'Nothing changes! Everything changes, you mean. Look at me. Look at my ugly face and this infirm body. Life is cruel, Bernd, my sweetheart,' she said, using the name I'd been known by as a boy. 'You will discover it too: life is cruel.' Only Berliners can mock their own self-pity to produce a laugh. Lisl was one of life's most successful survivors and we both knew it. She roared with laughter and I had to laugh too.

She let her Stuttgarter Zeitung slide onto the carpet. She spent her life reading newspapers and talking about what she discovered in them. 'What has brought you to our wonderful city?' she asked. She rubbed her knee and sighed. Now that arthritis had affected her legs, she seldom went out except to the bank.

'Still selling tablets?' she asked. I'd always said that I worked for a pharmaceutical manufacturer that exported medicines to East and West. She didn't wait for a reply; in any case she'd never believed my story. 'And did you bring photos of your lovely wife and those beautiful children? Is everything all right at home?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Is the top room empty?'

'Of course it is,' she said. 'Who else but you would want to sleep there when I have rooms with balcony and bathroom en suite?'

'I'll go up and have a wash,' I said. The attic room had been my room when my father, a Major in the Intelligence Corps, was billeted here. The place was full of memories.

'I hope you're not going over the other side,' Lisl said. They have all the medicine they need over there in the East. They are getting very rough with medicine sellers.'

I smiled dutifully at her little joke. 'I'm not going anywhere, Lisl,' I said. This is just a holiday.'

'Is everything all right at home, darling? It's not that sort of holiday, is it?'

Frank Harrington, head of Berlin Station, arrived at Lisl's exactly on the dot of four. 'You got fed up with sleeping on that sofa at Werner's place, did you?'

I looked at him without replying.

'We are slow,' said Frank, 'but eventually we hear all the news.'

'You brought it?'

'I brought everything.' He put an expensive-looking black leather document case on the table and opened it. 'I even brought that A to Z street guide I borrowed from you in London. Sorry to have had it so long.'

'That's okay, Frank,' I said, throwing the London street guide into my open suitcase so that I wouldn't forget it. 'And where is the man who delivered this stuff?'

'He went back.'

'I thought he was staying so I could debrief him. That's what London wanted.'

Harrington sighed. 'He's gone back,' he said. 'You know how people are in situations like this. He got nervous yesterday and finally slipped off back over there.'

That's a pity,' I said.

'I saw a lovely-looking girl downstairs talking to Lisl. Blonde. Couldn't have been more than about eighteen. Is she staying here?'

Frank Harrington was a thin sixty-year-old. His face was pale, with grey eyes and a bony nose and the sort of black blunt-ended stubble moustache that soldiers affect. His question was an attempt to change the subject, but Frank had always had an eye for the ladies.

'I couldn't tell you, Frank,' I said.

I began to sort through the papers he'd brought. Some of them were verbatim accounts of meetings that had taken place at the Foreign Office when our Secret Intelligence Service people went over there for special briefings. None of the material was of vital importance, but that it had got back to East German intelligence was worrying. Very worrying.

Frank Harrington sat by the tiny garret window from which I used to launch my paper aeroplanes, and smoked his foul-smelling pipe. 'You don't remember the time your father organized a birthday party for Frau Hennig?' Frank Harrington was the only person I knew who called Lisl Frau Hennig. 'He had a six-piece dance band downstairs in the salon and every black marketeer in Potsdamerplatz contributed food. I've never seen such a spread.'

I looked up from the papers.

He waved his pipe at me in a gesture of placation. 'Don't misunderstand me, Bernard. Your father had no dealings with the black market. The contributors were all Frau Hennig's friends.' He laughed at some thought passing through his mind. 'Your father was the last man to have dealings with the black market. Your father was a prude, so prim and proper that he made lesser mortals, like me, sometimes feel inadequate. He was a self-made man, your father. They are all like that – a bit unforgiving, unyielding and inclined to go by the book.' He waved his pipe again. 'Don't take offence, Bernard. Your dad and I were very close. You know that.'

'Yes, I know, Frank.'

'No proper education, your father. Left school when he was fourteen. Spent his evenings in the public library. Retired a Colonel, and ended up running the Berlin office, didn't he? Damned good going for a self-educated man.'

I turned over the next lot of papers to get to the memo on cipher machines. 'Is that what I'm like?' I asked him. 'Unforgiving, unyielding and inclined to go by the book?'

'Oh, come along, Bernard. You're not going to tell me you wish you'd been to university. You're berlinerisch, Bernard. You grew up in this funny old town. You were cycling through the streets and alleys before they built the Wall. You speak Berlin German as well as anyone I've ever met here. You go to ground like a native. That's why we can't bloody well find you when you decide you can't be bothered with us.'

'Ich bin ein Berliner.' I said. It was a joke. A Berliner is a doughnut. The day after President Kennedy made his famous proclamation, Berlin cartoonists had a field day with talking doughnuts.

'You think your father should have sent you back to England so that you could read politics and modern languages? You think it would have been better to have listened to Oxford academics telling you where Bismarck went wrong, and some young tutor explaining which prepositions govern the dative case?'

I said nothing. The truth was I didn't know the answer.

'Bloody hell, laddie, you know more about this part of the world than any Oxbridge graduate can learn in a lifetime.'

'Would you put that in writing, Frank?'

'You're still annoyed about young Dicky Cruyer getting the desk? Well, why wouldn't you be angry? I made my position clear from this end. That you can be sure of.'

'I know you did, Frank,' I said as I tapped the papers together to make them fit back into the brown paper envelope. 'But the fact is that you don't just learn about history and grammar at Oxford and Cambridge, you learn about the people you meet there. And in later life you depend upon those judgments. Knowing the streets and alleys of this dirty old town doesn't count for much when there is a desk falling vacant.'

Frank Harrington puffed at his pipe. 'And Cruyer was junior to you in service as well as younger.'

'Don't rub it in, Frank,' I said.

He laughed. I felt guilty about describing him as an old woman, but it would make no difference to his career whatever I said about him, because Frank was due to retire any time, and being pulled out of Berlin would be no hardship for him. He hated Berlin and made no secret of it. 'Let me write to the D-G,' said Frank as if suddenly inspired with a brilliant idea. 'The old man was a trainee with me back in the war.'

'For God's sake, no!' That was the trouble with Frank; just like Lisl, he always wanted to treat me as if I were a nineteen-year-old going after his first job. He wasn't so much an old woman as a well-meaning old auntie.

'So what do you make of all that wastepaper?' he said, poking a match into the bowl of his pipe as if searching for something.

'Garbage,' I said. 'It's just a lot of guesswork someone in Moscow has dreamed up to get us worried.'