Berlin Game

He sipped his coffee and then tasted it carefully, moving his lips while staring at me as if I might have come to sell him the year's crop. 'It's just a shade bitter, don't you think, Bernard?'

'Nescafé all tastes the same to me,' I said.

'This is pure chagga, ground just before it was brewed.' He said it calmly but nodded to acknowledge my little attempt to annoy him.

'Well, he didn't turn up,' I said. 'We can sit here drinking chagga all morning and it won't bring Brahms Four over the wire.'

Dicky said nothing.

'Has he re-established contact yet?' I asked.

Dicky put his coffee on the desk, while he riffed some papers in a file. 'Yes. We received a routine report from him. He's safe.' Dicky chewed a fingernail.

'Why didn't he turn up?'

'No details on that one.' He smiled. He was handsome in the way that foreigners think bowler-hatted English stockbrokers are handsome. His face was hard and bony and the tan from his Christmas in the Bahamas had still not faded. 'He'll explain in his own good time. Don't badger the field agents – that has always been my policy. Right, Bernard?'

'It's the only way, Dicky.'

'Ye gods! How I'd love to get back into the field just once more! You people have the best of it.'

'I've been off the field list for nearly five years, Dicky. I'm a desk man now, like you.' Like you have always been is what I should have said, but I let it go. 'Captain' Cruyer he'd called himself when he returned from the Army. But he soon realized how ridiculous that title sounded to a Director-General who'd worn a General's uniform. And he realized too that 'Captain' Cruyer would be an unlikely candidate for that illustrious post.

He stood up, smoothed his shirt, and then sipped coffee, holding his free hand under the cup to guard against drips. He noticed that I hadn't drunk my chagga. 'Would you prefer tea?'

'Is it too early for a gin and tonic?'

He didn't respond to this question. 'I think you feel beholden to our friend Bee Four. You still feel grateful about his coming back to Weimar for you.' He greeted my look of surprise with a knowing nod. 'I read the files, Bernard. I know what's what.'

'It was a decent thing to do,' I said.

'It was,' said Dicky. 'It was a truly decent thing to do, but that wasn't why he did it. Not only that.'

'You weren't there, Dicky.'

'Bee Four panicked, Bernard. He fled. He was near the border, at some godforsaken little place in Thüringerwald, by the time our people intercepted him and told him he wasn't wanted for questioning by the KGB – or anyone else, for that matter.'

'It's ancient history,' I said.

'We turned him round,' said Cruyer. It had become 'we' I noticed. 'We gave him some chickenfeed and told him to go back and play the outraged innocent. We told him to co-operate with them.'

'Chickenfeed?'

'Names of people who'd already escaped, safe houses long since abandoned… bits and pieces that would make Brahms Four look good to the KGB.'

'But they got Busch, the man who was sheltering me.'

Unhurriedly, Cruyer finished his coffee and wiped his lips with a linen napkin from the tray. 'We got two of you out. I'd say that's not bad for that sort of crisis – two out of three. Busch went back to his house to get his stamp collection… Stamp collection! What can you do with a man like that? They put him in the bag of course.'

'The stamp collection was probably his life savings,' I said.

'Perhaps it was, and that's how they put him in the bag, Bernard. No second chances with those swine. I know that, you know that, and he knew it too.'

'So that's why our field people don't like Brahms Four.'

'Yes, that's why they don't like him.'

'They think he informed on that Erfurt network.'

Cruyer shrugged. 'What could we do? We could hardly spread the word that we'd invented that story to make the fellow persona grata with the KGB.' Cruyer walked across to his drinks cabinet and poured some gin into a large Waterford glass tumbler.

'Plenty of gin, not too much tonic,' I said. Cruyer turned to stare blankly at me. 'If that's for me,' I added. So there had been a blunder. They'd told Brahms Four to reveal old Busch's address, then the poor old sod had gone back for his stamps. And run into the arms of a KGB arrest squad.

Dicky put a little more gin into the glass, and added ice cubes gently so that they would not splash. He brought it, together with a small bottle of tonic, which I left unused. 'No need for you to concern yourself with this one any more, Bernard. You did your bit in going to Berlin. We'll let one of the others take over now.'

'Is he in trouble?'

Cruyer went back to the drinks cabinet and busied himself tidying away the bottle-caps and stirrer. Then he closed the cabinet doors and said, 'Do you know the sort of material Brahms Four has been supplying?'

'Economics intelligence. He works for an East German bank.'

'He is the most carefully protected source we have in Germany. You are one of the few people ever to have seen him face to face.'

'And that was almost twenty years ago.'

'He works through the mail – always local addresses to avoid the censors and the security – posting his material to various members of the Brahms net. In emergencies he uses a dead-letter drop. But that's all – no microdots, no one-time pads, no codes, no micro transmitters, no secret ink. Very old-fashioned.'

'And very safe,' I said.

'Very old-fashioned and very safe, so far,' agreed Dicky. 'Even I don't have access to the Brahms Four file. No one knows anything about him except that he's been getting material from somewhere at the top of the tree. All we can do is guess.'

'And you've guessed,' I prompted him, knowing that Dicky was going to tell me anyway.

'From Bee Four we are getting important decisions of the Deutsche Investitions Bank. And from the Deutsche Bauern Bank. Those state banks provide long-term credit for industry and for agriculture. Both banks are controlled by the Deutsche Notenbank, through which come all remittances, payments and clearing for the whole country. Now and again we get good notice of what the Moscow Narodny Bank is doing and regular reports about the COMECON briefings. I think Brahms Four is a secretary or personal assistant to one of the directors of the Deutsche Notenbank.'

'Or a director?'

'All banks have an economic intelligence department. Being head of that department is not a job an ambitious banker craves for, so they get switched around. Brahms Four has been feeding us this sort of thing too long to be anything but a clerk or assistant.'

'You'll miss him. Too bad you have to pull him out,' I said.

'Pull him out? I'm not trying to pull him out. I want him to stay right where he is.'

'I thought…'

'It's his idea that he should come over to the West, not mine! I want him to remain where he is. I can't afford to lose him.'

'Is he getting frightened?'

They all get frightened eventually,' said Cruyer. 'It's battle fatigue. The strain of it all gets them down. They get older and they get tired and they start looking for that pot of gold and the country house with the roses round the door.'

'They start looking for the things we've been promising them for twenty years. That's the truth of it.'

'Who knows what makes these crazy bastards do it?' said Cruyer. 'I've spent half my life trying to understand their motivation.' He looked out the window. Hard sunlight side-lighting the lime trees, dark blue sky with just a few smears of cirrus very high. 'And I'm still no nearer knowing what makes any of them tick.'