London Match

25

At midnight the front door to Lisl Hennig's hotel was locked. That had always been the routine, ever since I could remember. Any hotel guest who occasionally returned after that time was given a key on request. Any guest frequently returning after that time was asked to find another hotel.

Guests arriving there after midnight without a key had to tug the old bellpuil. You couldn't hear the bell from outside in the street and sometimes guests made a great deal of noise before they got in. I couldn't hear the bell from my little garret room at the very top of the house. Lisl could hear the bell. She slept downstairs – she'd been sleeping.downstairs ever since her arthritis had got really bad. Lisl never went down to open the door, of course; just that one flight of stone stairs, from the salon to the front hall, was something she didn't attempt very often. One of the servants opened the door if the bell rang. They took it in turns. Usually it was Klara, but on that night after Werner went over to the East it was Richard, a youngish man from Bremen who worked in the kitchen. Klara was not out that night, of course – she was in bed and asleep and awakened by the bell as always. But when she was off duty, she was off duty, and she just turned over and forgot about it.

So it was Richard who went down to the front door when the bell went at 2:30 a.m. It was dark and still raining, and Richard took with him the wooden bat used for flattening slices of veal to make Wiener schnitzels. As he said afterwards, he knew that there were no guests still not back and he wanted something to defend himself with.

So it was Richard who woke me up out of a deep sleep in which I was dreaming about old Mr Storch who was making me recite a poem about Hitler. It was a silly dream in which I knew no poems about Hitler except a rude one which I was frightened to tell Mr Storch.

'A gentleman to see you, sir,' said Richard, having shaken me by the shoulder and put Storch and my classmates to flight. 'There's a gentleman to see you.' He said it in English. I suspected that he'd got it from one of those film butlers because he had exactly the right accent and inflection whereas the rest of his English was appalling.

'Who?' I said. I switched on the bedside light. Its yellow plastic shade made patterns on the wall and its light made Richard look jaundiced and ferocious.

'It's me.' I put my glasses on and looked towards the doorway. It was Bret Rensselaer. I could hardly believe my eyes. For a moment I thought it was all a part of my dream. I got out of bed and put on my dressing gown.

'My God, Bret, what are you doing in Berlin?' I said. 'It's okay,' I told Richard. 'It's a friend of mine.'

As Richard left and closed the door, Bret stepped into the light. He was hardly recognizable. This wasn't the Bret I knew. His dark overcoat was so soaked with rain that it was dripping pools onto the ancient carpet. There was mud on his shoes. He had no necktie and his shirt was dirty and open at the throat. His staring eyes were deep sunk into his ashen face and he needed a shave badly.

'You look like you could do with a drink,' I said, opening the corner cupboard where I had a bottle of duty-free Johnnie Walker and some glasses. I poured him a big shot of whisky. He almost snatched it from me and drank a couple of gulps.

'I had to find you, Bernard. You're the only one who can help me.'

Was this really Bret Rensselaer? I never thought I'd see the day when Bret was asking anyone for help, let alone asking me. 'What's wrong, Bret?'

'You're the only one I can trust any more.'

'Sit down,' I said. 'Get out of that wet coat and take the weight off your feet.'

He did as I told him, moving with the shambling robotic pace of the sleepwalker. They'll go for you too,' said Bret.

'Start at the beginning, Bret,' I said.

But he was too tired to understand. He didn't look up at me, he was slumped on the chair studying his muddy shoes. 'They arrested me.' He said it very quietly so that I had to lean close to him to hear.

'Who did?'

'A team from Five… it was all kosher. They had all the documentation,,, even a chit from the Deputy with the two authorized signatures.'

'Morgan had signed?'

'Yes, Morgan had signed. But it's not all Morgan's doing; they've got a whole file on me.'

I poured myself a drink while I pulled my thoughts together. Was Bret admitting to me that he was a KGB mole? Had he come to me convinced that I was a KGB agent too? And how the hell was I going to find out? I sipped the drink and felt the warmth of it slide down my throat. It didn't make my thinking any clearer, but it was waking me up in the best possible way. 'What now?' I said tentatively. 'How can I help?'

'It all began when the committee went down to Berwick House,' said Bret, as if he hadn't heard my question. 'Some of them wanted to be present at an interrogation. There had been a lot of argument about whether Stinnes was really cooperating or just playing us along. Ladbrook was there. Ladbrook's straight, you know that.'

I nodded. Ladbrook was the senior interrogator. He kept out of office politics as much as possible.

'We used one of the big downstairs rooms; there wasn't room for everyone in the recording room.' Bret held out his glass for another drink. I poured him one, a small one this time. He didn't drink it right away. He swirled it round in his hands. Bret said, 'The interrogation was concerned with codes and communications. I wasn't listening all that closely at first; I figured that it was all stuff I'd heard before. But then I realized that Stinnes was offering some goodies. Five had one of their communications boffins assigned to the committee just for that sequence, and he got excited. He didn't jump up and down and sing 'Rule, Britannia!' but he might have if there'd been more leg room.'

'Stuff you hadn't heard before?'

'Really good material, Bernard. Stinnes started out by offering us the whole signals procedure at the Embassy, and the boffin from Five asked some questions that Stinnes answered easily and unequivocally. This was a different sort of Stinnes I was seeing; he was smooth and charming and polite and deferential. He cut a hell of a good figure with them. Jokes too. They were even laughing, and Stinnes was more at ease than I'd ever seen him before. Then one of the Five people said it was a pity that he hadn't given us some of this material a few weeks earlier because there were sure to be signals alterations any time now, in the light of Stinnes changing sides. And Stinnes calmly said that he'd told me all this stuff in the first days I saw him.'

'And you denied it?'

Bret's voice was shrill. 'He never gave us any of that hard intelligence. He didn't give it to me, he didn't give it to Ladbrook, and he didn't give it to you.'

'So what was your reaction?'

'I'm the chairman of that lousy committee. What am I supposed to do, call myself to order and appoint a subcommittee? I let it roll. What could I do, except sit there and listen to all that crap.'

'And they swallowed it?'

A thought struck Bret Rensselaer. 'He didn't tell you any of that stuff, did he? Codes and communications? Embassy contact lists? Foreign country routings? Signals room security? Did he tell you any of that? For God's sake… '

'No, he didn't tell me any of that,' I said.

'Thank Christ for that.' He wiped his brow. 'There are moments when I wonder if I'm tipping off my trolley.'

They arrested you?'

'That wasn't until two days later. From what I heard afterwards, it seems that the people from Five got together that night for some kind of council. They were excited, Bernard, and convinced. They hadn't seen Stinnes before. All they knew about him was this smooth, dynamic guy who's falling over himself trying to give away Soviet secrets. What are they supposed to think except that I've been sitting on him?'

'And Ladbrook?'

'He's a good man, Bernard. Apart from you, Ladbrook is the only person who can see what's really going on. But that won't make any difference. Ladbrook will tell them the truth, but that won't help me.'

'What will he say?'

Bret looked up with alarm and annoyance. I had become the interrogator now, but there was nothing he could do about that; I was his last hope. 'He'll say that Stinnes has given us only operational material.'

'Good operational material,' I said. It wasn't a statement, it wasn't a question; it was a bit of both.

'Wonderful operational material,' said Bret sarcastically. 'But every time we acted on it, things seemed to go unaccountably wrong.'

'They'll say that was your fault,' I said. And to some extent it was his fault: Bret had wanted to show everyone what a fine field agent he might have made, and he'd failed.

'Of course they will. That's the brilliance of it. There is just no way of proving whether we did it wrong or if it was material arranged to fail right from the word go.'

I said, 'Stinnes is a plant. A solitary. His briefing must have been lengthy and complex. That's why it took so long to get him to move. That's why he went back to Berlin before coming out to Mexico again.'

'Thanks, buddy,' said Bret. 'Where were you when we needed you?'

'It's easy to see it now,' I admitted. 'But it looked okay at the time. And some of the stuff was good.'

'Those early arrests in Hannover, the dead-letter drops, the kid in our office in Hamburg. Yes, it was good, but it wasn't anything they couldn't spare.'

'How did they arrest you?'

'Five sent two men from K7 who searched my house. That was Tuesday… no, maybe Monday… I've lost all track of time.'

'They found nothing?'

'What do you think they found?' said Bret angrily. 'A radio transmitter, invisible ink and one-time pads?'

'I just want to get the facts straight,' I said.

'It's a frame-up,' said Bret. 'I thought you were the one person who'd see that.'

'I do see it. I just wanted to know if there was anything planted at the house.'

'Shit,' said Bret. He went pale. 'Now I remember!'

'What?'

'They took a suitcase out of the loft.'

'What was in it?'

'Papers.'

'What papers?'

'I don't know, typewritten paper, reams of it. They took them away to examine them. There were several pieces of baggage in the loft. I thought they were all empty.'

'And now one is full of papers. Any recent visitors to the house?'

'No, none. Not for weeks.'

'No repairmen or telephone wiring?'

'A man came to fix the phone, but that was okay. I had our own engineers out the next day to check the house.'

'Check the house for bugs and wires, not check the house for suitcases full of papers.'

He bit his lip. 'I was a fool.'

'It sounds as if you were, Bret. They would put your phone on the blink and then turn up.'

'That's right. They arrived after I had trouble – they said they were in the street, working on the lines. It was a Saturday. I said I didn't know you guys work on Saturdays.'

'The KGB work a long week, Bret,' I said.

'He can't sustain it,' said Bret, hoping that I would agree. He was talking about Stinnes. I didn't answer. 'It's a bravura performance and the committee are eating out of his hand right now. But he can't sustain it.'

'When did they arrest you?'

'First the senior grade officer from K7 came to my home. He told me I wasn't to leave the house.'

'Your house?'

'I wasn't to go to the office. I wasn't even to go to the shops in the village.'

'What did you say?'

'I couldn't believe my ears. I told him to remain in the room with me while I phoned the office. I tried to get the D-G, but Sir Henry was on a train going to Manchester.'

'Clever Sir Henry,' I said.

'No, it was genuine enough. His secretary tried to reach him with messages at both ends.'

'Are you crazy, Bret? Five send a K7 search and arrest team to pick up a senior officer, and the D-G just happens to have another appointment that he can't break and no contact number? Are you telling me the D-G wasn't in on the secret?'

Bret looked at me. He didn't want to believe they could do that to him. Or that they would want to. Bret didn't just happen to be born in England like the rest of us – Bret was an Anglophile. He loved every blade of bright green grass that Shakespeare might have trodden on. 'I suppose you're right,' he said at last.

'And you skipped?'

'I left a message saying that I urgently wanted an appointment with the D-G and gave my phone number. I said I'd stay by the phone and wait for the call.'

'And then you took off. That was good, Bret,' I said with genuine admiration. That's what I would have done. But they'll have you on the airline manifest even if Immigration didn't identify you.'

'I have a friend with a Cessna,' said Bret.

He needn't have told me that, and I felt reassured that he was prepared to fill in the details. 'Did they leave anyone outside the house?' Bret shrugged. 'Do you think they tailed you?'

'I changed cars.'

'And the watchers don't run to anything that could follow a Cessna, so they'll be trying to trace the plane landing.'

'I flew to Hamburg and then came on by car. I rented the car in a false name. Luckily the girl at the counter didn't read the driving licence carefully.'

'You can't win them all, Bret. You forgot about the computer on the autobahn entrance point. They even get traffic violators on that one.'

'I'm innocent, Bernard.'

'I know you are, Bret. But it's going to be tough proving it. Did anyone say anything about a Cabinet memo?'

'Cabinet memo?'

'They're trying to lock you up tight, Bret. There is a Cabinet memo; the numbered copy is the one to which you had access. It's been to Moscow and back again.'

'Are you serious?'

'And a lot of people have been told about it since then.'

'Who?'

'I was singled out to be shown a copy, and so was Dicky Cruyer. You can bet there were others. The implication is that the full report went to Moscow too.'

'I should have been told.'

'You're not wrestling only with Stinnes,' I said. 'You've got the whole of Moscow Centre to contend with, and they've spent a lot of time working on it.'

He drank a tiny sip of whisky as if he didn't trust himself any longer. He didn't ask what it was all about or anything like that. He'd had a lot of time to think what it was all about. He must have known by that time that his chances of getting out of it and becoming Mr Clean again were very slim. The sea was rough. Bret was going down for the third time and there was every chance he'd take me with him. 'So what do I do, Bernard?'

'Suppose I said, "Turn yourself in"?'

'I wouldn't do that.'

'Suppose I turned you in?'

'You wouldn't do that,' said Bret. He looked away from me, as if meeting my eyes would increase the chances of my saying I would turn him in.

'What makes you so sure?' I said.

'Because you're an egomaniac. You're cynical and intractable. You're the only son of a bitch in that Department who'd take the rest of them on single-handed.'

It wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear, but it was sincere enough and that would have to do. 'We don't have a lot of time. They'll trace you right to this room. Getting into Berlin without leaving a track is almost impossible, unless you come in from the East, in which case no records are kept.'

'I never thought of it like that,' said Bret. That's crazy, isn't it?'

'Yes, it is, but we don't have time to write to Ripley about it. We don't have tune to do anything very much. I'd say that London Central will trace you to Berlin, and maybe to me at this hotel, within two or three days.'

'Are you saying what I think you're saying?'

'Yes. We'll have to talk to Frank. The only other course is for you to leave town very quickly. Why did you come here, Bret?'

'I decided that you were the only person who could help.'

'You'll have to do better than that, Bret,' I said.

'And I have money here,' he said. I continued to stare at him. 'And a gun.'

'Honesty is the best policy, Bret,' I said.

'You knew, did you?'

'Not about the money. But when a senior officer does anything unusual in Berlin I like to know, and there are people who know I like to know.'

'Who the hell told you about the gun?'

'Buying a gun is very unusual, Bret,' I said. 'Especially for a man who can sign a docket and get one across the counter from Frank Harrington.'

'So Frank knows too?'

'I didn't tell him.'

'Will Frank turn me in?'

'Let's not tempt him too much. Suppose I go along and talk to him while you stay out of sight?'

'I'd appreciate that.'

'Frank could defy the Department for weeks, and if Five sent anyone here, Frank has authority enough to have them refused entry at the airport. If we got Frank on our side…'

'It would start looking good,' said Bret appreciatively.

'Not good, Bret, but a bit less bloody doomy.'

'So you'll see Frank in the morning?'

'I'll see Frank now. We haven't got enough time for luxuries like night and day. And at night we won't have his secretarial staff to get an eyeful of you and me talking to him. If we see him on his own and he says "No deal", we might persuade him to forget he ever saw us. But once his secretary enters it in the appointment diary, it will be more difficult to deny.'

'He'll be asleep.' Bret obviously thought it would prejudice our chances of success to wake Frank from a deep dreamless slumber.

'Frank never sleeps.'

'He'll be with a girl? Is that what you mean?'

'Now you're getting warmer.'