'Kill her? But wait a minute, Sir Henry. In fact she hasn't done that, has she?'
'And that leads us on to another aspect of the horrible position that Samson now finds himself in.' The D-G heaved himself up out of the low seat. Bret got to his feet and watched but decided against offering him assistance. The D-G said, 'Samson is asking a lot of questions. Suppose he discovers the truth? Might it not seem to him that we have played a cruel prank on him? And done it with callous indifference? He discovers that we have not confided in him: he feels rejected and humiliated. He is a man trained to respond violently to his opponents. Might he not decide to wreak vengeance upon us?'
'I don't think so, Sir Henry. Samson is a civilized man.' Bret went across the office and held the door open for him.
'Is he?' said the D-G in that cheery way he could summon so readily. 'Then he hasn't been properly trained.'
17
East Berlin. November 1983.
To the façade of the building in Karl Liebknecht Strasse a dozen workmen were affixing a huge red banner, 'Long Live Our Socialist Fatherland'. The previous one that had promised both prosperity and peace was faded to light pink by the sun.
From the window of Fiona Samson's office there were only the tassels to be glimpsed, but part of the framework for the new banner cut across the window and reduced the daylight. 'I've always wanted to go to America,' admitted Hubert Renn as he picked up the papers from her desk.
'Have you, Herr Renn? Why?' She drank her tea. She must not leave it for it was real Indian tea, not the tasteless USSR stuff from the Georgian crop. She wondered where Renn had found it but she didn't ask.
'Curiosity, Frau Direktor. It is a land of contradictions.'
'It is a repressive society,' said Fiona, dutiful to the line she always took. 'A land where workers are enslaved.'
'But they are such an enigmatic people,' said Renn. He replaced the cap on his fountain-pen and put it in his pocket. 'Do you know, Frau Direktor, when, during the war against Hitler, the Americans began to drop secret agents into Germany, the very first of those parachutists were members of the ISK?'
'Der Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund?' She had never heard of that organization until Renn had mentioned that his mother had been a member, and then she'd looked it up in the reference library.
'Yes, ISK, the most radical of all the parties. Why would the Americans select such people? It was as if our friends in Moscow had sent to us, as Stalin's emissaries, White Russian nobility.'
She laughed. Renn gave a skimpy selfconscious grin. There had been a time when such remarks by Renn would have suggested to her that he might be sympathetic to the USA, but now she knew better. If there was anything of his attitude to be deduced from his remarks it was a criticism of Russia rather than praise for the US. Renn was a dedicated disciple of Marx and his theories. As Renn saw it, Karl Marx the incomparable prophet and source of all true enlightenment was a German sage. Any small inconsistencies and imperfections that might be encountered in the practice of socialism – and Renn had never admitted to there being any – were due to the essentially Russian failures of Lenin and Stalin.
But Fiona had learned to live with Hubert Renn's blind devotion to Marxist socialism, and there was no doubt that daily contact with him had opened up to her a world that she had never truly perceived.
There were for instance the regular letters that arrived from Renn's twenty-two-year-old daughter Lisa, her father's great pride. Lisa had taken the learning of the Russian language in her stride and gone on to postgraduate work in marine biology – one of the postgraduate courses the regime permitted to female students – in the University at Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal. The deepest lake in the world, it contains more fresh water than all the North American lakes put together. This region supported flora and fauna not found anywhere else. And yet until Renn had showed her the letter from his daughter she'd not even known where Lake Baikal was! How much more was there to know?
'I will confide a secret,' Renn announced when she gave him back the chatty letter he'd just received from his daughter.
'What is it, Herr Renn?'
'You are to get an award, Frau Direktor.'
'An award? I've heard nothing of it.'
'The nature of the award has still to be decided but your heroic years in England working for the revolution will be marked by an award. Moscow has said yes and now there might also be a medal from the DDR too.'
'I am overwhelmed, Herr Renn.'
'It is overdue, Frau Direktor Samson.'
Renn had been surprised at the way in which Fiona had settled in to her Berlin job. He didn't realize to what extent Fiona's English background had prepared her for the communist regime. Her boarding school had very quickly taught her to hide every human feeling: triumph, disappointment, glee, love or shame. Her authoritarian father had demonstrated the art of temporizing and the value of the soft reply. Her English middle-class background – with its cruel double-meanings, oblique questions and humiliating indifference – had provided the final graduation that amply fitted her for East Berlin's dangers. And of course Renn had no inkling of Fiona's bouts of depression, her ache for her children and the hours of suicidal despair and loneliness.
Hair drawn back in a style that was severe and yet not unbecoming, her face scrubbed and with very little make-up, Fiona, with the slight Berlin accent that she now applied to her everyday speech, had become accepted as a regular member of the KGB/Stasi team. Her office was not in the main building in Normannenstrasse, Berlin-Lichtenberg. As Renn had pointed out, to be one of the horde coming out of that big Stasi building at the end of the day's work, to fight your way down into the Magdalenenstrasse U-Bahn and wait for a train, was not something to yearn for.
There were many advantages to being in Karl Liebknecht Strasse. It was in the Mitte, only a stone's throw from the shops, bars and theatres, and Unter den Linden ran right into it. What the cunning old Hubert Renn really meant of course was that it was near the other government offices to which he had to go on foot, and convenient to the Alexanderplatz S-Bahn which took him home.
'I ordered a car for fourteen-thirty,' said Renn. He stopped to admire the fur-lined coat that Fiona had just bought. Not wanting to attract too much speculation about her finances, Fiona had debated about what sort of winter coat she should wear. Hubert Renn had solved the problem by getting permission for her to buy, with DDR currency, one of the fancy coats normally only on sale to foreign visitors. 'You have a meeting at the clinic for nervous diseases at fifteen hundred,' said Renn. 'I'll make sure the driver knows where to go. Pankow: near where the Autobahn ends. It's a maze of little streets: easy to get lost.'
'Thank you, Herr Renn. Do we have an agenda?'
Renn looked at her with an expression she didn't recognize. 'No agenda, Frau Direktor. Familiarization visit. You are meeting with Doktor Wieczorek.'
'Can't the doctor come here?'
Renn busied himself with some papers that were on the filing cabinet. 'It is usual to go there,' he said stiffly and without turning to look at her.
She was about to say that it all sounded very mysterious and make a joke of it, but she had learned that jokes of that sort did not go down well in the East. So she said, 'Do I need to take papers or files with me?'
'Only a notebook, Frau Direktor.'
'Will you not be there to take notes?' She was surprised by this development.
'I am not permitted to attend the meetings with Doktor Wieczorek.
She looked at him but he didn't turn round to meet her eyes. 'In that case,' she said, 'perhaps I'll take an early lunch. By the way, Herr Renn…'
'Yes, Frau Direktor?'