The Looking Glass War (26 page)

‘No gun?’

‘I think we can allow the knife. That could be a general-purpose thing; I mean if anything went wrong we could say it was general purpose.’

After lunch they made a tour of the border – Gorton had provided a car. Leclerc brought with him a handful of notes he had made from the Circus frontier report, and these he kept on his knee, together with a folded map.

The extreme northern part of the frontier which divides the two halves of Germany is largely a thing of depressing inconsequence. Those who look eagerly for dragon’s teeth and substantial fortifications will be disappointed. It crosses land of considerable variety; gullies and small hills overgrown with bracken and patches of untended forest. Often the Eastern defences are set so far behind the demarcation line as to be hidden from Western eyes – only a forward pillbox, crumbling roads, a vacated farmhouse or an occasional observation tower excite the imagination.

By way of emphasis the Western side is adorned with the grotesque statuary of political impotence: a plywood model of the Brandenburg Gate, the screws rusting in their sockets, rises absurdly from an untended field; notice boards, broken by wind and rain, display fifteen-year-old slogans across an empty valley. Only at night, when the beam of a searchlight springs from the darkness and draws its wavering finger across the cold earth, does the heart chill for the captive crouching like a hare in the plough, waiting to break cover and run in terror till he fall.

They followed an unmade road along the top of a hill, and wherever it ran close to the frontier they stopped the car and got out. Leiser was shrouded in a mackintosh and hat. The day was very cold. Leclerc wore his duffel coat and carried a shooting stick – Heaven knows where he had found it. The first time they stopped, and the second, and again at the next, Leclerc said quietly, ‘Not this one.’ As they got into the car for the fourth time he declared, ‘The next stop is ours.’ It was the kind of brave joke favoured in battle.

Avery would not have recognised the place from Leclerc’s sketch map. The hill was there, certainly, turning inwards towards the frontier, then descending sharply to the plain below. But the land beyond it was hilly and partly wooded, its horizon fringed with trees against which, with the aid of glasses, they could discern the brown shape of a wooden tower. ‘It’s the three staves to the left,’ Leclerc said. As they scanned the ground, Avery could make out here and there the worn mark of the old path.

‘It’s mined. The path is mined the whole way. Their territory begins at the foot of the hill.’ Leclerc turned to Leiser. ‘You start from here.’ He pointed with his shooting stick. ‘You proceed to the brow of the hill and lie up till take-off time. We’ll have you here early so that your eyes grow used to the light. I think we should go now. We mustn’t attract attention, you know.’

As they drove back to the farmhouse the rain came bursting against the windscreen, thundering on the roof of the car. Avery, sitting next to Leiser, was sunk in his own thoughts. He realized with what he took to be utter detachment that, whilst his own mission had unfolded as comedy, Leiser was to play the same part as tragedy; that he was witnessing an insane relay race in which each contestant ran faster and longer than the last, arriving nowhere but at his own destruction.

‘Incidentally,’ he said suddenly, addressing himself to Leiser, ‘hadn’t you better do something about your hair? I don’t imagine they have much in the way of lotions over there. A thing like that could be insecure.’

‘He needn’t cut it,’ Haldane observed. ‘The Germans go in for long hair. Just wash it, that’s all that’s needed. Get the oil out. A nice point, John, I congratulate you.’

The rain had stopped. The night came slowly, struggling with the wind. They sat at the table in the farmhouse, waiting; Leiser was in his bedroom. Johnson made tea and attended to his equipment. No one talked. The pretending was over. Not even Leclerc, master of the public-school catchword, bothered any more. He seemed to resent being made to wait, that was all, at the tardy wedding of an unloved friend. They had relapsed into a state of somnolent fear, like men in a submarine, while the lamp over their heads rocked gently. Now and then Johnson would be sent to the door to look for the moon, and each time he announced that there was none.

‘The met reports were pretty good,’ Leclerc observed, and drifted away to the attic to watch Johnson check his equipment.

Avery, alone with Haldane, said quickly, ‘He says the Ministry’s ruled against the gun. He’s not to take it.’

‘And what bloody fool told him to consult the Ministry in the first place?’ Haldane demanded, beside himself with anger. Then: ‘You’ll have to tell him. It depends on you.’

‘Tell Leclerc?’

‘No, you idiot; Leiser.’

They had some food and afterwards Avery and Haldane took Leiser to his bedroom.

‘We must dress you up,’ they said.

They made him strip, taking from him piece by piece his warm, expensive clothes: jacket and trousers of matching grey, cream silk shirt, black shoes without toecaps, socks of dark blue nylon. As he loosened the knot of his tartan tie his fingers discovered the gold pin with the horse’s head. He unclipped it carefully and held it out to Haldane.

‘What about this?’

Haldane had provided envelopes for valuables. Into one of these he slipped the tie-pin, sealed it, wrote on the back, tossed it on the bed.

‘You washed your hair?’

‘Yes.’

‘We had difficulty in obtaining East German soap. I’m afraid you’ll have to try and get some when you’re over there. I understand it’s in short supply.’

‘All right.’

He sat on the bed naked except for his watch, crouched forward, his broad arms folded across his hairless thighs, his white skin mottled from the cold. Haldane opened a trunk and extracted a bundle of clothes and half a dozen pairs of shoes.

As Leiser put on each unfamiliar thing, the cheap, baggy trousers of coarse serge, broad at the foot and gathered at the waist, the grey, threadbare jacket with arched pleats, the shoes, brown with a bright unhealthy finish, he seemed to shrink before their eyes, returning to some former estate which they had only guessed at. His brown hair, free from oil, was streaked with grey and fell undisciplined upon his head. He glanced shyly at them, as if he had revealed a secret; a peasant in the company of his masters.

‘How do I look?’

‘Fine,’ Avery said. ‘You look marvellous, Fred.’

‘What about a tie?’

‘A tie would spoil it.’

He tried the shoes one after another, pulling them with difficulty over the coarse woollen socks.

‘They’re Polish,’ Haldane said, giving him a second pair. ‘The Poles export them to East Germany. You’d better take these as well – you don’t know how much walking you’ll have to do.’

Haldane fetched from his own bedroom a heavy cashbox and unlocked it.

First he took a wallet, a shabby brown one with a centre compartment of Cellophane which held Leiser’s identity card, fingered and stamped it; it lay open behind its flat frame, so that the photograph of Leiser looked outwards, a little prison picture. Beside it was an authority to travel and a written offer of employment from the State Co-operative for ship-building in Rostock. Haldane emptied one pocket of the wallet and then replaced the contents paper for paper, describing each in turn.

‘Food registration card – driving licence … Party card. How long have you been a Party member?’

‘Since ’forty-nine.’

He put in a photograph of a woman and three or four grimy letters, some still in their envelopes.

‘Love letters,’ he explained shortly.

Next came a Union card and a cutting from a Magdeburg newspaper about production figures at a local engineering works; a photograph of the Brandenburg Gate before the war, a tattered testimonial from a former employer.

‘That’s the wallet, then,’ Haldane said. ‘Except for the money. The rest of your equipment is in the rucksack. Provisions and that kind of thing.’

He handed Leiser a bundle of banknotes from the box. Leiser stood in the compliant attitude of a man being searched, his arms raised a little from his sides and his feet slightly apart. He would accept whatever Haldane gave him, put it carefully away, then resume the same position. He signed a receipt for the money. Haldane glanced at the signature and put the paper in a black briefcase which he had put separately on a side table.

Next came the odds and ends which Hartbeck would plausibly have about him: a bunch of keys on a chain – the key to the suitcase was among them – a comb, a khaki handkerchief stained with oil and a couple of ounces of substitute coffee in a twist of newspaper; a screwdriver, a length of fine wire and fragments of metal ends newly turned – the meaningless rubble of a working man’s pockets.

‘I’m afraid you can’t take that watch,’ Haldane said.

Leiser unbuckled the gold armband and dropped the watch into Haldane’s open palm. They gave him a steel one of Eastern manufacture and set it with great precision by Avery’s bedside clock.

Haldane stood back. ‘That will do. Now remain there and go through your pockets. Make sure things are where you would naturally keep them. Don’t touch anything else in the room, do you understand?’

‘I know the form,’ said Leiser, glancing at his gold watch on the table. He accepted the knife and hooked the black scabbard into the waistband of his trousers.

‘What about my gun?’

Haldane guided the steel clip of the briefcase into its housing and it snapped like the latch of a door.

‘You don’t take one,’ Avery said.

‘No gun?’

‘It’s not on, Fred. They reckon it’s too dangerous.’

‘Who for?’

‘It could lead to a dangerous situation. Politically, I mean. Sending an armed man into East Germany. They’re afraid of an incident.’

‘Afraid.’

For a long time he stared at Avery, his eyes searching the young, unfurrowed face for something that was not there. He turned to Haldane.

‘Is that true?’

Haldane nodded.

Suddenly he thrust out his empty hands in front of him, cupped in a terrible gesture of poverty, the fingers crooked and pressed together as if to catch the last water, his shoulders trembling in the cheap jacket, his face drawn, half in supplication, half in panic.

‘The gun, John! You can’t send a man without a gun! For mercy’s sake, let me have the gun!’

‘Sorry, Fred.’

His hands still extended, he swung round to Haldane. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing!’

Leclerc had heard the noise and came to the doorway. Haldane’s face was arid as rock; Leiser could have beaten his empty fists upon it for all the charity it held. His voice fell to a whisper. ‘What are you doing? God Christ, what are you trying to do?’ To both of them he cried in revelation, ‘You hate me, don’t you! What have I done to you? John, what have I done? We were pals, weren’t we?’

Leclerc’s voice, when at last he spoke, sounded very pure, as if he were deliberately emphasising the gulf between them.

‘What’s the trouble?’

‘He’s worried about the gun,’ Haldane explained.

‘I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do. It’s out of our hands. You know how we feel about it, Fred. Surely you know that. It’s an order, that’s all. Have you forgotten how it used to be?’ He added stiffly, a man of duty and decision, ‘I can’t question my orders: what do you want me to say?’

Leiser shook his head. His hands fell to his sides. The discipline had gone out of his body.

‘Never mind.’ He was looking at Avery.

‘A knife’s better in some ways, Fred,’ Leclerc added consolingly, ‘quieter.’

‘Yes.’

Haldane picked up Leiser’s spare clothes. ‘I must put these into the rucksack,’ he said, and with a sideways glance at Avery, walked quickly from the room, taking Leclerc with him. Leiser and Avery looked at one another in silence. Avery was embarrassed to see him so ugly. At last Leiser spoke.

‘It was us three. The Captain, you and me. It was all right, then. Don’t worry about the others, John. They don’t matter.’

‘That’s right, Fred.’

Leiser smiled. ‘It was the best ever, that week, John. It’s funny, isn’t it: we spend all our time chasing girls, and it’s the men that matter; just the men.’

‘You’re one of us, Fred. You always were; all the time your card was there, you were one of us. We don’t forget.’

‘What does it look like?’

‘It’s two pinned together. One for then, one for now. It’s in the index … live agents, we call it. Yours is the first name. You’re the best man we’ve got.’ He could imagine it now; the index was something they had built together. He could believe in it, like love.

‘You said it was alphabetical order,’ Leiser said sharply. ‘You said it was a special index for the best.’

‘Big cases go to the front.’

‘And men all over the world?’

‘Everywhere.’

Leiser frowned as if it were a private matter, a decision to be privately taken. He stared slowly round the bare room, then at the cuffs on his coarse jacket, then at Avery, interminably at Avery, until, taking him by the wrist, but lightly, more to touch than to lead, he said under his breath, ‘Give us something. Give me something to take. From you. Anything.’

Avery felt in his pockets, pulling out a handkerchief, some loose change and a twist of thin cardboard, which he opened. It was the photograph of Taylor’s little girl.

‘Is that your kid?’ Leiser looked over the other’s shoulder at the small, bespectacled face; his hand closed on Avery’s. ‘I’d like that.’ Avery nodded. Leiser put it in his wallet, then picked up his watch from the bed. It was gold with a black dial for the phases of the moon. ‘You have it,’ he said. ‘Keep it. I’ve been trying to remember,’ he continued, ‘at home. There was this school. A big courtyard like a barracks with nothing but windows and drainpipes. We used to bang a ball round after lunch. Then a gate, and a path to the church, and the river on the other side …’ He was laying out the town with his hands, placing bricks. ‘We went on Sunday, through the side door, the kids last, see?’ A smile of success. ‘That church was facing north,’ he declared, ‘not east at all.’ Suddenly he asked: ‘How long; how long have you been in, John?’