Two Brothers

officer to turn traitor and work for you. I think they have exactly the same idea except the target is me. I don’t flatter myself that I’m much of a catch. I’m just a translator, but I’m in the Foreign Office and what’s more I’m attached to the East German desk. That’s got to be of interest to them.’

For the first time Bogart left his corner and joined the party. He even reached over and helped himself to a biscuit.

‘You’re absolutely right, of course,’ he admitted in his soft Yorkshire burr, ‘it may very well be that you are being targeted. Which is why we must be getting along with your briefing. We don’t want to lose you to some stupid mistake on elementary protocol.’

‘Not so damned fast,’ Stone snapped. ‘I want to get this clear. You’re admitting that you were happy to send me into East Berlin even though you knew I was being set up for some kind of Stasi entrapment?’

‘We don’t know that,’ Lorre replied. ‘We don’t know anything. One never does in our game. We think you might be being set up.’

‘You told me you knew she was alive, you bastards!’

‘Perhaps we should have said that we knew somebody using her name was alive,’ Bogart conceded gently. ‘Somebody who may or may not be entitled to use it.

‘Either way works for us,’ he went on cheerfully, pouring Stone another cup of tea. ‘Whether we end up trying to recruit her or they end up trying to recruit you, it’s a very promising situation for HM Government.’

Stone lit a cigarette, trying to take it all in.

‘So right from the start you’ve had it in mind that I might return to Britain having been recruited by the Stasi?’

‘That is one possible scenario,’ Lorre admitted.

‘Were you going to warn me?’

‘We find it is generally a useful policy to refrain from divulging anything that we do not absolutely have to.’

‘So you would have sat back and watched to see if I turned traitor? Content that you could use me either way?’

‘We were content to keep the various options open for as long as possible.’

Stone smoked and sipped his tea and thought about it. ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘at least now we understand each other a little better. So let’s get on with it, shall we? What do I need to know to be a spy?’

‘Oh, nothing too taxing,’ Peter Lorre said, once more adopting his vaguely patronizing tone. ‘Some addresses, a safe house if you need to run. Sources of money. Embassy codes and a bit of diplomatic law in case you have to try and claim immunity.’

‘I hate studying law,’ Stone said grimly.

‘Yes, we noticed you’ve been trying to pass your Bar exams,’ Lorre said. ‘Not happy at the Foreign Office?’

‘I’m not happy anywhere.’

‘There is just one thing, Mr Stone,’ Bogart said quietly. He had returned to his corner and was once more considering Stone with his enigmatic, faraway gaze.

‘Yes?’

‘The letter that first alerted you to the possibility that Frau Stengel might still be alive.’

‘Yes.’

‘That letter was sufficiently detailed and intimate to give you real hope. It was only when we told you that whoever wrote that letter was a Stasi agent that you began to doubt its credibility.’

‘That is true.’

‘So if Dagmar Fischer didn’t write it, who did? I can’t believe you haven’t thought about it. Who could still be alive today who had sufficiently intimate knowledge of your youthful relationship with Dagmar Fischer to be able to forge that letter?’

Stone waited a moment before replying.

‘I find it is generally a useful policy,’ he said finally, ‘to refrain from divulging anything that I do not absolutely have to.’

A Friendly Nazi Berlin, 1934

WOLFGANG WAS PLAYING piano in a bar down by the river.

It was not yet completely illegal for Jews to perform in front of non-Jews but Wolfgang did not make a point of admitting his racial status if he could avoid it. He was only playing for drinks and tips anyway and since the landlord, who was a jazz fan, didn’t ask, Wolfgang did not tell.

He kept his dirty little secret. A secret of which he was supposed to be ashamed. And because of that, in a vague, difficult to define sort of a way, he was ashamed.

Scarcely a year after Hitler had been handed power, something of what he had always claimed about the Jews had actually come to pass.

He said they were different.

And they had become different.

He had accused them of being furtive and sneaky.

And they had become furtive and sneaky. Covering up. Lying low. Watching the door. Hiding away. Survival rats. Constantly nervous, trying to blend in, avoiding people’s eyes, keeping out of people’s way. Attempting wherever possible to conceal the fundamental truth about themselves.

Exactly as Goebbels and Streicher said they did.

‘It’s a kind of ghettoization of the soul,’ Frieda said.

Wolfgang sat in the little bar with the smoke-blackened ceiling and played. Eyes closed, his mind transported far away by the music.

Yes, sir! That’s my baby. No, sir, I don’t mean maybe.

Slow and rolling, not like Lee Morse had immortalized it back in ’25, but soulful, like a blues. A faraway blues. Far away in America.

‘Hello, Wolfgang.’

The voice came from behind him. It was quiet, gentle even, but it shattered his reverie just as surely as if it had been the voice of the Leader himself. Wolfgang was, after all, vermin. A rat or a cockroach, startled, terrified, looking for a skirting board to scuttle under.

Warily he opened his eyes and glanced around. A handsome blond man in his late twenties or early thirties was standing just behind him, elegantly dressed, with a rakish pencil-thin moustache and a sardonic, knowing smile.

And a Gold Nazi Party badge on his lapel.

Wolfgang turned back to his piano, his fingers stumbling on the keys, clumsy with fear.

Gold party members were real Nazis.

Only the first hundred thousand members owned such a badge. People who’d joined when the rest of the nation were dismissing Hitler as a lunatic. These were true believers who despised the so-called Septemberlinge who had begun to flock to the swastika after Hitler’s first electoral breakthrough in September 1930.

And this Gold Party member knew his name. And if he knew his name, he knew he was a Jew. And if he knew he was a Jew then Wolfgang was at the mercy of his slightest whim.

‘I’m not sure I ever heard you play piano before,’ the man said, still from behind Wolfgang’s back.

‘Well, you’re hearing me now, mister,’ Wolfgang replied, concentrating on his keyboard, ‘and if you’ve been listening, then a few coins or maybe a beer would be much appreciated.’

‘Oh absolutely. Always a pleasure to drink with an old friend. Single malt’s your tipple, if I recall. Am I right, Mr Trumpet?’

Wolfgang remembered now. It was the use of that old nickname that did it. ‘Mr Trumpet’ had been Kurt’s