Berlin Game

13

From Bret Rensselaer's top-floor office there was a view westwards that could make you think London was all greenery. The treetops of St James's Park, Green Park and the gardens of Buckingham Palace, and beyond that Hyde Park made a continuous woolly blanket. Now it was all sinking into the grey mist that swallowed London early on such afternoons. The sky overhead was dark, but some final glimmers of sunlight broke through, making streaky patterns on the emerald rectangles that were the squares of Belgravia.

Despite the darkness of the rain clouds, Rensselaer had not yet switched on the room lights. The thin illumination from the windows became razor-shape reflections in all the chromium fittings and made the glass-top desk shimmer like steel. And the same sort of metallic light was reflected up into Rensselaer 's face, so that he looked more cadaverous than ever.

Dicky Cruyer was hovering over the boss, but moving around enough to see his face and be ready with an appropriate answer. Cruyer was well aware of his role; he was there whenever Rensselaer wanted witness, hatchet man, vociferous supporter or silent audience. But Cruyer was not a mere acolyte; he was a man who knew that 'to everything there is a season… a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing'. In other words, Cruyer knew exactly when to argue with the boss. And that was something I never did right. I didn't even know when to argue with my wife.

'You didn't tell Frank that it was all genuine material?' Cruyer asked me for the third time in thirty minutes.

'Frank doesn't give a damn whether it's genuine or not,' I said. They both looked at me with pained shock. 'As long as it didn't come dribbling out of his Berlin office.'

'You're hard on Frank,' Bret said, but he didn't argue about it. He took off his jacket and put it on a chairback, carefully arranging it so it wouldn't wrinkle.

'How would you like it wrapped up?' I said. 'You want me to tell you that he's sitting at home every night trying on false whiskers and working out new codes and ciphers just to keep in practice?' I suppose I was angry at Werner's rumour about Frank not wanting me to inherit his job. I didn't believe it, but I was angry about it just the same. The friendship between Frank and me had always been ambivalent. We were friends only when I remembered my place; and sometimes I didn't remember my place.

'I don't want an eager beaver in the Berlin office,' said Bret Rensselaer, pausing long enough for me to register the personal pronoun that said Bret Rensselaer was the one who decided who got that coveted post. 'Frank Harrington' – the surname was used to distance Bret Rensselaer from his subordinate – 'went over there to sort out a mess of incompetence, and he did that. He's not a goddamned superstar, and we all knew it. He was a receiver, sent in to preside over a bankruptcy.' Bret Rensselaer had appointed Frank Harrington to Berlin and he resented anything said against his appointee.

'Frank did wonders,' said Dicky Cruyer. It was a reflex response, and while I was admiring it he added, 'You took a chance putting Frank into that job, Bret, and you did it with half the Department heads telling you it would be a disaster. Disaster!' Dicky Cruyer devoted a precious moment to making a clicking noise with his mouth that indicated his contempt for those amazingly shortsighted people who had questioned Bret Rensselaer's bold decision. He looked at me whjle he did it, for among those doubters I was numbered.

Rensselaer said, 'Did you notice anything else about the material that this fast-disappearing helper' – a glance at me as the person who'd let the helper slip through our hands – 'slammed down on Frank's desk?'

'You want me to answer, Bret?' I said. 'Or are we both going to wait for Dicky to say something?'

'Now,what the hell's this?' said Dicky anxiously. 'There are quite a few things about that material that I noticed. In fact, I'm in the process of writing a report about it.' Being in the process of writing a report about something was the nearest that Dicky ever came to admitting total ignorance.

'Bernard?' said Rensselaer, looking at me.

'That it all came through Giles Trent's office?'

Rensselaer nodded. 'Exactly,' he said. 'Every document that was in that bundle of material leaked to the Russians had, at some stage or other, passed through Trent 's hands.'

'Well, let me hang this one on you,' I said. 'A few years ago – I have the dates and details – the Berlin office made an intercept that was reported back to Karlshorst within three days. Giles Trent was on duty there that night.'

'Then why the hell wasn't that on his file?' said Cruyer. I noticed that he was wearing a gold medallion inside his dark blue silk shirt. It went with his white denim trousers.

'He was completely cleared,' I said. ' Berlin decided who was responsible and took all necessary action.'

'But you don't believe it,' said Rensselaer.

I raised my hands in the sort of shrug of resignation that would have been over the top for a road-show actor's Shylock.

'But he was in the building?' said Rensselaer.

'He was on duty,' I said, avoiding the question. 'And he did handle everything that arrived in Berlin last week.'

'What do you think, Dicky?' said Rensselaer.

'Perhaps we're being too sophisticated,' said Dicky. 'Perhaps we've got a very straightforward case of Trent selling us out, but we insist upon looking for something else.' He smiled. 'Sometimes life is simple. Sometimes things are what they appear to be.' It was a cry from the heart.

I didn't say anything and neither did Rensselaer. He glanced at my face and didn't ask me what I thought. I guess I'm not as inscrutable as Cruyer.

When Rensselaer had finished with us, Dicky Cruyer invited me into his office. It was the sort of invitation I could decline at my peril, as Dicky's voice made clear, but I looked at my watch for long enough to make him open the drinks cabinet.

'All right,' he said as he put a big gin and tonic into my hand. 'What the hell is this all about?'

'Where do you want to begin?' I asked, and looked at my watch again. My difficulty in dealing with the stubborn and intractable mind of Bret Rensselaer was compounded by the myopic confusion that Dicky Cruyer brought to every meeting.

'Are you now trying to say that Giles Trent is innocent?' he said petulantly.

'No,' I said. I drank some of the very weak mixture while Cruyer was fishing around in his glass to scoop a fragment of tonic-bottle label from where it was floating among the ice cubes.

'So he is guilty?'

'Probably,' I said.

'Then I fail to understand why you and Bret were going through that rigmarole just now.'

'Can I help myself to a bit more gin?'

Cruyer nodded, and watched to see how much of it I poured. 'So why don't we just pull Trent in, and have done with it?'

'Bret wants to play him. Bret wants to find out what the Russkies want out of him.'

'Want out of him!' said Cruyer scornfully. 'Great Scott! They've been running him for all that time, and now Bret wants to give them more time… How long before Bret is going to be quite sure what they want?' He looked up at me and said, They want to know what we do, say and think up here on the top floor. That's what they want.'

'Well, that's not so worrying. You could get everything important that is done, said or thought up here written on the back of a postage stamp, and still have room for the Lord's Prayer.'

'Never mind the wisecracks,' said Cruyer. He was right about Trent. There would be only one use for an agent who was so close to us; they'd use him to provide 'a commentary'. ' Trent 's a Balliol man, like me,' said Dicky suddenly.

'Are you boasting, confessing or complaining?' I asked.

Dicky smiled that little smile with which all Balliol men like him confront the envy of lesser mortals. 'I'm simply pointing out that he's no fool. He'll guess what's going on.'

' Trent 's no longer doing any harm,' I said. 'He's been debriefed and now we might as well play him for as long as we can.'

'I don't go along with all this damned double-agent, triple-agent, quadruple-agent stuff. You get to a point where no one knows what the hell is going on any more.'

'You mean it's confusing,' I said.

'Of course it's confusing!' said Cruyer loudly. ' Trent will soon have got to the point where he doesn't know which side he's working for.'

'As long as we know, it's all right,' I said. 'We're making sure that Trent only gets to hear the things we want Moscow to hear.'

Dicky Cruyer didn't resent my talking to him as if he were an eight-year-old; he appreciated it. 'Okay, I understand that,' he said. 'But what about this new leak in Berlin?'

'It's not a new leak. It's an incident dating from years ago.'

'But newly discovered.'

'No. Frank knew about it at the time. It's new only to us, and that only because he didn't think it was worth passing back here.'

'Are you covering for someone?' said Cruyer. However numb his brain, his antennae were alive and well.

'No.'

'Are you covering for Frank, or for one of your old Berlin schoolmates?'

'Let it go, Dicky,' I advised. 'It's for background information only. Frank Harrington has closed the file on this one. You go digging it all up again and someone is going to say you are vindictive.'

'Vindictive! My God, I ask for a few details about a security leak in Berlin and you start telling me I'm vindictive.'

'I said you'll run the risk of being accused of it. And Frank sees the D-G socially whenever he's in town. Frank is near enough to retirement to scream bloody murder if you do anything to make ripples on his pond.' Cruyer's face went a shade paler under his tan and I knew I'd touched a nerve. 'Do what you like,' I added. 'It's just a word to the wise, Dicky.'

He shot me a glance to see if I was being sardonic. 'I appreciate it,' he said. 'You're probably right.' He drank some of his gin and pulled a face as if he hated the taste. 'Frank lives in style, doesn't he? I was out at his country place last month. What a magnificent house. And he's got all the expense of living in Berlin as well.'

Two houses in Berlin, I felt tempted to say, but I sipped my drink and smiled.

Dicky Cruyer ran a finger along the waist of his white denim jeans until he felt the designer's leather label on his back pocket. Thus reassured, he said, 'The Harringtons are treated like local gentry in that village, you know. They have his wife presenting prizes at the village fete, judging at the gymkhana, and tasting the sponge cakes at the village hall. No wonder he wants to retire, with all that waiting for him. Have you been there?'

'Well, I've known him a long time,' I said, although why the hell I should find myself apologizing to Dicky for the fact that I'd been a regular guest at Frank's house ever since I was a small child, I don't know.

'Yes, I forget. He was a friend of your father's. Frank brought you into the service, didn't he?'

'In a way,' I said.

'The D-G recruited me,' said Dicky. My heart sank as he settled down into his Charles Eames leather armchair and rested his head back; it was usually the sign of Cruyer in reminiscent mood. 'He wasn't D-G then, of course, he was a tutor – not my tutor, thank God – and he buttonholed me in the college library one afternoon. We got to talking about Fiona. Your wife,' he added, just in case I'd forgotten her name. 'He asked me what I thought about the crowd she was running around with. I told him they were absolute dross. They were too! Trotskyites and Marxists and Maoists who could only argue in slogans and couldn't answer any political argument without checking back with Party headquarters to see what the official line was at that moment. Of course, it was years afterwards that I discovered Fiona was in the Department. Then of course I realized that she must have been mixing with that Marxist crowd on the D-G's orders all that time ago. What a fool she must have thought me. But I've always wondered why the D-G didn't drop a hint of what was really the score. Did you know Fiona infiltrated the Marxists when she was still only a kid?'

'Thanks for the drink, Dicky,' I said, draining my glass and deliberately putting it on his polished rosewood desk top. He jumped out of his chair, grabbed the glass and polished energetically at the place where it had stood. It never failed as a way of getting him back to earth from his long discursive monologues, but one day he was sure to tumble to it.

Having polished the desk with his handkerchief, and peered at the surface long enough to satisfy himself that it had been restored to its former lustre, he turned back to me. 'Yes, of course, I mustn't keep you. You haven't seen much of the family for the last few days. Still, you like Berlin. I've heard you say so.'

'Yes, I like it.'

'I can't think what you see in it. A filthy place bombed to nothing in the war. The few decent buildings that survived were in the Russian Sector and they got bulldozed to fill the city with all those ghastly workers' tenements.'

'That's about right,' I admitted. 'But it's got something. And Berliners are the most wonderful people in the world.'

Cruyer smiled. 'I never realized that you had a romantic streak in you, Bernard. Is that what made the exquisite and unobtainable Fiona fall in love with you?'

'It wasn't for my money or social position,' I said.

Cruyer took my empty glass, the bottle caps and the paper napkin I'd left unused and put them on to a plastic tray for the cleaners to remove. 'Could Giles Trent be connected to our problems with the Brahms net?'

'I've been wondering that myself,' I said.

'Are you going to see them?'

'Probably.'

'I'd hate Trent to get wind of your intention,' said Cruyer quietly.

'He's a Balliol man, Dicky,' I said.

'He could inadvertently pass it to his Control. Then you might find a hot reception waiting for you.' He finished his drink, wiped his lips and put his empty glass with the other debris on the tray.

'And Bret would lose his precious source,' I said.

'Don't let's worry about that,' said Cruyer. 'That's strictly Bret's problem.'