Two Brothers

District and Circle Line London, 1956

IT WAS MID-MORNING when Stone emerged from the house on Queensgate in which he had been interrogated. A troop of cavalry from Chelsea Barracks were rattling their way up the road towards Hyde Park. They were in khaki, not dress uniform, but nonetheless made an impressive sight. An echo of imperial greatness. Stone found himself offering a wry salute. Force of habit, perhaps. You can take the man out of the army, as they say. But Stone actually liked the army, not the spit and polish bullshit, but the courage and the comradeship. Briefly the British army had given him a home.

He headed down towards South Kensington tube station. Lorre and Bogart had told him to go home, call in sick at work and keep himself available. They promised to square things with Stone’s head of department, assuring him that he would lose neither wages nor credit.

Stone didn’t care about wages. He had thoughts only for the shocking revelation that Dagmar was an officer of the Stasi.

And yet was it so shocking? The war had changed them all so much. Were he to go back in time and look at his own carefree, soccer-mad, rebellious pre-war self, he would surely not have predicted the journey that boy would take. That at the end of it he would find himself fading to grey behind a desk in Whitehall, doing his long weary penance for surviving.

Dagmar would scarcely recognize the man he had become. Would he recognize her?

Stone made his way through the fine red-tiled entrance of the nineteenth-century tube station, declining the offer to buy a first edition Standard. The news was the same as the day before anyway. The aftermath of the Suez debacle still dominated the front pages with its ongoing humiliation of Britain at the hands of Eisenhower and the US State Department, not to mention Nasser himself. The UK was finished, Egypt was in the ascendant and all over the Middle East Arabs were flexing their muscles.

There was Lonnie Donegan music playing through the open window of one of the flats that sat above the station entrance. Usually Stone quite liked Lonnie Donegan, except for the stupid one about chewing gum and bedposts. He liked skiffle in general because it was scruffy and disrespectful of authority. Now, however, he found it irritating. He found the chatter of girls in front of him on the stairs irritating. And the platform announcements too.

He was trying to think.

Dagmar had said in her letter that she’d been in a Soviet gulag. That made grim sense. The Russians had imprisoned hundreds of thousands of recently liberated innocents after the war, however much the craven apologists of the London Left might try to deny or excuse it.

Dagmar was, after all, a bourgeois Jew. Two strikes against her in Stalin’s book.

But that had been ten years ago. She could not possibly have spent all of the intervening period in a Soviet camp and yet now be a Stasi official. At some point during those years she must have been released and ‘rehabilitated’. And yet only now had she got in contact. Why had she taken so long to try and find him?

And why had she done so now?

The train arrived. Stone found a seat and lit up a Lucky Strike. His father had always loved American cigarettes.

The answer to the first question was obvious. Dagmar had not wanted to resume contact. Association with people from the West would do her no good at all. Particularly a person like himself, an ex-German, living in Britain and working at the Foreign Office. In her position Dagmar would certainly know of these things about him and would understand that association with him was bound to bring suspicion down on her. The fact that MI6 wanted him to contact her on their behalf was chilling enough evidence of that.

So why had she approached him?

The answer to that was so exciting that Stone had scarcely dared acknowledge it, even in his deepest, most private thoughts.

She needed him.

Stone held the cigarette between his teeth and took the letter from his wallet. Written in that still familiar hand, if shakier now, sadder somehow, less optimistic.

That last line. Everyone is looking for Moses.

It was his mother who used to say it. In the first year of the nightmare. In 1933. People used to come to her and ask for a way out. She was a doctor after all, doctors had the answer to everything. Perhaps even how to get an exit visa. But for all her cleverness and her compassion, Dr Stengel did not know that. She could only smile and whisper gently, Everyone is looking for Moses. Hoping he’ll lead them out of Egypt. She said it so often that first year but less so later and then not at all.

Well, Dagmar had a new Egypt now.

And this time Moses wouldn’t fail her.