Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy

order in which they happened. Douglas made long telephone calls. People arrived at the house and departed. There was a chance, he said. The East German police had not transferred custody of Major Dean to the Russians at Berlin-Karlshorst. They offered to exchange Dean for a document stolen from the East Berlin police H.Q. the previous week. She hesitated. The safe was built into the wall and concealed at the back of the desk in the library. She told Douglas that she didn't have the key and didn't know the combination. Douglas didn't take her seriously. It's your husband, Mrs Dean! Eventually she opened the safe and got it. They looked through the document that the East Germans wanted. There were forty-nine pages of it; mimeographed on poor quality pulp paper, tinted pink. There had been file numbers on it but these were now obliterated with black ink. The edges of the paper had faded in the sunlight and Marjorie felt that it couldn't be all that secret if it had been lying around in the sun long enough to fade.

She wondered if she shouldn't telephone Dean's senior officer but Douglas reminded her of what he was like. Can you imagine him taking the responsibility? He wouldn't give the O.K. to hand over even a used Kleenex tissue to the East Germans. No, he'll shuffle the responsibility to Frankfurt, and we'll wait a week for an answer. By that time Major Dean will be in Moscow.

But how can you be certain that this document isn't of vital importance? Douglas laughed and said it was only of vital importance to the East German official who'd had it stolen from his safe. Now he wanted to get it back and forget the whole thing as soon as possible. These things happen all the time. Marjorie was still worried about how important it was. Look for yourself, said Douglas, but Marjorie couldn't understand the jargon-heavy officialese of this report on police organization in the Eastern Zone. Do you imagine that someone like your husband would keep any really important stuff in his safe at home? Marjorie didn't answer but she finally decided that it was unlikely.

Marjorie remembered Douglas making her go to a cinema. She sat through Jolson Sings Again. The dialogue was dubbed into German but the songs were the original recordings. She didn't get home until late. There was a glorious sunset behind the trees in the Grunewald. When she came through the garden to the front door she thought that the roses had bloomed. It was only when she went to look at them that she discovered that behind the rosebushes the whitewash had been spattered with blood. She became hysterical. She blundered through the back garden to the apartment the Steiners used but there was no answer to her rings at the doorbell. Then Douglas arrived in a black Opel Kapitan and persuaded her to spend the night in the V.I.P. quarters at the barracks. He had arranged the necessary permission.

She didn't go back to the house until after Major Dean arrived from the East. The Volkspolizei had kept their word: as soon as the returned papers had been verified, Major Dean was brought to the crossing checkpoint. From there he took a taxi. She never again saw the Steiners. At her insistence the Deans moved to a smaller and more modern house in Spandau. Soon after that, Marjorie became pregnant, and for a time the marriage seemed to go very well but there was now an abyss separating Hank Dean and his young wife.

The perfunctory inquiry was held behind closed doors and its findings were never made public. It was agreed that the document passed to the Volkspolizei was a document originating from that East German force. It had already passed across the desk of Dean's analysers and was in any case of a grading no higher than confidential. Steiner's brother-in-law was found dead and floating in the River Spree, having sintered severe wounding 'by a person or persons unknown' prior to death. He was described on the record as 'a displaced person'. Mrs Dean's evidence about the man's argument with Steiner was rejected as 'inadmissible hearsay'. Major Dean was reprimanded for taking official documents home, and was removed from his job. Mrs Dean was totally exonerated. Corporal Douglas Reid-Kennedy took much of the blame. It was inevitable that he should face the inquiry's wrath, for he was a draftee. Reid-Kennedy had no military career at stake; he wasn't even an officer. However, his quiet acceptance of the findings was rewarded by a transfer to a U.S. Army recruitment depot in New Jersey, promotion and an early release.

And yet, for Douglas Reid-Kennedy and the Deans, the events of that week in Berlin were traumatic. Hank Dean knew he would never again be given a job so important and so sensitive as the one he lost. A couple of times fellow officers snubbed him. He drank. When Hank Dean's drinking became bad enough for the army to send him to a special military hospital near Munich to dry out, Marjorie took the newly born son, Henry Hope, back to her parents in New York. She met Douglas. The first time it was by chance but eventually the relationship became serious and then permanent.

It seemed as if the nightmare were over, but in fact it was only just beginning. At college Douglas had been a heavyweight boxer of considerable skill. He had been well on the way to a State championship when by an unlucky Mow he severely hurt a fellow contender. Douglas never went into the ring again. It was the same sort of bolo punch that he used to fell the Steiners' bogus brother-in-law. The fact that the man was a blackmailer and an East German spy persuaded the inquiry to skirt round that happening. But the Russians were not prepared to kiss and make up. Three years after the incidents in Berlin, Douglas was visited by a baby-faced young man who presented the card of a Polish company that made transistors. After the usual polite small-talk he said that through nominee holdings, the company for which he worked now owned 37 per cent of Douglas's company. He realized that 37 per cent was not 51 per cent — the baby-faced man smiled — but it was enough for them to have a real control over what was going to happen. They could pump money into the company, or turn it over to making razor-blades or tear it down and go into real estate. The young man reminded Douglas that he had killed one of their 'employees' and Douglas realized that his company was now owned by the K.G.B. They offered to pay Douglas off each year in his own shares, if he would work for them. They would tell him exactly which U.S. Government electronics contracts to bid for, and their agents would be able to discover exactly what his business rivals were bidding. In return, they wanted a steady supply of technical information about the whole U.S. electronics industry. If Douglas refused to work with them, the young man told him, they would bankrupt his company and 'execute' all of the people implicated in the events of that night: Marjorie, the Steiners, the Steiners' daughter and Douglas himself. Douglas asked for a week to think it over. They agreed. They knew the answer must be 'yes'.

As she finished her story, she poured herself another large brandy and sipped some. Major Mann went over to the air-conditioner and moved the control from medium to coldest. He stood there letting the cold air hit him. He turned round and gave her his most engaging smile. 'Well, it's great,' he said. 'I want you to know I think it's just great. Of course, you've had about twenty years to goose it up, and work in some interesting details, but then so did Tolstoy — thirty years Tolstoy had, if I remember correctly.'

'What?' she said, frowning hard.

That story,' said Mann. 'My buddy here is crazy about all that kind of spy fiction.'

'It's true,' she said.

'It's literature,' said Mann. 'It's more than just a lousy collection of lies and evasions; it's literature!'

'No.'

'Douglas Reid-Kennedy joined the Communist Party when he was still at school. I guessed that as soon as I knew that his two closest buddies joined the C.P. and he remained aloof from that gay group of fun-loving raconteurs — am I pronouncing that right, Mrs Dean?… raconteurs. That's what your friend Corporal Douglas Reid- Kennedy was on his days off with these Gestapo guys and film stars? Well, as soon as I hear about a guy at school who doesn't go along and sing 'The Red Flag' with his closest buddies, I think to myself either this guy isn't the kind of young amusing raconteur that everybody is cracking him up to be, or else the Communist Party have given him a secret number, and told him to keep his mouth shut. They do that when they spot a kid who has a job in the State Department, or a trade union, or has a father who makes electronic equipment for the U.S. Army.'

Mann walked across the room and picked up the photo of Douglas being nursed by his father. 'Great kid you got there, Pop, but just watch out for that bolo punch.' He put the photo down. 'Yeah, you were right about Douglas's boxing career at school… too modest in fact. See, Douglas crippled three kids with that body punch — a bolo is an upper cut to the body, I guess you already knew that, Mrs Dean, or you wouldn't have used that exact technical word — and Douglas didn't give up as easy as you say he did. He was forbidden to box again, not only by the school but also by the State boxing authority. And don't let's imagine that our Douglas was the kind of guy who didn't develop his natural talents. He graduated from crippling people to killing people. The K.G.B. spotted that more quickly than the U.S. Army spotted it; they knew that he'd like assignments to kill people. Those murder assignments were his rewards, not his work.'

'No!' she said.

Mann looked at her as she poured herself another drink. I had watched her drinking all this time and thought that she was using all her will-power to avoid getting drunk. Now I realized that it was just the reverse of that; she