He got off at the zoo, having decided to go into the park and find somewhere to sleep. It was a sunny day, but once he had walked for twenty minutes and found a quiet stretch on the banks of the canal, he found the wind a little too brisk to permit him to relax. For half an hour he lay shivering on the newly cut grass. He walked all the way back through the gardens to the station and took the U-Bahn home. Sleep was now his only priority. If the MPs were there, he would only be confronting the inevitable. If it was MacNamee, he would think of a story when it was necessary.
He glided along the pavement from Neu-Westend to Platanenallee. Tiredness dissociated him from the action of his legs. He was being walked home. There was no one waiting for him. Inside the apartment two notes had been put through the door. One, from Maria, said, “Where are you? What’s happening?” The other, from MacNamee said, “Phone me” and gave three numbers. Leonard went straight to the bedroom and pulled the curtains. He took all his clothes off. He did not bother with pajamas. In less than a minute he was asleep at last.
In less than an hour he was awake with an urgent need to urinate. The phone was ringing, too. He hesitated in the hallway, not knowing which to attend to first. He went to the phone and knew as he picked it up that he had made the wrong decision. He would not be able to concentrate. It was Glass, sounding distant and very upset. In the background there was a commotion of some sort. He was like a man having a bad dream.
“Leonard, Leonard, is that you?”
Shivery and naked in his sunless living room, Leonard crossed his legs and said, “Yes, it’s me.”
“Leonard? Are you there?”
“Bob, it’s me. I’m here.”
“Thank God. Listen. Are you listening carefully? I want you to tell me what’s in those cases. I need you to tell me right now.”
Leonard felt his legs going weak. He sat down on the carpet among the debris of the engagement party. He said, “Have they been opened?”
“Come on, Leonard. Just tell me.”
“Bob, for a start, it’s classified, and anyway, this is not a secure line.”
“Don’t give me that shit, Marnham. All hell is breaking loose here. What’s in those bags?”
“What’s happening there? What’s all that noise?”
Glass was shouting to be heard. “Christ! Haven’t you been told? They found us. They broke into the tap chamber. Our people just made it out. No one had time to close the steel doors. They’re all over the tunnel, it’s all theirs, right up to the sector boundary. We’re clearing stuff out of the warehouse just to be safe. I’m seeing Harvey in an hour and I have to give him a damage report. I need to know what was in those cases. Leonard?”
But Leonard could not speak. His throat was constricted by a joyous gratitude. The speed and simplicity of it all. And now the great Russian silence could descend. He would get dressed now and go and tell Maria that everything was fine.
Glass was shouting his name. Leonard said, “Sorry, Bob. I was stunned by the news.”
“The cases, Leonard. The cases!”
“Right. It was the body of a man I hacked into pieces.”
“You asshole. I don’t have much time.”
Leonard was trying to keep the lightness out of his voice. “Actually, you don’t have much to worry about. It was decoding equipment that I was building myself. It was only half completed, and it turns out the ideas were out of date.”
“So what was the big deal this morning?”
“All decoding projects are level four,” Leonard said. “But listen, Bob, when did all this happen?”
Glass was talking to someone else. He broke off. “What was that?”
“When did they break in?”
Glass did not hesitate. “Twelve fifty-eight.”
“No, Bob. That can’t be right.”
“Listen, if you want to know more, just tune into Deutschlandsender. They’re talking about nothing else.”
Leonard felt a spreading coldness in his stomach. “They can’t go public with it.”
“That’s what we thought. They’d lose face. But the commandant of the Soviet Berlin garrison is out of town. The second-in-command, a guy called Kotsyuba, must be nuts. He’s milking it for propaganda. They’re going to come out of this looking stupid, but that’s what they’re doing.”
Leonard was thinking of the joke he had just made. He said, “It can’t be true.”
Again someone was trying to talk to Glass. He spoke hurriedly. “They’re holding a press briefing tomorrow. They’re going to show the press corps around the tunnel on Saturday. They’re talking about opening it up to the public. A tourist attraction, a monument to American treachery. Leonard, they’re going to use every last damn thing they can find.”
He rang off, and Leonard hurried to the bathroom.
Twenty-One
John MacNamee insisted on meeting Leonard at Kempinski’s and wanted to sit outside. It was barely ten o’clock in the morning and all the other customers were inside. It was the same bright, cold weather. Each time an enormous white cumulus cloud drifted in front of the sun, the air became icy.
Leonard had been feeling the cold lately. He always seemed to be shivering. The morning after Glass’s phone call he woke with shaking hands. It was no mere tremble, it was a palsied shake, and it took him minutes to button his shirt. It was a delayed muscular spasm, he decided, brought on by carrying the cases. When he went out for his first meal in over two days at a Schnellimbiss on Reichskanzlerplatz, he dropped his sausage on the pavement. Someone’s dog was there to eat it, mustard and all.
At Kempinski’s he was in a sun trap, but he kept his coat on and clenched his teeth to stop them chattering. He could not trust himself to hold a coffee cup, so he ordered a beer, and that too was icy. MacNamee looked comfortable enough wearing a tweed jacket over a thin cotton shirt. When his coffee came he stuffed his pipe and lit it. Leonard was downwind, and the smell and its associations made him feel sick. He went to the lavatory as a pretext for changing seats. When he came back he sat on the other side of the table, but now he was in the shade. He pulled his coat around him and sat on his hands. MacNamee passed the untouched beer across to him. There was condensation on the glass, through which two droplets of water were carving an erratically parallel path.
“Right then,” MacNamee said. “What about it?”
Leonard could feel his hands shaking under his buttocks. He said, “When I couldn’t get anything from the Americans, I began to have one or two ideas of my own. I started to build something in my spare time. I really thought I could see my way through to separating out the clear text echo from the encoded message. I worked at home for safety. But it didn’t come out right. The ideas turned out to be old hat anyway. I brought the stuff in, intending to dismantle it in my room, where I keep all the parts. I never imagined I’d be searched so thoroughly. But there were two new boys on the gate. It wouldn’t have mattered, but Glass was right there with me. I couldn’t afford to let him see the kind of thing I had. It’s hardly in my job description. I’m sorry if it got your hopes up.”
MacNamee tapped his stumpy brown teeth with the stem of his pipe. “I was rather excited for an hour or two. I thought you’d got your hands on a version of Nelson’s thing from somewhere. But not to worry—I think they’re almost there at Dollis Hill.”
Now that he had been believed, Leonard wanted to go. He had to get warm, and he had to look at the midday papers.
But MacNamee wanted to reflect. He had ordered another coffee and a sticky tart. “I like to think of the pluses. We knew it wouldn’t go on forever, and we had almost a year’s run at it. It will take London and Washington years to process everything they’ve got.”
Leonard took his hand out to reach for his beer, changed his mind and put it away.
“From the point of view of the special relationship and all that, the other good thing is that we’ve worked successfully with the Americans on a major project. They’ve been slow to trust us since
Burgess and Maclean. Now that’s all changed for the better.”
Eventually Leonard made an excuse and stood. MacNamee remained seated. He was refilling his pipe as he squinted up at Leonard, into the sun. “You look like you need a rest. I suppose you know you’re being recalled. The MTO will be in touch.”
They shook hands. Leonard disguised his palsy by being vigorous. MacNamee did not seem to notice. His last words to Leonard were “You’ve done well, despite everything. I’ve put in a good word for you at Dollis Hill.”
Leonard said, “Thank you, sir,” and hurried away up the Kurfürstendamm to buy the newspapers.
He scanned them in the U-Bahn to Kottbusser Tor. Two days later, and the East Berlin press was still saturated with the story. Both the Tagesspiegel and the Berliner Zeitung carried double-page spreads of photographs. One showed the amplifiers and the edge of the desk under which the cases stood. For some reason, the telephone in the tap chamber still worked. Reporters called into the receiver and got no reply. The lights and ventilation were still functioning, too. There were detailed accounts of what it was like to walk the tunnel from the Schönefelder Chaussee end to the sandbagged barrier marking the beginning of the American sector. Beyond the sandbags was “darkness broken only by the glow of two cigarettes. But the observers do not react to our call. Perhaps their consciences are too bad.” Elsewhere Leonard read that “the whole of Berlin is incensed by the wheeling and dealing of certain American officers. Berlin will only be at peace when these agents cease their provocations.” One headline said STRANGE DISTURBANCES ON THE LINE. The story underneath told how Soviet intelligence had became aware of noises interrupting regular cable traffic. The order was given to begin digging up certain stretches of the line. The article gave no reason why Schönefelder Chaussee was chosen. When soldiers broke into the tap chamber, “conditions were such as to indicate that the spies had left in great haste, abandoning their equipment.” The fluorescent light bulbs bore the name of Osram, England, “clearly an attempt to mislead. But screwdrivers and adjustable wrenches give the game away: all are marked ‘Made in USA.’” At the bottom of the page, in bold type: “A spokesman for the American forces in Berlin said in response to inquiries last night, ‘I don’t know anything about it!’”
He skimmed through all the stories. The delay in announcing the discovery of the cases was tiring him. Perhaps the idea was to isolate the story to give it all the more impact later. It could be that investigations were already under way. If it hadn’t been for his foolish remark to Glass, the Russian claim that they had found a dismembered body in two suitcases could be easily dismissed. If the East German authorities quietly handed the matter over to the West Berlin Kriminalpolizei, they had only to ask the Americans and the cases would be traced to Leonard.
Even if the Americans refused to cooperate, it would not take the police long to identify Otto. There was probably forensic evidence in every tissue of his body to indicate that he was a drunk. Soon it would be noted that he had failed to turn up at his lodgings, that he had not collected his Sozialhilfe, that he was no longer in place at his favorite Kneipe, where the off-duty police bought him drinks. Surely the first thing the police did when they found a body was to look at their missing-persons list. There were countless and intricate bureaucratic links between Otto and Maria and Leonard: the dissolved marriage, the housing claim, the official engagement. But surely that would also have been so if Leonard had managed to leave the cases at the Zoo station. What was it they were thinking of? It was a struggle to think it through. They would have been questioned, but their stories would have been consistent, the apartment would have been meticulously cleaned. There might have been suspicion, but there would have been no proof.
And what was the essence of his crime? To have killed Otto? But that was self-defense. Otto had broken into the bedroom, he had attacked. Not to have reported the death? But that was only sensible, given that no one would have believed them. To have cut up the body? But it was already dead then, so what difference could it make? To have concealed the body? A perfectly logical step. To have deceived Glass, the sentries, the duty officer and MacNamee? But only to protect them from unpleasant facts that did not concern them. To have betrayed the tunnel? A sad necessity, given everything else that had gone before. Besides, Glass, MacNamee and everyone else were saying that it had always been bound to happen. It could not have gone on forever. They had had almost a year’s run at it.
He was innocent, that he knew. Why then should his hands shake? Was it fear of being caught and punished? But he wanted them to come, and quickly. He wanted to stop thinking the same thoughts over, he wanted to speak to someone official and have his words written down, typed up for his signature. He wanted to set out the events, and make known to those whose job it was to have truths officially established how one thing had led to another, and how, despite appearances, he was no monster, he was not a deranged chopper-up of citizens, and that it was not insanity that had caused him to haul his victim around Berlin in two suitcases. Time and again he set out the facts for his imagined witnesses, his prosecutors. If they were men dedicated to the truth, they would come to see it his way, even if laws and conventions constrained them to punish him. He recounted his version, it was all he ever did. Every conscious minute he was explaining, refining, clarifying, barely aware that nothing was actually taking place, or that he had been through it all ten minutes before. Yes, gentlemen, I plead guilty to the charge as described, I killed, dismembered, lied and betrayed. But when you understand the real conditions, the circumstances that brought me to this, you will see that I am no different from you, that I am not evil, and that all along I acted only for what I took to be the best. By the hour the language of his defense was being heightened. Without thinking, he drew on the courtroom dramas of forgotten films. At times he spoke at length in a small bare room in a police station to a half-dozen reflective senior officers. At others he addressed, from the witness box, a hushed court.
Outside Kottbusser Tor station he stuffed the newspapers into a litter bin and headed down Adalbertstrasse. And what of Maria? She was part of his plea. He had brought into being a barrister, an authoritative presence, who would invoke the hopes and love of this young couple who had turned their backs on the violent pasts of their respective countries and were planning a life together. In whom lay our hopes of a future Europe free of strife. This was Glass speaking now. And now MacNamee was before the court to testify, as far as was compatible with security, to the important work Leonard had undertaken in the name of freedom, and how he had set out single-handedly and in his spare time to devise equipment that would further that aim.
Leonard walked faster. There were moments, minutes on end, of lucidity, when the repetitions and convolutions of his fantasies sickened him. There were no truths waiting to be discovered. There was only what could be imperfectly established by officials who had many other things to do and who would be only too pleased to be able to fit a crime to its perpetrator, process the matter and move on. Hardly had he set in train that thought, itself a repetition, than he was drawn to some fresh mitigating memory. For it was true, surely, that Otto had seized Maria by the windpipe. I had to fight him even though I hate violence. I knew he had to be stopped.
He was crossing the courtyard of No. 84. His first visit back. He started up the stairs. His hands were shaking badly again. It was difficult to hold on to the banister. On the fourth landing he stopped. The truth was that he still did not wish to see Maria. He did not know what to tell her. He could not pretend to her that the cases were safely out of the way. He could not tell where he had put them. That would mean telling her about the tunnel. But he had told the Russians, after all. He could tell anyone after that, surely. He thought what he had already thought: he was in no condition to make decisions; therefore he should keep silent. But he had to tell her something, and he would tell her that the cases were at the station. He tried gripping the banister tighter. But neither was he in a state to
pretend anything. He went on up.
He had his own key, but he knocked and waited. He could smell cigarettes inside. He was about to knock again when the door was opened by Glass, who stepped out onto the landing and steered Leonard by the elbow to the top of the stairs.
He murmured hurriedly, “Before you come in—we have to establish whether they found us by accident or whether we have a security breach on our hands. Among other things, we’re talking to all non-U.S. wives and girlfriends. Don’t take offense. It’s routine.”
They went in. Maria came toward Leonard and they kissed on the lips, dryly. His right knee was trembling, so he sat down in the nearest chair. At his elbow on the table was a full ashtray.
Glass said, “You looked tired, Leonard.”
He included them both in his answer. “I’ve been working round the clock.” And then to Glass alone, “Doing things for MacNamee.”
Glass took his jacket off the back of a chair and put it on.
Maria said, “I’ll see you to the door.”
Glass gave Leonard a solemn mock salute as he went. Leonard heard him talking to Maria at the front door.
When she came back she said, “Are you ill?”
He held his hands still in his lap. “I feel strange, don’t you?”
She nodded. There were shadows under her eyes, and her skin and hair had a greasy look. He was glad he did not feel attracted to her.
She said, “I think it’s going to be all right.”
This feminine certainty irritated him. “Oh yes,” he said. “The cases are in the lockers at the Bahnhof Zoo.”
She was looking at him closely, and he could not meet her stare. She started to speak and changed her mind.