Emerald Decision

to be noticed. Lobke thought he recognized her from the television news programmes. Lobke didn't like the Hotel Spree and its spurious Westernism. He disliked it because it was part of a facade — behind it the grimy dullness of the DDR waited to displace fantasy. To jump out and remind the dreamer that it was a joke, nothing more substantial. On the contrary, he liked West Berlin, liked any messenger-jobs to the Federal Republic, or the rest of Europe. The shiny toys were real there.

Meanwhile the stupid cow in her Italian boots and West German coat waited for her dreary friends from East German TV or the pretend-glossy magazines. He dialled headquarters. Asked for Goessler after identifying himself.

'Chief?'

'Rudi, how did it go?'

'He's booked in. Seems to be enjoying himself — I think he'll go all the way with you, Chief.'

'Rudi, what TV stations are you watching these days?'

Lobke laughed. 'Ours, naturally.'

'OK — well done. I think I shall call Herr Professor McBride at once, and introduce myself.'

'Goodbye, Professor—'

Lobke put down the telephone, winked coarsely at the woman in the beige coat who turned her head away immediately, and then he went out of the revolving doors into the evening sunshine, to walk along the Rathausstrasse to Marx-Engels and the Unter den Linden. He liked to look at the Brandenburger Tor with the low sun coming through its columns. It seemed to hold out a vague promise, made to him personally.

McBride unpacked methodically as soon as the porter left, with the tip in dollars that he was not, by law, allowed to receive at all. He always staked his claim to possession of any temporary home by spreading his things around — the toiletries on the bathroom shelf especially helped to establish his claim. While he was still putting socks and pants into a drawer, the telephone rang.

'McBride.'

'Ah — a call from Professor Goessler of the University for you, Herr McBride.'

'Put him through, please.'

McBride straightened at the telephone, as if before a superior. The window of his room looked over the shop roofs on the Rathausstrasse, towards the cathedral. He was pleased it did not face in the opposite direction, where he would have seen, beyond St Hedwig's, the Wall.

'Professor McBride?' The voice of a jolly man— an image he would not have connected with an East German Marxist historian. He shook his head at his own misconceptions.

'Professor Goessler, good of you to call me, sir.'

'The pleasure is mine. Please, you are comfortable at the Hotel Spree — it is suitable?'

'Sure, fine, Professor.'

'Good, good — if you had given us time, I would have booked your room for you. However, you have not made a mistake with the Spree. Tell me, my friend, are we to get right down to business, as you would say?'

'I'm in your hands, Professor. I haven't changed my ideas since I wrote you—'

'And you expect to find what you are looking for here in Berlin, in our archives?'

'What do you think my chances are, Professor? You've been through all that stuff the Russians gave back in the '60s and '70s.'

'My friend, I have only scratched the surface, I assure you!'

McBride felt a thin, needle-like sense of satisfaction that Goessler seemed ignorant — and a disappointment at the work in front of him. Needles in haystacks.

'I see — but you'll give me freedom of access?'

'Naturlich — oh, I'm sorry. No, but you speak German, of course. My friend, perhaps we can have dinner together this evening?'

McBride looked at his watch. Six, almost.

'Sure. Here any good, Professor?'

'A rather bland cuisine, but it will not hurt us. Yes — shall we say eight?'

'Sure. Ring my room when you arrive, Professor, and I'll meet you in the bar.'

'Excellent. Goodbye.'

McBride put down the telephone, and crossed thoughtfully to the window, recognizing the process of revising prejudices going on inside him. How could he complain at the treatment? He stared at the cathedral, blackening in the shadows and the low streaming sun.

He suddenly received a curious image of himself crawling over the face of that cathedral, checking each of the figures and gargoyles carved on it, looking for a piece of paper with its secret message stuffed up one stone nostril of one of the hundreds of stone saints and devils. He laughed. If Smaragdenhalskette had dropped a couple of its stones in East Berlin, then he would find them.

November 1940

McBride hunched down between two rocks, jammed in as if afraid he might lose some precarious hold. The greatcoat — which he had wanted to abandon half a dozen times — now kept out the searching wind that moaned off the sea, moaned against the low cliffs of the cove. The tide had just turned, and the sea — because the wind was from the north and against the tide — was choppier than when he had rowed in. It would be harder for him to pick out the submarine when it surfaced bow-on to the cove. The deflated carlin float was hidden only yards from him.

He'd returned the way he had come, avoiding the guard-posts since, despite his uniform, he had no movement order or excused-duty chit. It had taken him almost three hours. He looked at his watch again, then took up the signal-lamp. If the submarine was out there, he wouldn't know it until it surfaced; He was early, and all he could do was to signal periodically and hope they were using the periscope.

He flashed the morse-signal, M, put down the lamp, and listened. He'd heard a couple of cars and a truck pass along the road above him, but nothing had stopped. Yet he knew that by now they must be searching for him — someone would have found either Willi or Friedrich or both of them long before, and they would have been able to describe him and what he'd been doing when Friedrich surprised him. And they'd want to finish him off, deducing that he'd be taken off by submarine before light. And from one of the narrow, sheltered coves at the northern tip of the island, near l' Ancresse Bay.

He listened. Impatient, he picked up the signal-lamp again, hesitated more out of pride than caution, then flashed his morse dash-dash identification out to sea. The rain had stopped, but the wind was colder now, angering the sea as if to provide another barrier to his escape. He hugged the lamp to his chest while despising its use as a comforter.

Then, almost involuntarily, he flashed out the ident once more, gripped by a panic he could not laugh at or depress. He put back his head, and breathed as deeply as he could, inhaling and exhaling regularly for a minute or more. When he looked at the choppy, threatening, empty sea again, he could hear the sound of engines; identified them almost at once, and waited until the German S-boat rounded the low headland, its searchlight sweeping the tossed surface of the water, then — more in hope than expectation — flickering and dancing along the cliff-face, off the huddled groups of rocks. The tide on which he had come in had removed all traces of his arrival.

The S-boat — he watched it in helpless fascination — moved inshore and he could just make out the toy-like figures in caps and duffel-coats behind the coaming, the sailors at the bow operating the searchlight, or waiting armed with rifles and machine-guns.

He thought he detected the sounds of vehicles from the cliff-top even as the searchlight bounced away above his head, but the noise of the S-boat's twin diesels boomed off the cliffs, magnified and drowning any other noise. He felt his body-temperature drop, the wet rocks press on him. Then the searchlight moved on, sweeping back out to sea. The S-boat moved away, and in less than another minute had rounded the opposite headland, and its engine-noise died away.

Then he heard the shouted orders from above him. He had heard a truck stopping. He fumbled with the signal-lamp, adding to its shielding with his cupped hand as he flashed his signal on and off, again and again. The S-boat would be back, or another might be following, and in minutes — when the troops sent to search the cove had descended the cliff-path — he would be unable to signal.

'Come on, come on — for Christ's sake, come on,' he muttered over and over like an incantation, flashing the