As he let himself out of the front door, Bret heard Billy insisting, 'Well, I'll bet he's shot lots of people.'
Bernard Samson had been arrested in a Biergarten near Müggelheimer Damm. It was a forest that stretched down to the water of the Müggelsee. A thousand or so inebriated men celebrating Himmelfahrt – Ascension Day – had provided the congestion and confusion in which Bernard, and his closest friend Werner Wolkmann, had helped two elderly refugees to escape westwards. It was not a simple act of philanthropy: one of the escapees was an agent of the Department.
Werner and the others had got away when Bernard created a diversion. It was a brave thing to do but Bernard had had ample time to regret his rash gesture. They had locked him in an office room on the top floor of the State Security Ministry's huge office block on Frankfurter Alice.
This office was not like the cells in the basement – from which some prisoners never emerged – but its heavy door and barred window, plus the difficulty of moving from floor to floor in a building where every corridor was surveyed by both cameras and armed guards, was enough to hold anyone but a maniac.
Bernard had been interrogated by an amiable KGB officer named Erich Stinnes. He spoke the same sort of Berlin German that Bernard had grown up with, and in many things the two men saw eye to eye. 'Who gets the promotions and the big wages – desk-bound Party bastards,' said Stinnes bitterly. 'How lucky you are not having the Party system working against you all the time.'
'We have got it,' said Bernard. 'It's called Eton and Oxbridge.'
'What kind of workers' state is that?' said Stinnes.
'Are you recording this conversation?' asked Bernard.
'So they can put me in prison with you? Do you think I'm crazy?'
It was the sort of soft treatment that was usually followed up by browbeating from a ferocious tough guy partner, but Stinnes was waiting for a 'KGB Colonel from Moscow', who turned out to be Fiona Samson from London.
By that time Bernard Samson had begun to suspect what was about to happen. Some of the clues that Bret Rensselaer had so artfully supplied to the other side had become evident to the ever more worried Bernard.
The desperate realization that his wife was a KGB Colonel was a betrayal of such magnitude that Bernard felt physically ill. But the effect upon him – and the agony of it – was not greater than many men have suffered when discovering that their wife has been unfaithful to them with another man. For each individual there is a threshold beyond which pain does not increase.
For Fiona the pain was made worse by the guilt of inflicting it upon a man who loved her. She was very tired – and the journey had left her with a splitting headache – that morning when they brought Bernard in to face her. It was a test – perhaps the toughest one she would face – of her ability, her conviction and her resolution to pursue her role even in the face of Bernard's contempt and hatred.
Brought in by a guard he was dirty and unshaven. His eyes stared at her in a way she had never seen before. It was a horrible hateful exchange but she played her part determined that Bernard would see no glimmer of hope. Only his despair would protect her.
There was a tray with coffee pot and cups on the desk but Bernard didn't want any. 'Is there anything to drink in this office?' he demanded.
She found a bottle of vodka and gave it to him. He poured it into a cup and drank a large measure in one gulp. Poor Bernard: she suddenly became afraid that this would be the beginning of a long drunken bout. 'You should cut down on the drinking,' she said.
'You don't make it easy to do,' he said. He smiled grimly and poured more for himself.
'The D-G will send for you, of course,' she said more calmly than she felt. 'You can tell him that the official policy at this end will be one of no publicity about my defection. I imagine that will suit him all right, after all the scandals the service has suffered in the past year.'
'I'll tell him.'
She watched him: he'd gone green. 'You never could handle spirits on an empty stomach,' said Fiona. 'Are you all right? Do you need a doctor?'
'It's you I'm sick of,' he said.
It was as much as she could bear. She pressed the floor button and the guard came to take her husband away. Against her training, and her better judgement, she blurted out, 'Goodbye then, darling. Do I get one final kiss?'
But Bernard thought she was gloating. 'No,' he said and turned away.
As soon as Bernard had been taken through Check-point Charlie and released, Fiona pleaded tiredness and went back to the hotel suite they had provided as temporary accommodation. She took a long hot bath, two sleeping pills and went to bed. She slept the clock round. When she finally awoke there was a moment in which she believed that it was all a terrible dream, that she was at home in London with no complications to her life. She pulled the bedclothes over her head and stayed there unmoving while she slowly came to terms with the bizarre world in which she found herself.
After that terrible encounter with her husband, Fiona's arrival and installation in East Berlin was more endurable. The debriefing seemed to go on forever, but Bret Rensselaer had thought of just about everything and her prepared answers seemed to satisfy the men who asked the questions.
The KGB personnel chief had gone to a lot of trouble to make her as comfortable as possible, and the minuscule apartment with its hard bed and outdated kitchen had to be compared with the crowded rooms and shared kitchens and bathrooms that were a normal part of living in the capital of the DDR.
Her office in the KGB/Stasi operational command building was light, and it had a new sheepskin rug and a pinewood desk, imported from Finland. These were considered status symbols. More important, they'd assigned to her a fifty-year-old male secretary named Hubert Renn, who spoke fluent Russian, some French, a little English and could take shorthand. Renn was a hard-line communist of a kind which only Berlin produced, and which was now almost extinct. He was the son of a stone mason, and together with his fifteen brothers and sisters had grown up in a dark three-room tenement in a cobbled alley in Wedding. During the nineteen twenties das rote Wedding was so solidly communist that the block was run on communal lines by appointed Party officials. Renn's mother had been a member of the ISK – Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund – a political sect so strict that its members rejected alcohol, tobacco and meat. She left the ISK upon marriage, since only full-time workers were permitted membership.
Short, agile, undernourished and eternally combative in spirit, Renn was also efficient. It was typical of his frugality and practicality that when he turned back the lapel of his jacket he revealed a selection of pins, safety-pins and even a needle.
When Fiona first came face to face with her newly appointed secretary she thought that they'd met before. This mistaken familiarity came from her memories of people depicted in old photos of Berlin streets. Despite this feeling she was to discover that Renn was like no other person she'd ever met. With his thick neck, truculent ruddy face, neglected teeth and the short hair that responded to neither brush nor comb, here was a character straight out of Brecht.
Little Hubert Renn had been exposed to Leninism and Marxism while in the dented tin bath that doubled as a cradle. Essentially militant, the ISK rejected Marx's theory about the inevitable collapse of capitalism. The necessity of violent struggle was something he had heard his mother and father endlessly debating. After such an upbringing no one could teach Renn anything about the phraseology of left-wing politics. Even Pavel Moskvin, a Moscow-backed bully with whom Fiona had that morning crossed swords, could not best him in political argument. But Renn didn't mince words about 'the German road to socialism' or spend much time discussing why, at the vital Parteitag in April 1946, the party's declared aspirations had been based upon Marx and Engels and not Lenin and Stalin. Renn – who had been present at that historic congress – preferred to ask, somewhat archly, why it had taken place in the Admiralspalast theatre, noted otherwise for 'top comedy routines'.