The Other Side of Silence

THIRTY

I stood up slowly, wearily, willing myself to become much smaller in their eyes, as if resigned to my probably ignominious fate. And in a way I was resigned to it, but a moment’s reflection had persuaded me that, as in a game of poker dice, I didn’t have to pick up and throw anything myself. All I had to do was close the lid on the cigar box handed to me by Anne French and make a bid that improved on the one I’d tacitly accepted. Sometimes, when you have nothing and you’ve got the stone face and the balls for it, those five dice in a closed box can get you much further than you might think is even possible. She was a pretty good liar, but, as Somerset Maugham had recently observed up at the Villa Mauresque, years of practice born of simple necessity had made me a damned good liar, too; perhaps an even better one than Anne French. That now remained to be seen.

“All right,” I said, staring unhappily at the monk, “you win, Englishman. You said before, when you were interrogating me, that you wanted a full confession. Well, I’ll give you one now. All of the dirt. The full unexpurgated version. Names, dates, everything. I’ll write it all out and sign it. Whatever you want.” I rounded my shoulders, lowered my battered head as if in penitence for what I had done, and pushed a hand through my greasy hair. I’d seen enough broken men in my time with the Murder Commission at the Berlin Alex to know the full pantomime for a true confession. “It was a put-up job, just like the bitch has said, to discredit Roger Hollis. To take your top man in MI5 and make him smell of yesterday’s shit.”

I let out a sigh, and shook my head as if in pity of the hopeless situation now affecting me. At the same time I was very careful to avoid her eye, just in case I was deflected by the incredulity I knew I would certainly meet there. This little performance was going to take all my powers of invention.

“What are you saying?” demanded Hennig. “She’s lying, you stupid idiot. Look, I don’t know what’s going on here but I think there’s been some sort of mistake.”

“Of course there’s been a mistake,” I shouted. “We got caught, thanks to her. Look, Harold, it’s no good. Don’t you see? The game is up for us now.”

“What game? There is no game.”

“The stupid bitch has betrayed us both. She’s told them almost everything now, and quite clearly they believe her. So, what’s the damned point of maintaining the fiction any longer? Eh? Answer me that. We might as well put our hands up to the whole thing. The party isn’t going to save us now. Nor the Stasi.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Gunther?”

He didn’t realize it quite yet, but his using my real name suited my purpose very well.

“And what’s more she’s right and you know it. The masters we work for in Germany today, they’re just as rotten as the bastards we served before. Perhaps worse. At least Hitler tried to be popular. This lot we have in Germany now, they just don’t care one way or another. Because they don’t have to. No one knows who the hell they are, anyway. They’re just a lot of faceless bureaucrats in Karlshorst.”

“You bloody fool, Gunther. Just shut the fuck up, will you? You’re going to get us both shot. Do you know that?”

“Can’t you see? The double-crossing bitch has done that already. Me, I’ve had enough of the whole damned business. I’m tired—so very tired. I think the best thing is if we just give them what they want and get this circus over with as quickly as possible. Come on, man. What do you say? Let’s make a clean breast of it and hope for the best.”

Hennig’s manacled hands were clasped tightly on his knees, as if in earnest prayer, and I could see his knuckles turning white as I was speaking. His jaw was shifting furiously, like two small tectonic plates, and his nostrils were flaring as wide as an emptying hot water bottle. He looked as if he wanted to strangle me. And this wasn’t so very far from the truth, as a moment later he stood up abruptly, ran across the room, and, screaming like Krampus, launched himself at my head in imitation of one intent on hauling me down to the underworld. Fortunately, one of the thugs from Portsmouth intervened just in the nick of time and sent Hennig sprawling on the threadbare carpet with an uppercut that would have floored Floyd Patterson.

“Get that bloody man out of here,” yelled the monk. It was the first and only time I heard him raise his voice. “Lock him up and keep him locked up until he’s learned to behave.” He might have been speaking about some unruly schoolboy instead of a blackmailer and probable Stasi spy.

I smiled because in the exclamatory, violent chaos of the moment I had seen Anne French staring at me, her face ugly with suspicion about what I might actually tell the British secret service men when the thugs had finished dragging Hennig’s semi-conscious body out of the room. Given all that she had said already, she could hardly contradict my own full confession now. It was, I hoped, the one thing her cynical masters in the Stasi could never have anticipated. That I might actually agree with her. Every word and more. And for the first time since I’d met her at the Grand Hôtel in Cap Ferrat there was real fear in her lovely eyes.