The Girl in Berlin (6 page)

McGovern returned to his office with the file and handed it to Jarrell. ‘We’re to investigate this character. He’s in London just now.’

Jarrell read with amazing rapidity. ‘A practising
homosexual
. That makes it sound like a religion, don’t you think, sir? Practising – like practising Christian. And a Red as well. I shouldn’t have thought the two would go together.’

‘You’d be surprised, Jarrell. And the right wingers think all the Reds are perverts and the communists think the same about the fascists.’

Unlike Alan Wentworth, McGovern wasn’t repelled by deviant sex, it seemed merely puzzling. His colleagues in the Vice Squad, cheered on by the Director of Public Prosecutions, had embarked on a crusade against queers, hunting them down in urinals and posing as perverts themselves. He found that pointless and stupid, a distraction from the efforts of law enforcers who were struggling to contain the Messinas, the
gangs, or the real perverts like Neville Heath, who’d raped and murdered a girl while posing as a war hero, or George Haigh, the acid bath killer.

‘It says nothing here, sir, about any kind of contact with the Soviets.’

‘East Germany’s more or less the same thing. It’s a puppet regime. They
are
the Soviets.’

‘Some people think communism is a virus, a disease, spreading everywhere. But if it’s a mental illness, can you catch it, sir? Senator McCarthy thinks so. It’s what he said at the House Un-American Activities Committee in America.’

So Jarrell had been doing his homework and now wanted to show off about it.

‘But the
Daily Worker
describes what McCarthy’s doing as a witch hunt,’ continued Jarrell. ‘D’you think that’s fair? Is communism really a kind of epidemic?’

‘You’re a wee swot, aren’t you, Jarrell, a troglodyte.’ Troglodyte was one of Kingdom’s words.

‘I’m interested, that’s all.’

‘Good lad. I was only joking. But you can answer the question yourself.’

‘I want to know what you think, sir.’

‘I don’t. Our job is simply to crush subversion. The cause is immaterial.’

‘That’s Gorch’s line. But you don’t believe that, do you.’

‘No.’

Gorch, like most of McGovern’s fellow policemen, was anti-intellectual. Deeds, not thoughts, were what mattered. A villain could believe anything he bloody well wanted to, so long as it remained inside his head. That was all very well, but the seasoned policeman, for all his common sense and practical wisdom, seemed not to understand that ideas were the motor for action. That was another of Kingdom’s attractions. He did understand.

‘I think communism is more like an obsession than measles,’ said Jarrell. ‘Or I suppose it could be rather like a hobby. Only not quite the same.’

McGovern thought of his father. ‘For many ordinary communists it’s just a sense that life is unfair. They want an equal chance. And why not.’

Yet he himself had rejected the faith in equality. He wanted to get ahead.

‘D’you think this Harris is a spy, sir?’

‘Do you?’

Jarrell shook his head. ‘Someone working for the Soviets wouldn’t be openly a Communist Party member, would he? The opposite, if anything.’

‘On the other hand, he’s in Berlin. And Berlin’s the front line of the Cold War, and the world capital of spies, and it’s also where the Third World War is going to start. But now he’s here. So today we’re to follow him around London and see if that throws up anything interesting. If it doesn’t, we might try something else. We’d best look sharpish, if we get down there right away we should catch him before he goes out.’

That was the point of the early start. Of course, you never could tell. A suspect might stay in his bolt hole all day long and never venture out at all. Unlikely in this case; the man must have business of some kind in the capital, otherwise he wouldn’t be here.

Outside in Whitehall, McGovern considered Jarrell’s appearance. ‘You need a hat. Your hair is a wee bit conspicuous.’

Sussex Gardens was a seedy avenue running parallel with Praed Street, adjacent to Paddington Station. The whole area was pocked with cheap eateries and tearooms where sad transients stared into nothingness. There were newsagents, and barbers’ shops where you could buy rubbers. One side of Sussex Gardens itself was lined with dingy mansions. Most of the houses on the opposite side had gone, leaving an overgrown bomb site.

The hotel where Harris was staying was simply two of the tall houses knocked into one. The peeling stucco was grey with dirt. The columned portico – its pretentions so at odds with the squalid façade – was chipped and three steps led up to a door from which the paint had worn away. Grimy net curtains veiled the windows. It was only a few rungs up from a dosshouse or the sort of place where you could hire a room for an hour.

The two policemen stood on the opposite side of the road, although there was little cover. McGovern lit a cigarette. Jarrell didn’t smoke.

For half an hour they waited in vain for anyone to emerge. It seemed much longer and every time McGovern looked at his watch he was dismayed to find that only two or three minutes had passed. But at last the hotel door opened. They knew at once the man standing on the steps was Harris. He carried his height well and walked like a soldier. He certainly didn’t fit McGovern’s vague idea of a homosexual as a womanish fop.

Their quarry strode away in the direction of the Edgware Road and entered the underground station. They kept him in sight through the rush-hour crowd, down the stairs and onto the thronged platform. When the train arrived, they entered by separate doors, so that Harris was between them, halfway along the gangway.

By the time they followed him out into Charing Cross Station, McGovern was feeling the familiar tension that this sort of work involved. You had to be so careful and so quick. The concourse was crowded with commuters heading in from the suburbs, but they kept Harris in sight as he bought a ticket and stood looking up at the indicator board.

At the ticket office McGovern flashed his identity card at the man behind the grille. ‘Your last customer – where was he going?’

The clerk stared in surprise, but answered meekly. ‘Deal, sir.’

That was that then. Shortage of resources meant they were strictly forbidden to stray beyond the capital. In any case, it was usually suicidal to follow a target out into the countryside. The train leaving for Deal against the rush hour would be carrying few passengers. Harris would almost certainly realise he was being followed.

‘No use, Jarrell. He’s going to the Kent coast. We can’t follow him out of London. Stay here a minute.’ And Jake left his companion looking crestfallen while he made for a telephone kiosk – there was a line of them along one wall of the ticket hall – to ring Kingdom.

Kingdom took the news quite casually, but McGovern had the feeling he wasn’t pleased.

six

H
E WOKE SUDDENLY
. Bewildered. A gap in the curtains let in a shaft of dim light from the street, saving the room from total darkness. Then he remembered. It was the first time they’d been away together. The only sound, apart from Edith’s breathing, was the sigh of waves against the shingle beyond the front, as if the sea were sleeping too.

He couldn’t see his watch, but somehow knew it was the dead pit of 2 a.m. He buried his face in the pillow, seized with the insomniac’s terror of unending hours of wakefulness. He turned over, but he was too hot. He turned over again, but found no comfortable position. He lay on his back for a while, rigid as a crusader on a tomb, but his mind had wound itself up and the interview was ticking away remorselessly in his head.

Konrad Eberhardt had turned out not to be the lofty, serious European scientist and intellectual Alan had expected. The old man had been rude, for a start. He’d agreed to the interview over the telephone, but when Alan arrived on the doorstep the unkempt, grizzly old bear of a man had claimed to remember nothing about the appointment.

‘I’ve come to interview you about your work. You were going to talk to us about it.’

‘What is that you say? You’re interrupting my work.’

‘The BBC, sir. You agreed to talk to us—’

‘Agreed to talk to you? Did I? I don’t remember this, I don’t know who you are—’

Eventually, however, Eberhardt had grudgingly allowed Alan across the threshold and led the way into a cluttered front room, furnished with items that had been modern in the thirties. Alan followed, aware of the old man’s smell, the odour of neglect, a mixture of tobacco, ear wax and even, faintly, urine.

While Alan had fiddled with his hefty recording machine Eberhardt had watched him. ‘Visitors! I don’t need visitors. I had a visitor … you’ve been to see me already, haven’t you? Didn’t you come here yesterday?’ He peered at Alan, surly and suspicious. ‘Or was it the day before?’

Alan plugged his machine into a dangerous-looking power point that hung off the wainscot. ‘May I sit down, sir?’

Eberhardt gestured vaguely at a heavy cubic armchair. He stared bleakly at Alan and then abruptly sat down himself.

‘In the current political climate there is a great deal of interest in your scientific work,’ began Alan. ‘And on your philosophical reflections on that work.’

The old man continued to peer at him suspiciously.

As the intellectual permafrost of the Cold War settled over public discourse, Eberhardt the physicist had become an obscure, half-forgotten figure in postwar Britain, a semi-recluse since the death of his wife. He was still tenuously attached to a Cambridge laboratory, but was not thought to be doing new scientific work. Then, when his friendship with Klaus Fuchs, the convicted atomic secrets spy, became known, an aura of the vaguely sinister had got attached to him, although he had nothing to do with atomic research. Journalists had tried to interview him about Fuchs and hadn’t been satisfied by Eberhardt’s response. He was tainted by association.

Eberhardt’s past in Germany was also mysterious. He’d had a reputation as a Marxist, but one too lofty ever actually to have joined the German Communist Party, the KPD. Yet he hadn’t
left Germany until 1938 and hadn’t spoken out against the Nazis, who in turn left him alone, at least to begin with. This was surprising because Alan had discovered that the old man
had
been a KPD member, but he always denied it and since the war he’d tacked sharply to the right of the political spectrum, swimming bravely, like many others, with the tide.

Then unexpectedly he’d written a book of essays, part science, part philosophy, in which he’d set out some unusual and controversial – even contradictory – ideas.

‘Your recent book of essays aroused a lot of interest.’

‘Essays?’ The old man’s eyes seemed to cloud over behind the thick spectacles and he gazed blankly at Alan.

‘
The Role of the Scientist: Secrets, Lies and Truth
.’ Alan repeated the book’s title gently, but with sinking heart. He hadn’t expected it to be this difficult.

Yet his mention of the title unlocked something in Eberhardt’s brain and in a moment he was in full flow, brushing aside Alan’s attempts to cut in with a question, as Alan tried desperately to stem this pouring out of words. At one point Eberhardt talked of a united, neutral Germany, at another of air strikes launched against the Soviet Union. Now he was talking about Germany and being a German, now he had strayed into garbled maunderings about Marxism-Leninism, then moved on to the role of the scientist and finally even entered dangerous territory in denouncing McCarthy as well as Stalin.

After enduring this for some time, accompanied as it was by clouds of smoke from Eberhardt’s pipe, Alan managed to drag the interview – not that it could be dignified by such a name – towards safer ground, to Eberhardt’s earlier life, his exile in Britain, his family. But just as Alan felt things were going better Eberhardt stood up. ‘This is enough,’ he said. ‘I have no more time. Already I had one visitor. Why do these people want to interfere with my life? He also said he was a journalist. They want me to return to Germany, you know.’

‘Return to Germany? Are you considering that?’

‘That cynic Brecht went back East. They wouldn’t have him in West Germany.’ For the first time Eberhardt laughed, a laugh that turned into a rude noise as he blew a mock fart. ‘East, West, home is best.’ He stood up, was moving around as if looking for something. Then suddenly he turned round and made an abrupt, almost threatening gesture, leaning forwards towards Alan and saying, too loudly, ‘You’ve been here long enough. I’ve got to make up my mind. Too many interruptions. I don’t need visitors. I don’t want any more visitors. You’ll have to wait for my autobiography. I’ve written my autobiography, you know. I think that’s what could be called in English “spilling the beans”.’

Alan moved against Edith’s flank and began to be aroused. Only sex would enable him to sleep again. He stroked her buttock and, as she stirred, entered her from behind. The bed creaked, but that was exciting too. By now he knew how to elicit the harsh, urgent gasps she made as she came. They never failed to excite and soon he was groaning too, sounds that faded to a dying whisper along the empty corridors.

But he still couldn’t sleep. The Eberhardt interview had been a disaster. Editing would be a nightmare. And it had unsettled him. The incoherence, the anger, the repetitions, the conflicting ideas – this was not the magisterial intellectual émigré he’d expected. His frustration made him more restless than ever. When eventually he dropped off, as dawn whitened the gap between the curtains, his dreams were confused and sinister.

Breakfast, surrounded by the shabby remnants of grandeur in what was reputed to be the town’s best hotel, was a dispiriting experience. The windows were shrouded in sallow net curtains, the florid carpet was threadbare. The coffee was awful,
the toast leathery. Edith, however, went at the bacon and eggs with a will. Their affair had hitherto included few shared meals and this was the first time Alan, slightly taken aback by it, had noticed how greedy she was. Then he reflected that he shouldn’t have been surprised, for he already knew all about her greed for sex, for attention and, above all, for fame.