from well. And Berlin made her feel rootless. Her fluent German made no difference to the way that Berliners regarded her, as a prosperous American of the occupying army. Yet the other Americans could not forget her German-born grandparents and were always reminding her that she should feel at home here. But Berlin was a claustrophobic city, 'the island' Berliners called it, a tiny bastion of capitalism in the vast ocean of Soviet Zone Germany. And for her, the wife of a senior intelligence official, there could be no jaunts into Berlin's Eastern Sector, and the long ride down the autobahn to the western half of Germany required the special permission of the commanding general.
And she hated this old house, it was far too big for just the two of them, and the Steiners who looked after the place lived in the guest house at the far end of the overgrown garden, with its dilapidated greenhouses, dark thickets and high hedges. It was easy to see why the U.S. Army had taken over the house as V.I.P. accommodation, and then as a school for agents learning radio procedures before going over to the East, but it wasn't really suitable for housing Major Dean and his wife. The furniture was still the same as it had been when this was the home of a fashionable Nazi neurologist. The hall still had the paintings of men in Prussian uniforms, and, on the piano, there was a vignetted photograph of a woman wearing a tiara. The Deans had decided that it must have been the Nazi doctor's mother.
That Thursday, Marjorie Dean stayed in bed until almost noon. Her husband was away for a few days — these trips of his seemed to be getting more and more frequent — and there was nowhere to go until the ladies' bridge tournament at tea-time in the officers' club at Grunewald. But she bathed and put on her favourite linen dress because at one o'clock the courier would arrive from the barracks.
The coffee that Frau Steiner had brought her was now cold, but Marjorie sipped at it just the same, staring at herself as she applied make-up as slowly as she could to spin out the time. On the bedside table there was a tall pile of novels, about romance in America's deep South. She despised herself for reading such books but it helped to numb the mind that otherwise would think about the way the marriage was going, her husband's terrible disappointment at the miscarriage, and the all-pervading boredom.
Suddenly from the drawing-room she heard the piano. Someone was playing an old German song about a farmer and a rich merchant. Her father used to sing it to her. She thought her mind was wandering until she remembered that she'd told the Steiners that their daughter could practise on the piano for an hour each morning. She could hear the Steiners talking. It was so hot that the kitchen window was open wide. She could also hear the voice of Steiner's brother-in-law. Marjorie hoped that the brother-in-law wouldn't stay too long. What had started out as only one weekend had now become frequent visits. He claimed to be a master bookbinder from Coburg in Thuringia but Marjorie's ear for German accents put him in Saxony, now in the Russian Zone. The lilt was unmistakable and slightly ridiculous. As she heard him again through the open window, she could hardly suppress a smile. But as she listened more carefully to what was being said, the smile faded. The argument flared up, and the brother-in-law's voice was threatening and abusive. The tempo of his speech, the shrill Saxon accent and the use of much German soldier's slang made the conversation difficult for Marjorie to follow, but suddenly she was afraid. Her intuition told her this visitor was not a relative of the Steiners, and that his presence — and his anger — was in some awful way connected with her husband and the secret work he was engaged in. She heard the window being closed, and could hear no more. Marjorie put the matter from her mind. It was too easy to let one's imagination run away in a town like this.
The courier arrived at one o'clock every day, bringing classified paperwork in a locked metal case. He was always punctual. She looked forward to his visit, and she knew that he enjoyed it too. Usually he would find time to have coffee and a snack. He liked the old-fashioned German
On this particular day, Frau Steiner had cooked hazel-nut biscuits. There was a plate of them on the kitchen table, covered with a starched napkin. Alongside she had left the coffee and the percolator and a tray set with one of the antique lace tray-cloths that were on the inventory of this old house. Usually, she found Corporal Douglas Reid-Kennedy brought some new snippet of small-talk or rumour with him. Sometimes they would talk of their childhood in New York. They had both grown up there and Douglas insisted that he had noticed the pretty girl who sat always in the same church pew with two parents and a brother. Once he had told her all about himself and his family. His father was born in Hamburg. He'd emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1925, after losing everything in the inflation period. His father had changed the name to Reid-Kennedy after meeting some neighbours who didn't like Germans, and said so. And yet in the 'thirties it became an advantage to be German. The Jewish man from the U.S. Army procurement office who in 1940 gave them a contract to manufacture radio tuners for B — I7 bombers, assumed that they were refugees from Hitler.
The army contract brought a change in the fortunes of the Reid-Kennedys. His father rented more space and took on extra workers. From being a four-man radio component sub-contractor, they ended the war with a turn-over only a few hundred dollars short of two million. Douglas was sent to a swanky private school, and acquired a million-dollar accent but was still unable to pass the U.S. Army officers' selection board. He'd been annoyed at the time but now he had decided they were probably right; he was too irresponsible and too
Mixing with 'real Berliners' was one of Douglas's very favourite occupations. It was quite amazing the people he knew; a selection of German aristocracy, a Nazi film star, a professional lion-tamer, sculptors and painters, radical playwrights and ex-Gestapo officers with a price on their heads. And if you were after a new camera or some priceless antiques, Douglas knew where the newly impoverished sold their wares at knock-down prices. Douglas was young and amusing, he was a raconteur, a gambler who could lose a little money without crying too hard. He'd been too young for the war, he didn't give a hoot about politics, and for the army he did only what he had to do to stay out of trouble until the happy, happy day when he went back home. In short, Douglas was as different to Hank Dean as any man could get.
And so it was surprising to find this day a changed Corporal Reid-Kennedy who was serious and downcast. Even his clothes were different. His job with the army permitted him to wear civilian clothes and he liked to dress in the slightly ostentatious style of a newly rich Berliner. He chose silk shirts and soft leather jackets and the sort of hand-made hunting clothes that looked good in a silver Porsche. But today he was wearing a cheap blue suit, shiny on the elbows and baggy at the knees. And he wasn't wearing his gold wrist-watch, or the fraternity ring, or the heavy gold identity bangle. He looked like one of the Polish refugees, who went from door to door offering to do odd jobs in exchange for a meal.
He sat down in the kitchen and left the coffee and hazel-nut biscuits untouched. He asked her if she could let him have a Scotch. Marjorie was amazed at such a suggestion but she tried not to show it. She put the bottle on the table and Douglas poured himself a treble measure and swallowed it down hastily. He looked up and asked her if she knew what Major Dean's job was in intelligence. Marjorie knew that Dean had 'the police desk' but she didn't know what a police desk was. She'd always assumed that he was a liaison officer between the U.S. Army and the West Berlin police; getting drunken G.I.s out of jail and dealing with all those German girls who wanted to be a wife in the U.S.A. but found themselves alone in Berlin and pregnant. Douglas told her what the police desk really was: Major Dean assembled all the accumulating intelligence material to build a complete picture of the East German Volks polizei. The trouble was that he'd become so interested in his work that he had gone across to the East for a firsthand look.
She drank some of the fresh coffee and tried the biscuits. Douglas let her have a few minutes to think about the situation before he spoke again. Marjorie, he said finally, you'd better understand that they are holding your husband in East Berlin, and the charge is spying. And they don't fool about over there, they could shoot him. He took her wrist across the table as he said it. It was a sudden change in the relationship. Until now he'd always called her Mrs Dean, and treated her with all the deference due to the wife of his major. But now the problem they shared, and the fact that they were very nearly the same.age, unified them, just as it separated them from the older man who was at the centre of the problem. Suddenly Marjorie began to cry, softly at first and then with the terrible racking sobs of hysteria.
The events that came after had been repressed and repressed until she no longer had a clear idea of the
