felt we were really rather doing her a favour, but we became almost dependent on her. Is she in trouble?
I had a good staff sergeant. We used to go over to East Berlin, once or twice a week, as permitted under the Four Power Agreement and it was important to take advantage of the access. We didn’t learn much and were always followed by the Stasi, but we did it. We’d walk around, lean on road bridges and watch for military convoys, look for new cap badges of Soviet troops, pretty mundane but that was the work of I Corps. But one time in December ‘eighty-seven, on Leipzig Strasse, the sergeant was bumped. The tail was on the other side of the street, quite wide there. He was bumped by a young man. Actually, he was another hundred metres up the street before he realized that an envelope had been palmed into his pocket. He brought it back, came straight to me and gave it to me. That was Hans Becker’s first contact.
‘Most of our work in Berlin was debriefing those who had either escaped, youngsters, or been allowed out, the elderly. The Stasi were always trying to plant their own people into our system, to learn about our procedures and to feed us disinformation. I don’t deny it, we were truly excited that evening. What we usually handled was so low-grade – what passes were needed for what area of East Germany, where were the passes issued, what colour were they, who signed them. This had the potential of being way ahead of the dross, and it didn’t seem like a plant. The letter said that a meeting should take place in Alexanderplatz, that a named song should be played over the forces’ radio the evening before; the song was “The Londonderry Air”, pretty mournful stuff. I lost sleep over it – it was the staff sergeant’s suggestion – but we sent Tracy over. She didn’t know, but I sent three Welsh Guards NCOs to have her within sight. I thought she had the ability – she was the only one of us who didn’t look like a soldier. I asked a hell of a lot of a girl of that age, but she always seemed so capable.
‘We called it Operation Catwalk. She was Traveller. So damn difficult to find a codename. When she was looking after the children she used to read to them, and Walter de la Mare – particularly his “Traveller” – was a favourite for my elder daughter.
‘She was a pig in shit – excuse me, a duck in water. Very matter of fact, very calm, took it in her stride. The first time she went over we had back-up and I was down at the Wall. The last time she just slipped out of Brigade, could have been going shopping. She took equipment and material over to him, she had memorized my instructions as to what we needed. We’d give him a few weeks to follow the instructions, then we’d play this song on the radio and they’d meet again the next day. My wife spotted it – not much can be hidden from her. My wife said that something had happened to that “plain little thing”. My wife said it was love. Tracy had become a woman, gone confident, more mature – there was another side to her, harder, sharper, quite a savage joker, and then skittish, you know what I mean. We had a good little section that dealt with forged papers. They’d done an excellent job fitting Tracy with a student’s pass into the East for the library at the Humboldt, and they did the necessary for getting him over, once, to meet us. You only had to see them together to know that it was love. I should have stopped it then, should have killed our involvement. We were forbidden to run agents, it was thought we weren’t capable. Should have been handed over to the civilians. We dressed his reports up as debrief material – that’s the way we slid it into the system. We were getting the applause, I wasn’t going to pass it up. I saw them together and I could see there was heavy emotional entanglement, and I should have killed it.
‘The Baltic was a key, critical zone. All the assumptions were that they would attack, if it came to war, through amphibious forces. We would have tried a counter-strike, which would have meant blitzing the Soviet air defence up there. There was a major concentration of air defence at Wustrow, near Rostock. Prize intelligence was to be able to read their counter-measures. I sent him to Wustrow with the electronics to read the radar. She took it to him and off he went. I was stretching him, too far perhaps. He worked in the marshalling yards at the Lichtenberg rail junction in Berlin and could tell us what tanks were being moved, what units were coming West through the yard, but this was at a different level. I was away that day – a conference or something.
‘It was almost a year to the day since he’d bumped my staff sergeant. A quite normal morning. I was in early. Tracy was already at her desk. I asked her if it had gone well, the previous day’s rendezvous, she said it had been routine. Would have been about lunch-time that the first reports came through. Our Siglnt at Lubeck had picked up heavy Soviet radio traffic from the Wustrow base, indications of a manhunt. Then we had reports via Denmark. One of their ferries, out at sea, had seen flares over the Wustrow area… I knew it had gone wrong. I broke it to her, in my office, in private, asked her if she wanted to cut away and get back to her quarters. I thought that was fair. She stayed put, went on with her work. She was very strong. Must have been ghastly for her, the uncertainty. The next month, and the month after, we had that song played on the radio. I didn’t send her over, I went myself. He didn’t show. What was important, the meeting point was not under particular surveillance by the Stasi. That told me that he hadn’t been captured and hadn’t talked. The assumption was that he was dead, drowned or killed. I pushed him forward, I was responsible. Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I carry that burden with ease? I was five years in Berlin and in that time he was the only worthwhile source I had. The rest was rubbish, juvenile games. This was real, and it cost a young man, Tracy’s young man, his life. For God’s sake, what help is it to dredge in the past?’
‘Where did he live?’
‘With his parents on Saarbrucker Strasse. The staff sergeant checked it to see that we weren’t being conned. Apartment nine, third floor, number twelve on Saarbrucker Strasse… She’s a lovely girl, very kind, very gentle, my children worshipped her. Who’s helped by opening the dirty side of history?’
Josh let himself out of the house and walked to his car.
She lay in the bed.
It was as she remembered it. It was narrow, made of heavy wood. She lay naked under the old blankets and she could hear his mother moving behind the thin wood partition. Once, a long time before, in Hansie’s bed, there had been no sound from the other two rooms of the apartment, the shop closed and his mother and father away at his uncle’s home in Erfurt. Her skin was warmed by the roughness of the sheets and by the weight of the blankets. She had loved Hansie in the darkness of alleyways, in the shadow of deep doorways, but once, when his mother and father were away, he had brought her to the apartment. Crawling on her, climbing above her, loving her. She stretched up her arms, as if she reached for him, as she had reached for him. She held the void, clasped it, sought again to find the love. She had brought the condoms from the lavatory (female) at Brigade
She had thought she gave him courage. They had left separately before daylight, walked on Saarbrucker Strasse in different directions and met at the Trabant car. They had gone in the car to Rostock…
She remembered the small chest. After they had made love in his bed, he had taken the dark clothes from the drawers of the chest, because she had told him he should wear deep browns, blacks and hard greys that night, and as he had dressed she had reached from the bed, naked, into her bag, which held the electronic monitoring equipment to check that she had the camouflage cream for his face and his hands, for the night.
She remembered the dressing gown, hanging on the back of the door, and protruding from under it, slung on the same hook, were his competition swimming goggles. He had a foot problem, right foot, needed a built-up shoe. He could run only with difficulty, was handicapped sufficiently to avoid military service, but he could swim well enough to believe that he could cross the wide water of the Salzhaff.
He had been the only boy into whose bed she had gone naked. She lay and reached for him, to hold him, to smell the sweet sweat of him, to feel him, and her fingers groped at nothing.
In the morning he had done the court, had sat alongside Mr Protheroe and fed him the relevant papers, like a loader at a shoot. He was necessary but unequal.
He had thought that ‘Sunray’, alone in his garden, would have crumpled under the weight of the responsibility that had won him his medal.
In the early evening, as the partners shrugged into their coats and locked the doors of their offices, he cleared his desk.
‘Goodnight, Mr Greatorex, I’ll see you the day after tomorrow, first thing.’
‘Why do you do this?’
She had come on the U-Bahn. At the top of the tunnel steps she had been met by the woman, Hildegard. A hesitation. The woman looked away, to the snow-brushed pavement, to the high lights and the flat roofs of the tower blocks.
She said, ‘You met my father. To you, a stranger, he would appear as any other older man. You came to our home and to you, a stranger, it would have seemed like any other home. He was a poet. He tried to write the
