lined with cars and vans. They were dirty: caked with the mud and grime of a European winter, a condition unknown in southern California. On the glasswork of the parked cars, frost and ice had formed elaborate swirling patterns. Any one of these vehicles would provide a secure hiding place for a surveillance team watching the building. I regretted letting the kid bring me here. It was stupid and careless. He was sure to be known to the opposition, and too tall to be inconspicuous; that’s why he’d never last as a field agent.
After I’d cleaned up and shaved and changed into a suit, he spread a map across the table and showed me the route he proposed. He suggested that we drive through Charlie into the Eastern Sector of Berlin and then drive south and avoid the main roads and Autobahnen all the time. It was a circuitous route but the kid quoted all London’s official advisories to me and insisted that it was the best way to do it. I yielded to him. I could see he was one of those fastidious preparation fanatics, and that was a good way to be when going on a venture of this sort.
‘What do you think?’ the kid asked.
‘Tell me seriously: did London Central really say I might want restraints to drag this bruiser out even against his will?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have any whisky?’
As is so often the case with frontier crossings that inspire a nervous premonition of disaster, passing through Checkpoint Charlie went smoothly. Before driving out of the city I asked the kid to make a small detour to call at a quiet little bar in Oranienburger Strasse so I could get cigarettes and a tall glass of Saxony’s famous beer.
‘You must have a throat like leather to actually crave East German cigarettes,’ said the kid. He was staring at the only other people in the bar: two youngish women in fur coats. They looked up at him expectantly, but one glance was enough to tell them that he was no proposition and they went back to their whispered conversation.
‘What do you know about it?’ I said. ‘You don’t smoke.’
‘If I did smoke, it wouldn’t be those coffin nails.’
‘Drink your beer and shut up,’ I said.
Behind the counter Andi Krohn had followed our exchange. He looked at the girls in the corner and stared at me as if about to smile. Andi’s had always been a place to find available women for a price: they say it was notorious even as far back as before the war. I don’t know how his predecessors had got away with it for all these years, except that the Krohn family had always known the right people to cultivate. Andi and I had been friends since we were both schoolboys and he was the school’s most cherished athlete. In those days there was talk of him becoming an Olympic miler. But it never happened. Now he was greying and portly with bifocal glasses and he took several minutes to recognize me after we came through the door.
Andi’s grandparents had been members of Germany’s tiny ethnic minority of Sorbs, Slavs who from medieval times had retained their own culture and language. Nowadays they were mostly to be found in the extreme southeast corner of the DDR where Poland and Czechoslovakia meet. It is one of several places called the Dreiländereck – three-nation corner – a locality where they brew some of the finest beers in the world. Strangers came a long way to seek out Andi’s bar, and they weren’t all looking for women.
We exchanged banalities as if I’d never been away. His son Frank had married a pharmacist from Dresden, and I had little alternative but to go through an album of wedding photos and make appreciative noises, and drink beer, and a few schnapps chasers, while the kid looked at his watch and fretted. I didn’t show Andi pictures of my wife and family and he didn’t ask to see any. Andi was quick on the uptake, the way all barmen become. He knew that whatever kind of job I did nowadays it wasn’t one you did with a pocketful of identification material.
Once back on the road we made good time. ‘Smoke if you want to,’ the kid offered.
‘Not right now.’
‘I thought you were desperate for one of those East German nails?’
‘The feeling passed.’ I looked out at the landscape. I knew the area. Forests helped to conceal the military encampments, row upon row of huts complete with chain-link fences and coils of barbed-wire and tall watch-towers manned by men with guns and field-glasses. So big were these military camps, and so numerous, that it was not always possible to be sure where one ended and another began. Almost as abundant in the first fifty miles of our journey were the open-cast lignite mines where East Germany obtained the fuel to make electricity and to burn in a million household stoves and create the most polluted air in Europe. Winter had proved capricious this year, tightening and then loosening its grip on the landscape. The last few days had seen a premature thaw and had left snow patches to shine in the moonlight, marking the edges of the fields and higher ground. The back roads we’d chosen were icy in places and the kid kept to a sensible moderate speed. We were within fifteen miles of Magdeburg when we encountered the road-block.
We came upon it suddenly as we rounded a bend. The kid braked in response to an agitated waving of a lighted baton of the sort used by German police on both sides of the frontier.
‘Papers?’ said the soldier. He was a burly old fellow in camouflage fatigues and steel helmet. ‘Switch off the engine and the main beams.’ His country accent was perfect: something to put into the archives now that all East Germany’s kids were talking like TV announcers.
The kid switched off the car headlights, and in the sudden quiet I could hear the wind in the bare trees and subdued pop music coming from the guard hut. The man who’d spoken handed our papers over to another soldier with Leutnant’s tabs on his camouflage outfit. He examined them by means of a flashlight. It was the very hell of a place for a lengthy delay. A bleak landscape of turnip fields until, right across the horizon, like tall-stacked cruisers of the Kaiser’s coal-burning battle fleet, there stood a long line of factory chimneys, puffing out clouds of multicoloured smoke.
‘Get out,’ said the officer, a short slim man with a neatly trimmed moustache and steel-rimmed glasses. We got out. It was not a good sign. ‘Open the trunk.’
When it was open the Leutnant used his flashlight and groped around the oily rags and spare wheel. He found a bottle of Swedish vodka there. It was still in a colourful fancy box they use for overpriced booze in airport duty-free shops.
‘You can keep it,’ the kid told him. The Leutnant gave no sign of hearing the kid’s offer. ‘A present from Sweden.’ But it was no use. The Leutnant was deaf to such bribes. He looked at our papers again, holding them close to his face so that the light reflected on to his face and made his spectacle lenses gleam. I shivered in the cold. For some reason the Leutnant didn’t seem interested in me. Maybe it was my rumpled suit with its unmistakable East German cut, or the pungent smell of Andi Krohn’s rot-gut apple-schnapps that had been repeating on me for the last half hour and was no doubt evident on my breath. But the kid was using a Swedish passport, and the identification that accompanied it described him as a Swedish engineer working for a construction company that was about to build a luxury hotel in Magdeburg. It was plausible, and anyway the kid’s German was not good enough to pass him off as a German national. The Swedes had made a corner for themselves building hotels to which only foreigners with hard currency were admitted, so it was a reasonable enough cover. But I wondered what would happen if someone started questioning him in Swedish.
I stamped around to keep my circulation moving. The trees were tormented by the wind and the skies had cleared enough to bring the temperature drop that always accompanies a sight of the stars. I didn’t envy these men their job. As we stood there on the country road the wind had that cruel bite that dampness brings. It was more than enough excuse for becoming bad-tempered.
The two soldiers circled the old dented Volvo, looking at it with that mixture of contempt and envy that Western luxuries so often produced in the Party faithful. Then, with the boot open, the two soldiers went back to their hut, leaving us standing there in the cold. I’d seen it all before: they were hoping we would get back into the car so that they could come back and scream at us. Or that we would close the trunk or even drive away, so that