of his elaborate hi-fi system, its working parts concealed inside a birchwood Biedermeier tallboy that had been disembowelled to accommodate it. Sometimes Frank felt bound to explain that the tallboy had been badly damaged before suffering this terminal surgery.
Frank was relaxed in his lumpy chair. Thin elegant legs crossed, a drink at his elbow and a chewed old Dunhill pipe in his mouth. From time to time he disappeared from view behind a sombre haze, not unlike the coach varnish that obscured the views of London, except for its pungent smell. After a period of denial, which had caused him – and indeed everyone who worked with him – mental and physical stress, he’d now surrendered to his nicotine addiction with vigour and delight.
‘I read the report,’ said Frank, removing the pipe from his mouth and prodding into its bowl with the blade of a Swiss army penknife. Seen like this, in his natural habitat, Frank Harrington was the model Englishman. Educated but not intellectual, a drinker who was never drunk, his hair greying and his bony face lined without him looking aged, his impeccably tailored pinstripe suit not new, and everything worn with a hint of neglect: the appearance and manner which knowing foreigners so often admire and rash ones imitate.
I sipped my whisky and waited. I had been summoned to this meeting in Frank’s home by means of a handwritten memo left on my desk by Frank in person. Only he would have fastened it to my morning Berliner doughnut by means of a push-pin. Such formal orders were infrequent, and I knew I’d not been brought here to hear Frank’s views on the more Byzantine stratagems of Germany’s political adventurers. I wondered what was really in his mind. So far there had been little official reaction to my delayed return to Berlin, and the detention in Poland that caused it. When I arrived I reported to Frank and told him I’d been arrested and released without charges. He was on the phone when I went into his office. He capped the phone, mumbled something about my preparing a report for London, and waved me absent. I resumed my duties as his deputy, as if I’d not been away. The written report I had submitted was brief and formal, with an underlying inference that it was a matter of mistaken identity.
I was sitting on one of the sofas in an attempt to keep my distance from the polluting product of Frank’s combustion. Before me there was a silver tray with a crystal ice bucket, tongs, and a cut-glass tumbler into which a double measure of Laphroaig whisky had been precisely measured by Tarrant. He’d put the whisky bottle away again, but left on the table a bottle of Apollinaris water from which I was helping myself. Shell-shaped silver dishes contained calculated amounts of salted nuts and potato chips and there was a large silver box that I knew contained a selection of cigarettes. Tarrant, Frank’s butler, had arranged a similar array on Frank’s side of the coffee table. Apart from Frank’s expensive hi-fi, Tarrant had ensured that the household and its routines were not modified by advances in science or fashion. As far as I could see, Frank did the same thing for the Department.
On an inlaid tripod table, booklets and files were arranged in fans, like periodicals in a dentist’s waiting-room. From the table Frank took the West German passport I’d been using when detained in Poland. He flipped its pages distastefully and looked from the identity photo to me and then at the photo again. ‘This photograph,’ he said finally. ‘Is it really you?’
‘It was all done in a bit of a hurry,’ I explained.
‘Going across there with a smudgy picture of someone else in your passport is a damned stupid way of doing things. Why not an authentic picture?’
‘An identity picture is like ethnic food,’ I said. ‘The less authentic it is the better.’
‘Can you elaborate on that a little?’ said Frank, playing the innocent.
‘Because the UB photocopy, and file away, every passport that goes through their hands,’ I said.
‘Ahhh,’ said Frank, sounding unconvinced. He slid the passport across the table to me. It was a sign that he wasn’t going to take the matter any further. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.
‘Don’t use it again,’ said Frank. ‘Put it away with your Beatles records and that Nehru jacket.’
‘I won’t use it again, Frank,’ I said. I’d never worn a Nehru jacket or anything styled remotely like one, but I would always remain the teenager he’d once known. There was no way of escaping that.
‘You are senior staff now. The time for all those shenanigans is over.’ He picked up my report and shook it as if something might fall from the pages. ‘London will read this. There is no way I can sit on it for ever.’
I nodded.
‘And you know what they will say?’
I waited for him to say that London would suspect that I’d gone to Moscow only in order to see Gloria. But he said: ‘You were browbeating Jim Prettyman. That’s what they will say. What did you get out of him? You may as well tell me, so that I can cover my arse.’
‘Jim Prettyman?’
‘Don’t do that, Bernard,’ said Frank with just a touch of aggravation.
If it was a chess move, it was an accomplished one. To avoid the accusation that I was grilling Prettyman I would have to say that I was there to see Gloria. ‘Prettyman was more or less unconscious. There was little chance of my doing anything beyond tucking him into bed and changing his bedpans, and there was a nurse to do that. What would I be grilling Prettyman about, anyway?’
‘Come along, Bernard. Have you forgotten all those times you told me that Prettyman was the man behind those who wanted your sister-in-law killed?’
‘I said that? When did I say it?’
‘Not in as many words,’ said Frank, retreating a fraction. ‘But that was the gist of it. You thought London had plotted the death of Fiona’s sister so that her body could be left over there. Planted so that our KGB friends would be reassured that Fiona was dead, and not telling us all their secrets.’
Fortified by the way Frank had put my suspicions of London in the past tense, I put down my drink and stared at him impassively. I suppose I must have done a good job on the facial expression, for Frank shifted uncomfortably and said: ‘You’re not going to deny it now, are you, Bernard?’
‘I certainly am,’ I said, without adding any further explanation.
‘If you are leading me up the garden path, I’ll have your guts for garters.’ Frank’s vocabulary was liberally provided with schoolboy expressions of the nineteen thirties.
‘I’m trying to put all that behind me,’ I said. ‘It was getting me down.’
‘That’s good,’ said Frank who, along with the Director-General and his Deputy, Bret Rensselaer, had frequently advised me to put it all behind me. ‘Some field agents are able to do their job and combine it with a more or less normal family life. It’s not easy, but some do it.’
I nodded and wondered what was coming. I could see Frank was in one of his philosophical moods and they usually ended up with a softly delivered critical summary that helped me sort it all out.
‘You are one of the best field agents we ever had working out of this office,’ said Frank, sugaring the pill. ‘But perhaps that’s because you live the job night and day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.’
‘Do I, Frank? It’s nice of you to say that.’
He could hear the irony in my voice but he ignored it. ‘You never tell anyone the whole truth, Bernard. No one. Every thought is locked up in that brain of yours and marked secret. I’m locked out; your colleagues are locked out. I suppose it’s the same with your wife and children; I suppose you tell them only what they should know.’
‘Sometimes not even that,’ I said.
‘I saw Fiona the day before yesterday. She annihilated some poor befuddled Ministry fogey, she made the chairman apologize for inaccurate minutes of the previous meeting and, using the ensuing awkward silence, carried the vote for some training project they were trying to kill. She’s dynamite,