During the search they had made me stand facing the wall, like a child being punished. As the mistress of the house you were from time to time asked to open a drawer, offer a glass of water. You performed these tasks without ever interrupting the swishing of an improvised fan: some of the revolutionary leaflets with which the streets were strewn and which had made their way into the houses through broken windows. Between these sheets of paper you had slipped the photos and coded messages that we had neither had time to send to the Center nor to burn. That would have been the one really dangerous discovery. Curiously enough, those leaflets in your hand wove a fragile protective zone around our lives that clearly made the soldiers uneasy. I sensed this tension, I understood it in these young armed men. They were struggling against the temptation to fire a short burst, which would have freed them from our watching eyes and restored the joyful savagery to their looting. But there were these slogans for revolutionary justice, freshly printed on the fan of leaflets. There was also the loudspeaker on a truck that had been showering the streets with appeals for calm and proclaiming the benefits of the new regime ever since the morning. Turning my head slightly, I could see hands stuffing into the bag a transistor, a jacket, and even the lamp clamped to the edge of the table, which you were helping to unfasten, while successfully avoiding giving an indication of the comic side of your involvement. You knew that the slightest change of mood might provoke the pent-up anger and the brief spitting of an automatic rifle. The soldier who removed the lamp also expropriated the banknotes left out on the desk. And, as this action looked more like simple theft than the others that had preceded it, he thought it politic to justify it by talking, in tones both menacing and moralistic, about corruption, imperialism, and the enemies of the revolution. These were the didactic and pompous tones of the loudspeaker. Ceaselessly repeated, such slogans ended up infiltrating even our thoughts and it was in this style that, in spite of myself, I formulated a silent observation, "The money that you have coveted is the end of your revolution. The serpent of cupidity has stolen into your new house."
When they had gone I turned around and saw you sitting there, still mechanically waving your fan of leaflets. The disorder in the room now matched the chaos outside, just as if this had been the purpose of their visit. Through the window we saw them quietly moving up the street, and a second later there came their flight under the crackle of bullets and the waltzing death of the soldier, revolving several times on the spot and scattering the confiscated objects all around him, those familiar fragments of our daily life. He collapsed, I glanced at you, guessing that you had the same memory: "That top…"
The evening of the private viewing in Berlin seemed infinitely remote. And yet scarcely three years had elapsed. I had a vision of the faces that were reflected then in the nickel-plated surface of the toy launched by that man with the forced laugh of a fairground barker. The dark-haired young woman swooning in front of a pallid canvas. Shakh speaking to the philatelist. And also the man who had succeeded in kicking away the top with the tip of his patent leather shoe. I had later chanced to pass the woman in a restaurant: in conversation with a friend, she was commenting on the menu and her descriptions were just as enthusiastic as the one she had earlier reserved for the picture. So she was less hypocritical than I had thought, I said to myself, just a little excessive in her praises. The philatelist continued to spend more than half his life in his shop piled high with stacks of stamped envelopes and albums, without having the least suspicion that he had entered our world of espionage for a few hours and left it again, unaware of what was happening to him. As for the man who had changed the trajectory of the spinning top by giving it a little kick, two years later he had lost his post as first secretary to a Western embassy in East Berlin, on account of an amorous liaison. It was Shakh who had told us of this misadventure. "He was not a novice, he knew that bed is the best trap for a diplomat. But it's a little like dying, it's something that only happens to other people." We thought the story would stop there: the tale of one of those stupid men in their fifties who swallow the amorous encounters set up for them hook, line, and sinker. But there was a detail that made Shakh continue. There was in his voice a chess player's fascination for an elegant series of moves. "The scenario was of a pathetic banality.
Even in intelligence schools I don't think they give such obvious examples any longer. On the other hand, as regards psychology, hats off to our East German colleagues. Here's how it was. The diplomat makes the acquaintance of a young Aryan beauty, falls for her, but remembers the need to be prudent. He hesitates. The young woman introduces him to one of her friends. Younger still and even more irresistible. The wretched diplomat doesn't resist. The first girl treats him to a terrible scene of jealousy and leaves him forever. Now he's completely reassured: have you ever seen a jealous female spy? Confident of his charm, he forges ahead. The sequel is an ultra classic case, even the subsequent reaction of his wife-and this scared him more than his own country's legal sanctions…"
After the house search that day it was you who talked about the ghosts reflected in the brilliant spinning of a top. You knew that after all those hours, when our deaths could have been caused by one word too many or a gesture that might have annoyed the soldiers, what we needed was to move, to talk, to laugh about that diplomat who was ready to sell all the secrets in the world, provided his wife did not learn of his misconduct. As you talked you were putting our house back in order, filling the gaps that had been left by the objects carried away.
I listened to you distractedly, conscious that it was not the substance of these stories that mattered. In the gleaming top I could see a young man in a dark suit, a glass of champagne in his hand. This self of mine that looked like a brilliant caricature, with his lust for living, his feverish anticipation of the new life, his haste to immerse himself in the seductive complexity of the Western World, with a pistol in his armpit and an ice-cold glass in his burning hand.
Our life had rapidly erased that caricature, turning as it did into an exhausting hunt for men who manufactured death. Those who invented weapons in the sheltered comfort of laboratories, those at the highest levels who made decisions about their production and later their use, those who sold them and resold them, those who killed. From this human chain all we needed was to seize upon just one tiny link of information, an address, a name. And it was often in countries at war that the chain could be uncovered most easily. We would settle there under one identity or another (in that African city we were representatives of a geological prospecting company), we would endeavor to meet the person who was supplying arms to feed the imminent fighting. "Fighting that very likely wouldn't break out if there were not all these means of killing," I said to myself, two days before the start of the massacres, as I was talking to an arms salesman about to catch a plane to London. In the early days I used to think it would have been simpler to shoot down this Ron Scalper, him and his like, they were so palpably insignificant compared with the carnage that resulted from their trade. But this desire had been left behind among the fantasies of that young man with his glass of champagne in the middle of a Berlin gallery. In reality one had to cherish this salesman with all possible solicitude, for he was the first link that could uncover the whole chain. At the airport he had given me his London address-our next destination.