'No,' said Frank, who preferred not to give the enemy the benefit of the doubt. 'We looked into it. A review board spent six weeks on it. There was no penetration of that network. The batteries fiasco wasn't a cause, but it should have been a warning to us at this end. It should have reminded us that ill-disciplined networks are vulnerable. It's always been that way. Look at France in nineteen forty-four.'

Keen to avoid Frank's account of what intricacies of ill-discipline afflicted the French networks in 1944, I said, 'Don't let's say six days; or specify any period of time, Frank. Let me keep my ear to the ground and report back to you.'

'I'm away for a few days in London,' said Frank. 'I'm catching the seven o'clock flight. Another of those Estimates Committees. I have to be there, or the others will gang up to persuade the old man to give Hong Kong, or some other godforsaken outpost, the money Berlin needs.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Do you want a record of this meeting?'

'We'd better have something on the file,' said Frank. 'Something that will make it clear that we earn our pay,' he added, in case his reference to the Estimates Committee hadn't alerted us to the fact that all our jobs were in constant jeopardy unless we not only did our work but recorded it in triplicate.

I stood up, but the kid remained sitting in his chair and flipping through thick files of paperwork he'd brought with him. It was not until Frank said 'Look at the time' to politely indicate that his presence was no longer required that he suddenly slammed his papers together and remembered unfinished work downstairs and departed.

'Robin is a good lad,' said Frank.

'Yes,' I said.

'You heard that Dicky Cruyer is giving a dinner at Claridge's? To celebrate the official commendation he got for the shooting . . . the severed hand and all that.' Frank looked at me quizzically. 'The old man is attending, so is Bret. I'm surprised that you're not going too, Bernard.'

'I thought it was better to get here and report to you,' I said. In fact, joining the fawning admirers at Dicky's celebration had not appealed to me greatly.

Perhaps Frank read my thoughts. 'Give Dicky credit for fast thinking, Bernard. He recognized the Stasi man, retrieved the severed hand and shot the fellow carrying it. Mind you, he admits to feeling nervous until he'd phoned Berne and confirmed his identification.'

'Dicky has always been very fast-thinking,' I said. 'I've never denied it.'

'A commendation will do wonders for Dicky,' said Frank. 'It will probably be enough to get him confirmed as Europe supremo. And the word is that this Stasi fellow Dicky shot is the sniper they used to kill that defector in the safe house.'

'That's the first I've heard of it,' I said.

'VERDI, the rufflan you and Werner Volkmann took to the Notting Hill safe house.'

'Who says so?'

'Special Branch appointed an investigation team for it. They're now saying it was the same man; but no solid evidence as yet. I can't think why you and Werner took that VERDI chap to Notting Hill. Isn't that safe house known to every Stasi and KGB man in Europe?'

'It is now,' I said.

'And the Fletcher House annex job was very nearly successful for them wasn't it? Nothing to suggest to you that that was a Stasi operation? You're the one who wrote the book.'

'They used a black getaway car,' I said blandly.

Frank laughed. 'They used a black car, did they?' There was a long-standing belief in the Berlin office that the hoodlums we faced would always choose a black car. The official cars used by the Eastern Bloc Party officials, the top cops and the security generals were invariably black. 'Me lesser lights — the heavies and the hit men — let loose in the West could seldom resist adopting this status symbol. 'And you are feeling well?' he asked.

'Do I look ill?'

'I would have thought you'd have been raring to go and sort out the DELIUS problem. In the old days you never passed up a chance to chase around over there.'

'I was younger then. And even more foolish.'

Frank looked at me and nodded. 'You'll be in charge here for the next few days, but I'm not far away. Don't do anything without we discuss it.'

'On the matter of the DELIUS net?'

'In the matter of anything.' He got to his feet and looked at his appointment book. The page was blank, as the pages of Frank's appointment book so often were.

'No, sure.'

He fixed me with his clear and piercing gray eyes and said, 'The last thing I need is a débâcle here now. I'm too old for it.' I knew what he meant. Berlin was to the Department what Las Vegas was to the glittering stars of showbiz: a perfect showcase for a brilliant youngster, but a burial ground for has-beens. But where did that leave me? I was too old to be a promising youngster but still too young to be a has-been. Too old to seek employment elsewhere, and that was the bitter truth of it. I could see that verdict in Frank's eyes too as he looked at me and added, 'But we both have to make the best of things, Bernard.'

'Yes, Frank.'

He took my arm: ' "T'is not hard, I think, for men so old as we to keep the peace." Romeo and Juliet, Act One, Scene Two. We did it at my prep school for half-term; I played the apothecary.'

'The apothecary,' I said. 'What perfect casting, Frank.'

*

As soon as Frank had departed for his plane, I exercised my newfound authority as Deputy Director of the Berlin Field Unit. I took a set of false identity papers from the safe and went across to the car pool and signed out a big BMW motorcycle. Once through the checkpoint — as a West German national — I left the motorcycle in the East, in a lock-up garage in Prenzlauerberg. From there I took instead a noisy little Trabant motorcar that was kept fueled and ready for such purposes. From a hiding place in the garage I picked up a suitcase containing a new lot of identity papers and I changed into a baggy suit of the cut that made citizens of the DDR instantly recognizable. Skirting the city I drove westwards, the Trabant's two-stroke engine running smoothly, as such engines did in the cold weather. There was very little traffic on the road. At one time the East German army and the Soviet garrison forces had always made their military redeployments after dark, but nowadays there were far fewer tactical military movements. Soviet troops, and East German units too, were being kept out of sight. There were few signs of individual soldiers either. Their pay constantly in arrears, they found it cheaper to get drunk in their camps and barracks. The only military vehicles I passed were three eight-wheel armored personnel carriers, their hatches closed down, and bearing the markings of some northern factory militia. They were rattling along at high speed, manned by workers ordered away from their benches for their regular two weeks of winter exercises.

The streets of Allenstein bei Magdeburg were dark and silent. I left the Trabbie out of sight in the alley behind the primary school rather than park it where it would be noticed by passersby. As I got out of the car I saw all round me a landscape etched with frost, and heard the crackle of ice under my feet. My nose and ears were stung painfully by the chilly wind that moaned through the overhead wires. Perhaps some member of the Forster family had heard the clatter of my Trabbie's two-stroke engine, for a woman came down and opened the main door of the apartment block before I rang the bell.

Once inside, the biting cold with its ever-present odor of brown coal was exchanged for warm stale air upon which rested the faint smells of recently cooked food. I took off my trilby hat and unbuttoned my coat. One of the few compensations of living in the DDR was having a warm home. It was a part of the tacit compact that the self-serving communist masters had struck with the inhabitants of this sad and deprived police state; warm rooms and crime-free streets were offered as compensation for everything inflicted upon them.