'You're a fund of information, Tante Lisl,' I said. I kept my voice level to show her that I was not convinced about Frank's double life, and would not be too concerned even if I was convinced.

'A man in his line of business should know better. A man with a mistress in an expensive little house in Liibars is a security risk.'

'I suppose so.'

I thought she was going to change the subject, but she couldn't resist adding, 'And Liibars is so near the Wall… You're damned near the Russkies right up there.'

'I know where Lübars is, Lisl,' I said grumpily.

'Happy birthday, darling,' she said as I reached the door.

'Thanks, Lisl,' I said. She never missed my birthday.

From the top of the brightly coloured apartment blocks of Märkisches Viertel, where sixty thousand West Berliners live in what the architects call 'a planned community' and its inhabitants call a 'concrete jungle', you can see across the nearby border, and well into the Eastern Sector.

'Some of them like it here,' said Axel Mauser. 'At least they say they do.' Axel had aged a lot over the last few years. He was three months younger than I was, but his pinched white face and large bald patch, and the way his years at desk and filing cabinet had bowed his head, made him look nearer to fifty than forty. 'They say they like having the shops and the church and the swimming pool and restaurants all built as part of the complex.'

I sipped a little beer and looked around the room. It was a barren place; no books, no pictures, no music, no carpet. Just a TV, a sofa, two armchairs and a coffee table with a vase of plastic flowers. In the corner, newspaper was laid out to protect the floor against oil. On it were the pieces of a dismantled racing bicycle that was being repaired to make a birthday present for his teenage son. 'But you don't?'

'Finish your beer and have another. No, I hate it. We've got twelve schools and fifteen kindergartens here in this complex. Twelve schools! It makes me feel like a damned termite. Some of these kids have never been downtown – they've never seen the Berlin we grew up in.'

'Maybe they are better off without it,' I said.

There was a snap and hiss as he opened a can of Export Pils. 'You're right, Bernd,' he said. 'What will kids find down there hi the middle of the city except crime and dope and misery?' He poured half the can for himself and the other half for me. Axel was like that; he was a sharer.

'Well, you've got a view to beat anything.'

'It's amazing how far you can see on a really clear day. But I'd happily trade the view to be back in that old slum my grandfather had. I keep hearing about the "German miracle", but I don't see any of it. My father gave me a new bicycle for my twelfth birthday. What can I afford to give my eldest son? That damned secondhand one.'

'Kids don't think like that, Axel,' I said. 'Even I can see it's a special racing model. He'll like it all the more because you've worked so hard to get it ready for him.'

Axel Mauser had been one of the brightest kids in the school: top of the class at chemistry and mathematics, and so keen at languages that he used to lend me his bicycle in exchange for English conversation practice. Now he was working in the Polizeipräsidium records office as a senior clerk, and living in this cramped apartment with three children and a wife, who – even on a Saturday – worked in the nearby AEG factory to keep their secondhand BMW running and give them their regular package holiday in Ibiza. 'But where can I afford to move to? Do you know what rents people are paying in Berlin nowadays?'

'Your dad went back to live in the East.'

Axel smiled grimly. 'All because of that bloody fool Binder – Max Binder, remember that Spieler?

Spieler: did he mean actor or gambler, I wondered. Max was a bit of both. 'I always liked Max,' I said.

Axel paused as if about to argue with me but then he went on: 'Max kept writing to Dad saying how much he was enjoying life over there. My dad believed it all. You know what Dad's like. He kept complaining about how it was over thirty years since he'd strolled down Unter den Linden. He'd wonder if he'd meet old friends on the Alexanderplatz – he was always on about that damned "Alex" – and he wanted to see the restoration job that's been done on the cathedral. And he'd get talking to Tante Lisl in that bar of hers when there were no customers in, and they'd be wallowing in nostalgia about seeing President Hindenburg in the Bristol and Lotte Lenya at the Wintergarten…'

'And talking to Joseph Goebbels at the bar of the Kaiserhof,' I said. 'Yes, I've heard all those stories. I couldn't get enough of your dad's yarns when I was young. I saw a lot of him in those days when he was behind the bar at List's.' From the next apartment there came the incessant sound of police sirens, shooting and the joyful shouts of children watching TV. Axel went across to the wall and thumped on it with the flat of his hand. This had no effect other than to make some of the plastic flowers quiver.

Axel shrugged at the continuing noise. 'And working for your dad too. Suppose they find out that he used to do those jobs for your dad? They'd throw him straight into prison.'

'Don't baby him, Axel. Rolfs a tough old bastard. He can look after himself.'

Axel nodded. 'So I said, "If you think you'll recapture your youth by going across the city, Dad, you go. And, take Tante Lisl with you… " When my mother was alive, she wouldn't listen to all those stories of his. She'd just tell him to shut up.'

'Well, he found a ready audience at that bar.'

'He was always complaining about working for Tante Lisl, wasn't he? But he loved standing behind the bar talking about "the real Berlin ", in the days when there was a respect for Christian values – eine christliche Weltanschauung. And after a few customers had bought him drinks, he'd be talking about the Kaiserzeit as if he'd been a general in the first war instead of an artillery captain in the second.' Axel drank some beer. There's no fool like an old fool,' he said with unexpected vehemence, and looked at his beer so that I could not see his eyes. 'I'd hate anything to happen to him, Bernd.'

'I know,' I said. 'But don't worry about him. He's over sixty-five, so he is permitted to visit the West.'

'He sees Werner sometimes.' He looked at me. 'They're in some kind of racket together.'

It was more a question than a statement. 'Are they?'

'Are you still with the Army intelligence people?'

I nodded. It was my cover story for Berliners such as Axel who remembered my father and had seen me coming and going, and had given me the use of their sofas and their motorcars from time to time. It was not the sort of cover story that earned respect from Germans. Germany is the only country in the world where a job in any sort of intelligence-gathering organization is considered little better than pimping. It is a product of the postwar years when informers were everywhere.

'You're not after Dad?'

'Stop worrying about him, Axel,' I said. 'Rolf came right through the war, and then survived through the years that followed the war. I'm sure he's doing fine. In fact, I might be able to look him up next time I go into the East Sector. I'll take him something, if you like.'

'So what's it all about, Bernd?' said Axel. He got up and went to the window, staring eastwards to where the spike of the East German TV tower rose out of the Alexanderplatz. Once it was the heart of the city, where pedestrians dodged bikes, bikes dodged cars, and cars dodged the trams that came through a five-way intersection at frightening speeds. Now the traffic had vanished and the 'Alex' was just an orderly concrete expanse, with red flags, flower boxes and slogans. 'You might as well come out with it,' said Axel, still staring out the window.