Quiller KGB

'The rock star?'

'Yes.'

'Why do we have to check on her?'

'Now that's a very good question.' He took his cup into the bathroom and rinsed it out and dried it on a towel and came back, and then Yasolev was suddenly in the open doorway in a worn red dressing-gown, his thin hair untidy as he looked first at Cone, then at me.

'I have just received information that General-Secretary Gorbachev — '

'Door,' Cone said, and jerked a hand.

I went past Yasolev and shut it and came back.

'Thank you — that General-Secretary Gorbachev will make an informal visit to East Berlin.'

'When?' Cone asked him.

'He arrives on the 17th of this month.'

In a week from now.

'There's some tea,' Cone said, 'if you'd like some.'

10: LIBIDO

'They shot him.'

Closer, now, the Wall.

'They shot him in the back.'

Looming against the south sky, the Wall.

'What made him do it?'

It was all you could see through the window here: the Wall, floodlit, towering, though it's not all that high, fourteen feet, but towering because of what it is, what it means. And because of the barbed wire, the watchtowers, the machine gun posts.

'I suppose he wanted freedom,' I said.

He took another gulp of schnapps, puckering his mouth over it, squeezing his eyes shut, a drop of clear mucus gleaming at the end of his nose under the bleak white light. You could even see the reflection, in the glass of the china cabinet opposite the window, the reflection of the Wall. It shut us in, squeezing us into the small overheated room between its floodlit expanse against the window and its reflection on the cabinet. It was all they talked about in these rooms, these buildings, along these streets: the Wall. Twenty-seven years ago it had leapt like a tidal wave and frozen solid, cutting a city in half.

Gunter Blum, sixty, cab-driver: 'It's not so bad here.'

'No

'We're better off here than what they are in Poland or Czechoslovakia. 'There's industry here, goods, stuff in the shops. You can earn a decent living.' He wiped his nose on the back of his hand. 'So why did he do it?'

'Those things aren't freedom,' I said. 'Perhaps that was what he wanted. How old was he?'

'Thirty-two. Still a young man.'

This place was near Spittelmarkt, and we were on the second floor. The other apartment was next to this one, next to his. He just had the two.

'When did it happen?'

'Three years ago. Three years and seventeen days.' He rubbed at a blister on his hand. 'She tried to kill herself.'

'Your wife?'

'His mother. More his mother than my wife, you know? He was everything to her.' Small jerk of his head. 'It's the way it is, sometimes, mothers and sons.'

This was the fourth place I'd seen. I hadn't looked at the small ads in the local papers because I wanted somewhere close to the hotel, close to the embassies. I'd spent two hours getting rid of a tag, not one of Cone's people because his face didn't match any of the photographs, possibly one of Yasolev's if he'd decided to break faith, possibly one of Horst Volper's. Then I'd gone on foot, looking for the Zimmer zu Vermieten cards in the windows.

'Where is she now?'

There was no sign of a woman here.

'She's living with her sister in Strausberg. She — we couldn't get on, after that.' Jerk of his head. 'She shouldn't have tried to do such a terrible thing. I didn't, and he was my son too, wasn't he? She still had me, didn't she?'

The cheap schoolroom chair creaked as he tossed back the last of his drink; he was a big man, his arms tattooed, his fists resting on the table, bunched, angry, his eyes glancing up at the window every so often as if he were keeping watch on an enemy.

'I read about it,' I told him.

'A lot of people did. It caught attention.' He reached for the bottle of schnapps and then changed his mind, looking at the tin-framed clock on the shelf over the sink.

The story had caught attention because of its irony. Paul Blum had almost made it to the West: he'd been poised on the top of the Wall when they'd shot him, and it was only his body that had dropped to freedom on the other side.

'Why did he do it?' Couldn't get it off his mind.

'He was making a statement,' I said.

'They don't shoot to kill, these days. If only he'd waited.'

'His statement still stands. There are plenty of others crying out for freedom. He spoke for them too.'

'Hero, then. He's a hero? They didn't think so when I went to the checkpoint. I didn't know he'd been going to try it. I saw the papers, next day, and I went to the checkpoint, out of my mind, hit some of the guards, went crazy.' Eyes on the window again. 'They beat me up and shoved me inside for twenty-four hours. Common criminal they said he was, a criminal, betraying the cause, all that Party bullshit.' His glance was on me, now, wary. 'I don't know you, don't know who you are.

'They're no friends of mine. I'm in the market.'

He looked away. 'Do a bit myself.'

They all do. 'So you never see your wife?' I needed to know.

'Once in a while.' Jerking his head — 'I still love her, but I'm not sorry she keeps away. Breaking her heart, you see, and I can't stand for women to cry. Wants to visit his grave. I think if she could ever do that, she'd start mending.'

'They buried him over there?'

'I've got a cousin. I sent him the money. He sent us some pictures — Paul's in a cemetery in Grunewald. Pictures aren't the same as seeing, though, being there. I'd do anything, but they won't even look at our applications. He was a criminal, is how they think of him. God in heaven — ' he hit the top of the table with the flat of his hands and got to his feet and kicked the chair aside '- he was born there, you know that? They killed him trying to get into his own country!'

He moved in the room like a creature tethered, going in lumbering circles, trapped, his big hands hanging with their fists still bunched, his Bath heavy, his mouth puckered.

'Do you think she'd come back to you,' I asked him, 'once she'd seen the grave?'

Or stay over there. Either way, she'd feel better, start mending.

'Why haven't you moved away?'

He stopped dead. 'Where to?'

'Just away from the, Wall.'

He faced the window again, his square head going forward. 'No. I'm not turning my back.'

I got out of the worn leatherette armchair. 'He wouldn't want that for you.'

'I want it for myself. I want to go on hating them.'

I let him talk some more, enough to do him a bit of good; then I got out my wallet. 'I'll take the flat,' I told him, 'for a month.'

'The flat?' He'd forgotten why I'd come here.

It'd be as good as I'd find and I'd run out of time; it was three days since Yasolev had told us Gorbachev was coming to East Berlin and we'd only got four left. From this floor there was an easy drop into the small littered yard behind the building and the window at the front wasn't overlooked — there was just the Wall. There was a staircase instead of a lift and good enough cover in the street outside: vans standing opposite the paper mill, loading and unloading; five doorways within plain sight and a long shop window diagonally opposite with a wide angle of reflection; a high fence alongside a demolition site where they were knocking a three-storey building down.

I got out some money. 'I'll want privacy,' I said, 'just as you want yours. I'm not into anything risky, I just want to keep myself to myself. Is that understood?'

'I'm not interested in other people's business.' He picked up the money.

'I'm going to rely on that. Give me your wife's name and her sister's address, and by the end of the month I'll see she gets a permit to visit the cemetery on the other side.'

He swung his head up. 'You can do that?'

'I guarantee it. If you look after me well.'