Quiller KGB

'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.'

'Got my word.'

Safe-house.

'Didn't you see me?'

She was in Airforce uniform, the greatcoat buttoned to the chin against the freezing wind, her hands gloved. First Lieutenant's insignia.

'It was the brakes,' I said. 'They've been giving trouble.'

'What did you say?' She stood closer, pitching her voice above the din of a truck going past, its wheels churning through the slush. There'd been snow last night.

'Brakes,' I said. 'They don't work.'

'You admit responsibility?'

'Yes. You'd better shut your door.' She'd left it open when she got out of the car to look at the damage. It wasn't much more than I'd done to the other two cars the night before: creased rear wing, smashed tail-light.

She went back to the pagoda-top Mercedes and got a black briefcase and slammed the door. 'Show me your driver's licence and your insurance, please.' A bus came past, throwing out a wave of slush, but she didn't move when it hit her jackboots, knew how to concentrate.

'Let's go in there,' I said, 'or we'll freeze.'

She glanced at the steamed-up window of the restaurant, then at her watch, then back to me.

'Let me see your identity card.'

I showed it to her, the official one with the HUA insignia, and she gave me a closer look, dark eyes, pale skin, a hard straight mouth. 'Very well, captain.'

The place was almost dark inside, either trying to look like a night-club or keep down the electricity bill. She put her briefcase onto a bench inside the door and zipped it open, her hands ungloved now, her movements deft. The other two women had been slower, less controlled. 'Here is my licence. May I please see yours?'

We exchanged notes; one of her gloves dropped and I picked it up; she didn't thank me. The window shook as something big went past, and a man in a moth-eaten fur hat came in and slammed the door and banged his feet up and down to get the slush off; but I was more interested in the woman — First Lieutenant Lena Pabst, Werneuchen Airforce Base, thirty-two, status unmarried — and the way she wrote, quickly, vertically, the way she stood, straight, balanced, totally confident.

'Thank you, comrade captain.'

'I haven't eaten since this morning,' I told her. 'Will you join me for a meal?'

I think I got the tone right: it wasn't an invitation, only a suggestion. We weren't so much a man and a woman as a secret police captain-and an Airforce lieutenant in a communist state; she'd pay her own bill when we left, if she decided to stay.

'Very well. I have time.'

The other two had been more feminine, more relaxed, and neither of them had known anything about Moscow, hadn't particularly cared, and that was why I hadn't gone any further with them. This one was into a fairly sophisticated summary, halfway through the meal, of her thoughts on the future of Europe.

'It's impossible for Greater Germany to remain bifurcated for much longer, given the climate of world-political thinking inside the Kremlin — given the undoubted genius of Gorbachev. And it's impossible to conceive of the new Germany following the corrupt and bourgeois system of the decadent West. The direction we shall be taking is obvious.'

We hadn't ordered wine. I'm driving. But when I get to my apartment I shall drink Underberg. She hadn't said when I get home.

'Have you been in the West?'

'Only for a few days,' she said, 'to the other side.'

'You were allowed to cross?'

She moved her head quickly to look at me. 'A group of us made a request to go there, for educational purposes. It was granted. There was no question of "being allowed" to go.'

I'd made a slip and she'd picked it up at once; I was thinking like a Westerner and I'd have to watch it.

'And how did it strike you?'

'Have you been there, comrade captain?'

'My name's Kurt, as you know. May I call you Lena?'

It stopped everything dead and she glanced down, and when she looked up again her eyes had changed. I'd thrown a personal note into the relationship, and her reaction was the same as when I'd suggested we have a meal together, but stronger, and she held my eyes for a moment, watchful, engaged.

'Very well, you may call me Lena.'

'"Thank you. Yes, I've been into West Berlin.'

In a moment, looking down again, her strong fingers toying with a crust, 'I found it pathetic. I don't think it's important that people can drive up to a bank and do business without having to get out of their car. I don't need the choice of a dozen different brands of breakfast cereal, all of which contain fifty per cent refined sugar. I need bread. Bread, food, work to do for the world. But the difference between the East and West isn't really significant. The people wear much the same clothes, have children, go to the movies, drive cars. War springs from fear, not from the slight difference in ways of life, and while there are these two all-powerful nations pitched together on the same planet there's bound to be fear. We need one world, not of nations but of people, earthlings, living in harmony, working for the future, poised on the threshold of space, the ultimate adventure. To achieve that, a last war is necessary. My air base, Werneuchen — ' she twisted in her chair to face me '- is in the front line of that war, and the thought excites me beyond all words. I am in the front line of the last war on earth, and when it's over I shall still be here to see the dawn of the new world. When I think of it in the night it's like an orgasm.'