а?”

(So, this is where you’ve been hiding?)

Then they both grinned like schoolgirls and hugged as though they had not seen one another in months.

As she left, almost over her shoulder the general said, “Не опаздывай.”

(Don’t be late.)

Momentarily Wilderness wondered, “Late for what?” but it didn’t matter. None of this mattered, they’d collect their money and go. And never come back.

Outside, Eddie stood with his hands in his pockets, conspicuously not helping the Silents load nine hundred and thirty-six jars of Cousin Kitty (smooth and crunchy) into the back of the half-track.

“I make that $327.60,” said Frank. “Call it $325 for easy.”

Wilderness translated and then translated Zolotukhina’s reply.

“She says Kostya holds the money. He’ll pay us this evening.”

“What? Does she think we’re fuckin’ dumb?”

“She says he’s having a tooth out right now, but he’ll be here at eight with our money.”

“And you believe her?”

Making a virtue out of necessity, Wilderness said, “Frank, you need to know who to trust.”

Frank let it go. Let Volga Zolotukhina go. Not that either of them could have stopped her. He was seething a little, but too many thoughts dogged his brain.

“So we come back one more time?”

“Yep.”

“And who was the top skirt?”

“You know, you’re wasted in Intelligence. That was Krasnaya. I’d bet money on it. Only female general in the NKVD.”

“Kras what?”

“Krasnaya. Short for Krasnaya Vdova—the Red Widow. Hero of the revolution. They all took noms de guerre. I think she began as Red Hammer . . . a name she is supposed to have adopted in exile in Switzerland over thirty years ago. She came back to Russia on the sealed train with Lenin and Krupskaya—”

“Krup who?”

“—But then her husband was killed in the civil war . . . so she’s been the Red Widow ever since. Krasnaya for short. There were posters she’s said to have posed for. That cartoon style of severity they call Socialist Realism . . . Delacroix made bold and simple . . . heroic, beautiful young woman . . . you know the sort of thing, billowing peasant skirt, red headscarf, unwavering steely gaze . . . machine gun on one arm . . . a baby on the other. They say the baby was really hers, too.”

“So did I just meet a piece of history in this pistol-packing momma?”

“Something like that.”

§6

All over England on a summer’s evening as warm and light as this one, men would be at their allotments lifting potatoes, brushing the caterpillars off brassicas, binding over the green tops of onions—many of them in an old battledress from the all-too-recent war. Khaki or blue. Retained, worn, not out of any prolonged sense of pride but out of a pragmatic sense of waste-not-want-not.

To see Germans still in threadbare Wehrmacht jackets was commonplace and never less than thought-provoking. Who could possibly wear it with any sense of pride? Who could possibly wear it without some sense of shame? Who in the country that was all “want” because it had been all “waste” would dream of throwing it away?

Three old soldiers sat in front of Café Unterwelt, sipping distastefully at acorn coffee and smoking God-knows-what in needle-thin roll-ups. One lacked an eye, one an arm and the third a leg. They were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones were still in Russia.

Wilderness always kept what he called his “bribe pack” of Woodbines in his pocket—two or three cigarettes passed around seemed to ease any negotiation and cost him nothing.

He put the packet on the battered tin table in front of the men. A hand reached out for them. No one spoke. No one looked at him.

But Frank spoke.

“You’re wasting time and money on these bums, Joe. They don’t know the meaning of gratitude. Fukkit, we should have shot the lot.”

He pushed open the door of the café. Mercifully without another word.

The one-eyed man spoke.

“He’s right, you know. We’d be better off dead. Tell him to come back and shoot me. But first let me smoke one of your English cigarettes. Most kind.”

Wilderness wasn’t sure if the man had smiled or smirked sarcastically. He followed Frank, drawn to the sudden outburst within.

Frank had Kostya up against the wall, body-slamming him into the plaster.

“Whaddya mean? Whaddya mean?”

Wilderness shouldered him aside.

“Frank, for crying out loud!”

Kostya slumped to the floor.

A trail of blood crept across his chin, but then Wilderness remembered he’d had a tooth out and Frank probably hadn’t hit him—yet.

“He’s trying to scam us. Says he hasn’t got the money!”

Wilderness pulled Kostya to his feet.

“Is this true? Your mother says you hold the purse strings.”

“Shto?”

“That you keep the money for both of you.”

“Тогда моя мать не сказала правды.”

Frank erupted.

“In English, you sonovabitch!”

“He says his mother lied to us.”

“All dollars I ever have I am give to you for first hundred jars. My mother keep other monies.”

“OK. So where’s your fuckin’ mother now?”

Wilderness echoed Frank, used a softer tone, but still one of concern.

“Kostya, where is Volga now? Does she have our money?”

“My mother since three o’clock on road to Moscow. Her . . . подразделение . . .”

“Her unit,” Wilderness prompted.

“Отозвано.”

“He says her unit’s been recalled to Moscow.”

Frank kicked over the table. “Shit, shit, shit.”

And Wilderness recalled Krasnaya’s last word to Volga Zolotukhina—“Don’t be late”—and in the mind’s eye he could see a mile-long column of tanks and half-tracks crawling across the dull plain that was Prussia.

“This comes out of your hide, kid.”

“No,” said Wilderness. “Take it out of my hide, or if you really feel you need to hurt someone there’s a bloke outside who’s already asked you to shoot him.”

“Three hundred bucks, Joe!”

“Peanuts, Frank. If you’re really that upset about it . . . take it out of the stash. Take it all out of my share and forget about it. Kostya hasn’t scammed you. His mother has.”

“What was it you said? I need to know who to trust? I need to know who to trust? It’s you who needs to know who to trust!”

Wilderness sincerely hoped that was Frank’s last word on the matter. His impulse was to walk out, take the jeep and leave Frank to find his way back west on the U-Bahn. But that would mean leaving him alone with Kostya.

Frank’s cap had fallen to the floor in the scuffle. Wilderness picked it up, knocked off the dust and handed it back to Frank. “Here. Take the jeep. I’ll find my own way back.”

Frank put his cap on, with a couple of overly demonstrative, fastidious adjustments. Then he feigned a lunge at Kostya, growling as he did so. Kostya fell back against the wall. Frank laughed and left.

Wilderness held out a hand to help Kostya up and, as he did so, heard Frank encounter the Wehrmacht veterans once more.

“Losers!”

§7

Wilderness went home to Grünetümmlerstraße, to his lover, Nell. He was “Franked” out—a common enough condition—quite possibly Eddie’s permanent one—and while Nell could never be a guarantee of a relaxing time, an easy time (he was not at all sure she understood the idea of “easy” in any language) she did at least provide balance, being almost the moral opposite of Frank, who after all was all but devoid of morals.

Yet again, as every evening since the blockade of Berlin began, the canned food—the solid stuff, as Frank would have it, the stuff they stole from the PX and the NAAFI on a daily basis—sat unopened on the dresser as Nell and Wilderness ate an “austerity” meal of whatever was available for honest Deutschmarks at the local honest market. Tonight it was cabbage-and-bread soup with a hint of fresh parsley grown in their window box—a poor man’s ribollita. On the dresser were prawns in aspic, two foot-long salamis and a dozen cans of Green Giant yellow sweet corn. And Wilderness’s threatening to pawn the can opener if she didn’t use it did not dent her resolve for a second.

“Wir sind Berliner. We are Berliners, Joe. The common fate of our people is our fate. We live like Berliners, we eat like Berliners.”

Substitute “Londoner” for “Berliner” and still the idea meant nothing to Wilderness. On Forces Radio, Flanagan and Allen’s “Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner” had been the hit song of 1947. Wilderness thought it pure schmaltz. He’d no more “love” London than he’d do “The Lambeth Walk.” It was all nonsense. Fate? Fate was never common. Fate was what you made of it.

Nell’s one concession to the black market was eggs from Yuri’s Eishaus. But that was sentimentality, not vice. Since 1945, when Yuri had become her mother’s lover and protector, protecting her from an army of Russian rapists, Yuri had brought eggs. She would never reject his eggs, it would be like rejecting the memory of her mother. Wilderness merely wished that Yuri brought them more often or that today he had bought some himself and passed them off as a gift from Yuri. Lies and more lies.

Wilderness had no problem with lies. You lied and you were lied to. A good Schieber survived by being able to know when he was being lied to whilst lying himself. Not that he liked lying, not that he disliked lying. What was there to have any feeling about? Lying was life—the air you breathed. But . . . but he had told Nell so many lies, and in his heart—that hysterical, unreliable organ—perhaps he wished he hadn’t or perhaps he wished that the necessity to lie wasn’t there?

He’d lied to her between the sheets tonight.

He was relishing the silence that was not quite silence. The sensual rhythm of Nell’s breathing. The perfect mechanical rhythm of the piston engines in the airlift planes overhead—all those Lancasters and Yorks, all those Douglas C-54s—into Tegel, into Gatow . . . all the food to keep a city, well . . . half a city, alive. And the imperfect arrhythmia of takeoff and landing. What was it? A plane every thirty seconds? Every sixty seconds? The Cold War’s metronome. It might become music. It had long ago ceased to be simply noise.

She spoke first.

“You went East today?”

“Yep.” True.

“You’ll have to stop soon. If the airlift goes on, smuggling will become so much more dangerous.”

“Yep.” True.

“So,” a fingertip traced the edge of his left ear, and her lips breathed warmly on his neck. “You will stop, won’t you?”

“Yep.” Lie.

If she knew what he was planning now, knew what tangled thoughts had woven their way into a mental web, knew what he and Frank had cooked up next . . . she’d leave him. Of course there’d be no more runs to the East with a jeep full of black market goodies. He’d found a tunnel. If the Russians controlled the surface, he and Frank would control the underground, deep beneath the Tiergarten, all the way to the ruins of Monbijou on the far bank of the Spree. And if Nell ever found out . . . she’d leave him.

Nell Burkhardt was probably the most moral creature he’d ever met. Raised by thieves and whores back in London’s East End, he had come to regard honesty as aberrant. Nell had never stolen anything, had lied, if at all, only in omission and, her association with Wilderness notwithstanding, led a blameless life, and steered a course through it by the unwavering compass of her selfless altruism.

Oh yes, Nell would definitely leave him.

§8

All the same, it came as a surprise when, a few months later, she did. Even more of a surprise was that he would not set eyes on her again for fifteen years, that the 1950s would roll into the 1960s without a glimpse of her.

From time to time he’d hear of Nell—Nell became, after all, little short of famous—from time to time a woman using L’aimant by Coty would pass him in the street, in London or Paris, Rome or Helsinki . . . and his head would turn involuntarily or his feet would follow, helpless. On one stupid, stupid occasion he’d caught up with a woman, touched her arm, seen the look of fear and commingled scorn in her eyes as he said Nell’s name, then apologised and retraced his steps. He’d learn to mask whatever he might have felt, that little frisson, that tingle in the spine, the goose-pimples up and down his arms, beneath the desirable, inescapable necessities of being first a husband and latterly a father.

He still told lies, but now he lied for England.

And of course he lied to England.

Vienna

§

Vienna, The Imperial Hotel: September 1955

I am not drunk, he told himself with the drunk’s acute sense of euphemism, I am tipsy.

Perhaps it was the booze. Perhaps it was the innate connection between being off duty and off guard. The first blow, to the belly, doubled him up, and the second, to the face, sent him to the floor scarcely conscious. He’d just about taken in the fact of the attack when he found himself dragged by his shirt collar to the bathroom. His eyes returned to focussing in time to see the bath full of water before his head was plunged in.

When he thought he was dying, hands yanked him back up, he sucked in air, and as his head went down again a voice uttered one of the few words that was common to most European languages: “Idiot.”

After the third dunking, the hands let him go, and he fell against the side of the bath, wheezing.

He looked up. The little Russian was sitting on the painted wicker chair by the bathroom door—a semiautomatic in his right hand.

“Идиот,” he said again. “You treat me like an idiot.”

Wilderness got to his feet. Stripped off his sodden jacket. He felt blood on his face and in his mouth. He leaned over the basin, spitting. The gun stayed on him.

“At the Gare du Nord, you are out in the open as though you think you are invisible. On the Orient Express you linger over your meals and gaze out of the window as though you have nothing better to do.”

Wilderness stuck two fingers in his mouth and wiggled a loose tooth. Then he cupped water in his palm and rinsed a pink trail into the basin. He looked in the mirror. This bloke wasn’t wearing gloves, and there were no prints on the mirror. He’d been very careful in his search and wiped it down—or he hadn’t looked.

“In Venice you . . . you English have a bird word for it . . . you swan around like a tourist . . .”

“Bamdid,” Wilderness said.

“Что?”

“Band-aid.”

The Russian just waved the gun.

Wilderness opened the cupboard. His Browning .25 was still taped to the back of the mirror. The Russian could have found it. He could have emptied the magazine. He could have stuck the gun back up. But, then, the point of taping it up had been that any movement of the tape would probably show. It looked to be as he had left it, but there was really only one way to find out. He’d know by the weight as soon as he had it in his hand.

He took out the roll of Elastoplast and closed the door.

The Russian set down his gun in his lap and lit up a cigarette. Cocky, casual, but he could grab the gun in a split second.

“And in the Nordbahnhof this morning, you practically waved a camera in my face. And still you think I do not notice you. English, you treat me like an idiot.”

Wilderness tore off a strip, slapped it on the cut on his right cheek.

The discourse rattled on. “Idiot, amateur, dilettante, бабочка.” Accomplished bore finds captive audience. Indeed, it occurred to Wilderness that the bugger might have gone to the trouble of sandbagging him simply to be able to give him a piece of his mind.

He opened the cupboard door, put the roll of Elastoplast back, pulled the Browning free and aimed.

The Russian just grinned—cigarette in his left hand, fingertips of his right resting on his gun. He took another long drag on his cigarette, exhaled a plume of utterly contemptuous smoke.

“You’re doing it again. Treating me like an idiot. I know you English. You’re all just amateurs. Play the game, chaps, play the game. Sticky wicket, googly, maiden over. You think of Agincourt and cannot begin to imagine Stalingrad. What an absurd nation you English are. I know all about you. Gentlemen and players. Professionalism is vulgar, practice is cheating. Gentlemen and players? Ha! You won’t shoot. Your kind never does.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

II

Tea and Stollen

§9

West Berlin: Late September 1965

Willy Brandt was a nice guy, one of the good guys. Everybody said so. There might be Germans who would never forgive him for fighting against Germany in the war or for accepting Norwegian citizenship, but foreign politicians adored him. He’d got on well with JFK, reasonably well with LBJ and De Gaulle and very well with England’s new prime minister, Harold Wilson—he could almost hear the phrase “Good German” on his lips, but hoped he never would.

Brandt hated losing.

He’d spent what seemed an age in Bonn, just lost the election for chancellor of the Bundesrepublik, otherwise known as West Germany. Now he was back in Berlin—his old job, his old office—suffering from . . . what was Churchill’s term for it? . . . “Black Dog Days.”

His chief of staff found him lying on the floor, his head propped up with a thick book—Goethes Sämtliche Werke Band VI. The Grundig radiogram, which sat in the corner squat as a harmonium, softly playing Schubert’s Swan Song.

“Miserable stuff,” Nell said. “Is this the mood you’re in?”

“Yes. And no.”

She put a cup of coffee within arm’s reach. Pulled up a chair and looked down at him. “The staff—your staff—would like to see something of you. They’d like a word from the mayor of West Berlin, not the hermit of the Rathaus.”

“Instead they’ve got the return of the prodigal loser.”

“Never cared for self-pity and dare I say it’s out of character.”

Brandt eased himself up, wrapped his hands round the mug of coffee.

“I said I’ll never run again.”

“Yes. We all heard that. It was the last thing you said before you fell down the well.”

“Before the dog bit me . . . much more appropriate. But . . . I was lying.”

“To the staff? To us?”

“To myself.”

Nell shrugged.

“Well. Plenty of time to change your mind a dozen times if you want. No election for four years.”

“This government won’t last four years. I need to keep . . . to keep a finger on the pulse in Bonn.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Did you enjoy our time in Bonn, Nell?”

“I say again, why are you telling me any of this?”

“I want you to go back. I want you to be my eyes and ears in Bonn.”

This required no thought, so Nell gave it none.

“No.”

“Is that your last word?”

“Until you start your charm offensive and wear me down.”

“What can I do to make the prospect appealing to you?”

“Nothing. I hated Bonn. It’s a hole. It’s a company town and the product is politics. I’d sooner be in KdF Stadt making Volkswagens. At least the product is tangible. Bonn is what I imagine Washington to be . . . the cave dwellers . . . everything is politics, every other person is a diplomat . . . the man you sit next to on the tram is a Swedish delegate, the woman ahead of you in the market queue is the British ambassador’s secretary. None of it, none of them is real.”

“You wouldn’t have to live there. Just . . . regular visits.”

“The answer’s still no. Fire me if you like, but I’m staying in Berlin.”

“I know . . . I know . . . you are the Berliner and I’m not. There are times I feel like a stranger in my own land. Let me finish the coffee you so kindly brought me and then I might be fired up enough for the charm offensive.”

“Fine. I’ll be in my office—in Berlin.”

§10

At six o’clock Nell did not go straight home. Instead she went to Grünetümmlerstraße, to the house she had lived in, all those years ago just after the war, with Joe Wilderness. Two years in that flat above Erno Schreiber. Another lifetime. Joe had moved on—or rather she had thrown him out—she had moved on. Erno had not. Erno had stayed. Erno had grown old in a three-room flat he had occupied since he walked home, slouching not marching, from Amiens on the Western Front in 1918, and decided the best use for his Pickelhaube was as a coal scuttle.

A young woman was poking the fire in the iron stove, shovelling in a few lumps of coal from the steel helmet, as Erno fussed about his tea and teapot. She was blonde, pretty—about the age Nell had been when she had finally moved out—the bloom of youth upon her, worn with a carelessness Nell had never managed.

“You know Trudie,” Erno said, not asking a question.

But Nell did not know Trudie.

“Ach . . . she has your old room.”

Trudie closed the stove door and stood up.

“I’m Nell,” said Nell. “Nell Burkhardt.”

“Of course,” Trudie replied. “Erno often talks of you and of Joe.”

Nell glared at Erno. It was an unwritten rule. They did not talk about Joe Wilderness.

But Erno merely smiled and set three cups on three saucers, and tore at the wrapper of a stollen cake.

“Not for me, Erno,” said Trudie. “I will leave you to talk.”

A scant exchange of the pleasantries of departing and Nell and Erno were alone.

He put a knitted tea cosy on the pot, eased his backside into a sagging armchair. “So, you think out of sight is out of mind?”

“I don’t want to talk about Joe. I didn’t come here to talk about Joe.”

“You don’t have to come here to talk about anyone. You are welcome even in silence.”

She sat opposite, perched herself on the hard edge of the chaise longue. “But I did come here to talk about someone—Brandt.”

“So—pour tea, cut cake and tell me.”

When Nell had finished, Erno said, “You’ve never lacked ambition.”

“Meaning what?”

“You have been trying to set the world to rights since you were nine years old. Your mother always said to beware your stamping foot and your po-face.”

“I was, I know, a rather serious little girl. Mea culpa.”

“And now you are a very serious woman. Why else did you ever take up with a rogue like Joe or an old rogue like me—because we made you laugh?”

“Let’s not talk about Joe.”

“Ask yourself, Nell—what will serve you best? Following Brandt or not following Brandt? He has the same ambition, the same messianic urge, the same preposterous belief in himself.”

“Preposterous?”

“If Brandt ruled the world, every day might not be the first day of spring, but East would talk to West, North would talk to South and no one would go hungry.”

“As you said, preposterous.”

“You have hitched your wagon to his star.”

“But . . .”

“But?”

“But Bonn. Erno, it’s the dullest place on Earth.”

III

Omelettes

§11

The Palace of Westminster, London:May 19, 1966, about 4 p.m.

Cloudy with Sunny Intervals

“Where is Bernard Alleyn?”

Fifteen minutes earlier it had been “Where is Leonid L’vovich Liubiumov?” One man, two names, but he did wish they’d make their collective mind up.

It was the third time Reg Thwaite had asked him that. This time, noticeably, pointedly without rank or status. Not Flight Sergeant Holderness, not even Mister.

Wilderness returned the compliment.

“I think I answered that question several minutes ago. I don’t know,” he lied.

“If you had answered me, I’d not be asking, would I? A Soviet agent, a Soviet agent in your charge, vanishes without trace—I’ll ask you a hundred times if I have to. Where is Bernard Alleyn?”

The chairman intervened.

“I think, Flight Sergeant, that Sir Reginald would like your ‘I don’t know’ placed in some sort of context.”

“Context?”

Wilderness felt Burne-Jones edging nearer, straining for proximity, everything short of scraping his chair across the parquet.

It was unusual for a parliamentary committee to question a serving MI6 officer, almost without prior protocol. Burne-Jones had been insistent . . . it would all take place behind closed doors, there’d be no stenographer, and as Wilderness’s immediate superior he’d be there too, half a pace behind.

“Run through the details of the handover.”

“Again?”

Wilderness felt Burne-Jones at his ear.

“Just answer the question, Joe.”

“All right. Once more. It hasn’t changed in the last half-hour. It won’t be any different. Alleyn and I walked out to the middle of the Glienicke Bridge—”

“Ah . . .” A rustling of papers on Thwaite’s part, the pretence of consulting notes. “Why was that? Why just the two of you?”

Wilderness could find it easy to hate Reg Thwaite. A working-class Yorkshire Tory MP, a privy councillor, who had taken it upon himself to be the voice of the patriotic working man, a barrack-room lawyer who had no truck with socialism and had made himself the scourge of what he saw as a secret service dominated by the English upper classes. He hated the old boy network, and even Wilderness’s East End accent carried no reassurance that he might be the antithesis of anything that could be termed “old boy.”

“More people, more guns, more possibilities of someone getting shot,” Wilderness replied.

“And you didn’t have Alleyn handcuffed?”

“No.”

“And you say no shots were fired?”

“No one even drew a gun,” Wilderness lied.

In reality, he and Yuri had stood in a face-off, pointing guns at each other’s heads. He’d no idea if he could ever have shot Yuri or Yuri him. He’d known Yuri since 1947, as plain Major Myshkin. At some point in the murk of Soviet history he had become General Bogusnik—another case of one man, two names.

“Alleyn crossed to the East German side as Geoffrey Masefield crossed to the West. They stopped for a moment. Got a good look at each other. Too long a moment. I watched General Bogusnik fold up in pain. Alleyn went to grab him, Masefield followed. Between them they got him back to his own people at the far end of the bridge. That was the last I ever saw of Alleyn.”

He hoped he’d placed the right emphasis on the final sentence.

“And what did you do?”

“I stayed on the American side of the line and I waited. I stood there with my hands in my pockets in a freezing wind and I waited. I thought Masefield would return, but when I heard engines start, I knew he wouldn’t. I knew the deal was off. I walked back into the American sector and drove into West Berlin.”

The Americans had backed him in this pack of lies. If they hadn’t, he’d be in the shit. He assumed it had been in both their interests to bury the truth—that Alleyn had crossed back with him. Frank Spoleto had been there—the CIA man posing as an Ad-man posing as a CIA man. As long as the grunts jumped when Frank barked, Wilderness didn’t care. Frank owed him no favours. He’d no idea why, but it must have suited Frank and the CIA to agree to his story. But—somebody had said something. There was a careless whisper in the air or pricks like Thwaite wouldn’t have their teeth into him.

“The last you saw of him?”

“Yes.”

“And where do you think he went after that?”

“I’ve no idea. Bogusnik died. That was common knowledge within ten days. They gave him a state funeral. Someone else will be looking after Alleyn. He could be on a pension with a row of medals on his chest, he could have a desk job, he could be propping up a bar with Kim Philby, he could be in a gulag.”

Thwaite looked pained. Mentioning Philby might have been showing the red rag to the bull, a one-person incarnation of everything Thwaite hated about the toffs. But he looked to his left, to the Liberal Party’s sole representative on the committee—J. Fraser Campbell, MP for islands in the North Atlantic where the sheep outnumbered the voters two hundred fifty to one—and passed the baton.

“Thank you, Sir Reginald. Could we come to the incident that took place a few hours later? At the Invalidenstraße checkpoint?”

“I got Masefield out,” Wilderness said bluntly, and sensing what was coming next threw in, “I did my job. Or did you expect me to leave him there?”

“Is it part of your job to create diplomatic incidents?”

“Mr. Campbell, I’m an SIS field agent. In the field everything is a potential diplomatic incident. If it weren’t, we’d be known as the Obvious Service, not the Secret Service.”

“So you don’t deny this was a diplomatic incident?”

“I don’t deny it. I don’t care. I did what I had to do. I did my job.”

Campbell shoved a sheaf of papers to one side, spread out a newspaper, spun it around to show Wilderness the headline and photographs: Der Tagesspiegel, six months old, dated the day after the incident. He’d seen it before. The West Berlin press must have been nifty to get there so soon. Night shots, the stark unreality that flashbulbs create . . . the wreck of a car, the prat of a British officer he’d confronted, the bent barrier . . . it all looked as though he’d just walked out of shot seconds before.

“The barrier crashed,” Campbell was saying. “Our side confronting their side, shots fired, men injured. Do you have any idea how hard it was to placate the East Germans?”

Wilderness had no recollection of any shots fired, but at the moment he crashed through the barrier in that borrowed Austin Healey he would not have noticed a bomb going off.

He flicked up a lock of hair, not so casually that they could fail to notice the scar on his forehead.

“No shots were fired. The only people injured were me and Masefield. And I don’t care about placating the enemy. This was a skirmish at a Berlin crossing point, not the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

The British border patrol weren’t telling any lies on his behalf, but then they didn’t have Frank breathing down their necks. What they had were photographs. The camera never lies. And Wilderness wondered whether this meeting would be taking place at all if there’d been no photographs.

“But weapons were drawn?”

“You don’t draw a rifle, you just point the bloody thing.”

Wilderness heard another whisper from Burne-Jones: “For God’s sake. Remember your manners.”

Too loud a whisper. They’d all heard.

Thwaite again, “I find your attitude very hard to credit, Flight Sergeant Holderness. There’s no room here for your resentment.”

“And I find your questioning very hard to stomach. You shouldn’t be sitting here in judgment on me like the three wise monkeys.”

“Then what should we be doing? If not our duty?”

“I did my duty. I got Geoffrey Masefield out. A hapless bugger who should never have been there in the first place. Instead of whining about diplomatic incidents you should be giving me a fucking medal.”

Burne-Jones was on his feet at once.

“Sorry, gentlemen, but I’m afraid this meeting is suspended until further notice. You will understand if I say that I need to talk to Flight Sergeant Holderness alone.”

Thwaite had to have the parting shot.

“I’d understand if you said you had to smack his bottom.”

§12

It being a Thursday when Burne-Jones and Wilderness emerged into New Palace Yard, Wilderness had no expectations of an early resumption. On Fridays members of Parliament dashed back to their constituencies in the pretence of consulting the electorate, while shooting grouse or shagging mistresses. The earliest he’d be summoned again would be Tuesday.

Burne-Jones held up his furled brolly and hailed a cab. Turning in the open door he said, “Go home, Joe.”

“Shouldn’t that be ‘go home and look to your sins’?”

“No. Go home and look to your wife and children. If you can’t be a good spy, at least be a halfway decent son-in-law.”

A bit of a stinger. Nothing like the bollocking he might have expected. All the same he thought he was a very decent son-in-law to Burne-Jones and had no opinion at all on his own merits as a spy.

He watched the cab head west, glanced up at Big Ben and, realising it would soon be rush hour, turned into Westminster Bridge Road and headed for the Underground.

It was Saturday afternoon before he heard from Burne-Jones again. He was watching wrestling on ITV—the antics of Jackie Pallo and whichever lumpkin knew part B of the same routine and had been selected as fall guy. Judy had taken the twins to Hampstead Heath in the custom-made double pushchair the Burne-Joneses had given the Holdernesses for Christmas.

Wilderness turned the volume down and picked up the phone.

“Joe.”

The upper-class drawl of his father-in-law, a single syllable drawn out to sound almost horizontal.

“Dinner this evening?”

“I think we can manage that. Judy’s out at—”

“No. Just you and me. Madge will be going to the theatre. The Whitehall. You know how fond she is of farce.”

He did know. Madge had dragged both of them to some awful tosh over the last few years. The current Whitehall farce was an attempt to make a comedy out of a Soviet defection.

“Isn’t it still Chase me, Comrade? She must have seen it by now?”

“Twice, as I recall, but it’s the last night, and she’s taking a very special guest, Nureyev. Upshot, I have the place to myself. Shall we say seven thirty?”

So, a bollocking at the dinner table. Alec being one of nature’s gents, they’d at least get through the soup course before he laid into Wilderness.

§13

There was no soup course. After a stiff martini, during which Wilderness had answered half a dozen questions about the character/behaviour/university place/career prospects of his two year-old children, Alec had invited him to rip up a French stick while he deftly tossed omelettes over a naked flame at the dining table.

“An omelette should never feel remotely leathery to the tongue,” he pronounced as the first turned a somersault.

He sounded so knowledgeable. All the same Wilderness knew he couldn’t so much as peel a potato if left to cook a proper meal. If he mentioned Elizabeth David, his father-in-law would raise an eyebrow and say “who?” It was not so much his party trick as just another toff thing. A leftover from his days in the Officers’ Mess. A gentleman should always be prepared to toss his own.

“Eat it while it’s at its best, Joe, don’t wait for me.”

A couple of minutes passed in silence. Burne-Jones flipped his own omelette onto his plate, took a mouthful and sighed at his own artistry.

“It’s good,” Wilderness said. “It’s very good.”

“Don’t blame yourself.”

“I’m not. You cooked it.”

“I meant Alleyn, Masefield . . . that pompous ass Thwaite.”

“Fuss about nothing,” Wilderness replied.

“Quite . . . but . . .”

Inevitable, thought Wilderness; he was here to rebutt the buts.

“But what?”

“Something set them off. Someone or something poked a sleeping pig with a stick.”

“So?”

“I’m tending towards the notion that it’s the Invalidenstraße incident that rang all the bells. After all, the Glienicke Bridge is American turf and they have little choice but to accept the Americans’ version of events. But Jock Campbell is not exaggerating. Invalidenstraße took some sorting. The Germans are utterly schizoid about things. They admire the guts and the dash for freedom whilst deploring the damage to their efforts at an Eastern Bloc Politik. But for Invalidenstraße I’m not at all sure Alleyn would be an issue. Our lords and masters might not have noticed him. But it remains, they have noticed. Pity you wrote off the car. Made too good a photo. Bigger pity our blokes couldn’t get it all straight before the press arrived, but there you are.”

Or, thought Wilderness, there I wasn’t.

“I got Masefield out. Surely no one thinks I should have left our Geoffrey behind?”

“No . . . no one does. I think it may well be your methods . . .”

“Tell me another way. I got him out without a shot fired.”

“And therein lies the saving grace. Not a shot fired. If there had been—well it doesn’t bear thinking about.”

“What do they want? What do they expect?”

“Dunno what they expect. Perhaps some evidence that Alleyn had reached Moscow?”

Wilderness shook his head.

“That’s . . . that’s naïve. To name one example. It took the Russians five years to admit Burgess and Maclean were there. Why would they trumpet Alleyn’s return? There’s no pattern.”

“It’s just that our people in Moscow have picked up nothing. Absolutely nothing.”