Also by Henry Porter
Remembrance Day
A Spy’s Life
Empire State
Brandenburg
The Dying Light
Firefly
White Hot Silence
This ebook published in 2021 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © 2021 Henry Porter
The moral right of Henry Porter to be
identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
EBOOK ISBN 978 1 52940 332 9
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, organizations, places and events are
either the product of the author’s imagination
or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or
locales is entirely coincidental.
Ebook by CC Book Production
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
For Charlie P. and Charlie K.
Contents
The Old Enemy
Also By
Title
Copyright
Dedication
PART ONE
Berlin Blue
GreenState
Survivors of the Bridge
Room 2172
Bulletin
The Balsam Tree
Cock and Bull
Anastasia
Düppel
The Pit
Strains of Illyria
The Gravel Washer
The Tulip Guy
Sex, Venice and a Bullet
Live Frog
Bubble Wrap
The Bird
PART TWO
Leverkusen-Opladen Intersection
Firefly
The Peacock
KaPo
Ulrike’s Story
The Sargasso Sea
Wet Grass
Zoe
Funeral in Tallinn
Confession
Open Toombs
Raw Data
In pectore
PART THREE
Locked in
Seneca Ridge
Angel
Blink
Sunset on Potomac
2172 Revisited
Old Friends
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Berlin Blue
He had made it into the spring – three months longer than they gave him. And here he was, out on the peninsula in the early-morning light, feeling okay and in some ways happier than he’d ever been, though, of course, it was not Robert Harland’s custom to examine his state of mind too closely. He was alive and painting – that was enough. And a kilometre away, on this crooked finger of land that pointed north into the Baltic, his wife, Ulrike, was at their cabin, by now tucked into her spot between the porch and timbered wall, sheltered from the wind. She’d have a book in her hands and a shawl around her and she’d be looking out to sea, sometimes peering at the insects that were blown round the porch and came to rest beside her on the bench.
In a moment he’d sit in the camp chair and maybe smoke one of the three cigarettes in the breast pocket of the old field-coat he wore, ignoring her strictures without much thought. For there was work to be done to the small oil sketch in front of him, which, like the others in the series, had been executed rapidly with some of the basic colours of the seascape mixed the night before. He looked up. The continent of cloud suspended over the ocean was about to deliver shafts of light that would reflect from the sea and spread through the spray-mist above the waves. With a brush clamped between his teeth and more brushes and a palette in his hands, the old spy waited, looking and looking, hardly breathing.
Ulrike would never know what made her open her eyes at that moment. She was plunged in the terrible finality of their time together, these days of being alone when, if Bobby was feeling strong, he would go out early with his paraphernalia loaded on to the light handcart that he was so pleased with, returning only when he was too tired to carry on, or he’d finished the painting. In the evenings, they were together. She’d cook – not much, because his appetite had gone – and he’d sit with a whisky looking at the day’s painting and peering intently across the scrub to the sea. Later, they’d lie in bed, mesmerised by the dancing shadows thrown by an oil lamp, the smell of which filled the cabin. Sometimes they’d go back to events three decades before in Leipzig and Berlin and, later, in Tallinn – the cities that marked chapters in their lives – and to the people they’d known and lost, and occasionally murmuring their love for each other. When he slept, she kept watch, wondering what she’d do when he was gone; what it would it be like without him beside her. Before dropping off the night before, he’d muttered, almost angrily, ‘I’m sorry, I had no idea this would be so ghastly for you!’ And, grazing her forehead with his lips, ‘You know that no one is more loved than you? You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said eventually, and, using the German for her usual reply, ‘Ja, und ich liebe dich auch,’ – and I love you, too – then she asked, ‘Are you happy out here? You don’t want to be doing anything else? Go home?’ She worried he was pressuring himself, because he was so short-tempered in the mornings.
‘The work’s got to be done.’ He’d been promised an exhibition in late May and he knew that was what kept him going. He needed twenty-four decent canvases to add to the works on paper that were already framed at the gallery in Tallinn. She reckoned he had nineteen, maybe twenty-two at a push. He wasn’t so sure.
He slept, but she did not, so now she dozed in her spot, smelling the resin in the wood heating up when the sun came out. The only sound came from a lark suspended in the sky, way off to her right, and the wind nudging the porch door. What made her start she could not say. But she sat up, filled with alarm. She shielded her eyes against the light and looked around. A figure was moving purposefully along the track by the shore; hard to make out because of the dark rocks, but occasionally a silhouette flashed against the breaking waves. She stepped inside and unhooked the binoculars they’d inherited with the cabin and trained them through the kitchen window. This individual, certainly a man, was carrying something, but not fishing gear, not a hiker’s backpack, not even the wildfowler’s shotgun under his arm; more like a
