'You should have got the papers. No one in their right mind tries the Wall.'

'Railway station?' I said. 'Don't you remember what an East German railway station is like? They're full of cops and soldiers. There's someone asking you for your papers every step of the way. And by that time the luggage office was probably staked out. No, there was no way but through the wire. We decided to try the border down near Wolfsburg. We chose that section because the Wall was being repaired there, and I'd seen a drawing of it. Okay, no one in their right mind tries the Wall, but the guards were getting to feel the same way and they can be slack on a cold night.

The Sperrzone was easy; at that place it was mostly agricultural land still being worked. We spotted the bunkers and the towers and followed the ditch by the road the workers use. We had tools to cut the fences and everything was okay until we were crawling through the Kontrollstreifen. And the night was dark, really dark. Everything went fine at the start. But we must have hit a wire or some alarm because suddenly there was a commotion. They began shooting before they could really get a bead on us. You know how they are; they shoot just to show their sergeant that they're on the ball. We were okay until we got to the road that they use for the patrol cars. We stopped worrying about disturbing the pattern in the naked strip and ran across into the mine field. The guards chasing us stopped at the edge of the mine field. It was too dark for them to see us so they had to get the searchlight – we were too far into the mine field for their hand lamps to be much use to them. We crawled and stopped. Crawled and stopped. Max was an old man; the crawling was difficult for him. A couple of times the big light in the tower came across us without stopping. We stayed still for a few minutes, but then they got systematic about it and began to sweep the area bit by bit. Max took careful aim and took out the light with two shots. But they saw the flash of his gun. The machine gunner in the tower just fired at the place he'd seen the flash. He kept his finger on the trigger so that Max must have been torn to pieces. I ran. It was a miracle. In the darkness and the general confusion I got right through.'

Just thinking about it made me tremble.

'Months later, Frank Harrington got hold of the Vopo guard commander's report. It confirmed that Max had been killed by the machine gunner. They'd decided to say there was only one escaper, and thus make their success rate one hundred per cent.' I took a drink of coffee. 'Max saved my life, Lange. He must have guessed what would happen. He saved me.' Why had I suddenly blurted out this story to Lange? I hadn't talked about it to anyone since it happened in 1978.

'Hear that, Gerda?' said Lange softly. 'You remember dear old Max, don't you? What a drinker. Remember how angry you used to get because he never wanted to go home? Then next day he always sent flowers and you forgave him.'

'Of course I do, darling,' she said. I understood now why I suddenly had to say it. I couldn't say it to Max. Max was dead. The next best thing was to say it to Lange who loved him.

'He was a good man,' said Lange. 'He was a Prussian of the old school. I recruited him back in 1946.'

Mrs Koby gave me a glass of her bright red homemade plum wine and gave another one to Lange.

'Didn't you ever feel like going back to the States, Lange?' I said. I drank some of the wine. It was a fierce fruity concoction that made me purse my lips.

'Nah. Berlin is where I want to be.' He watched me drinking the wine without commenting. I had the feeling that drinking a glass of Gerda's plum wine was a test that visitors were expected to endure without complaining.

'They wouldn't let us go to America, Bernard,' said Mrs Koby in contradiction to her husband's bluff dismissal of the idea. 'We got all ready to leave, but the Embassy wouldn't give us a visa.'

'But you're a citizen, Lange,' I said.

'No, I'm not. When I started working for your dad, he rushed through a British passport for me. Even if they let me in, we'd both be aliens in the US. I'm not sure I'd even get Social Security payments. And when I talked to one of our Embassy people he had the nerve to tell me that "working for a foreign intelligence service" would count against me with the Immigration Department. How do you like that?'

'He was kidding you, Lange,' I said. Lange looked at me and said nothing and I didn't press it. I drained my wine glass and got to my feet again. 'I must go,' I said.

'I didn't mean anything, Bernie. I know you weren't sent here by London Central.'

'No offence taken, Lange. But I'm taking Lisl to Werner Volk-mann's place for a meal. You know how Lisl is about people being late.'

'It's going to be a Jewish Christmas, is it? What's he serving you – gefilte fish and turkey noodle soup?'

'Something like that,' I said. I didn't care for Lange's jokes.

Lange got up too. 'I hear Frank is retiring,' he said. It was an obvious attempt to draw me out. 'Jesus, he's said goodbye enough times, hasn't he?'

'Sinatra?' I said facetiously.

'Frank Harrington,' said Mrs Koby, to put me right.

Lange gave his snorty little laugh and said, 'And I hear that some guy named Cruyer is calling the shots in London these days.'

I pulled my trench coat on. 'Cruyer?' I said. 'That name doesn't ring any bells for me.'

'You've got a great sense of humour, Bernie,' said Lange, without disguising the bitterness he felt at being excluded from the latest gossip about London Central.

7

It was still early when I left Lange and walked north to the Tiergarten and what is the most mysterious part of the present-day city of Berlin. The park was empty, its grass brown and dead and glazed with frost. The trees were bare, like scratchy doodles upon the low grey sky. Rising from behind the trees, like a gilt-tipped rocket set for launching, the Siegessäule column. Its winged Victoria – which Berliners call 'golden Elsie' – celebrates the last war that Germany won, some hundred and ten years ago.

And as you turn the corner, you see them – stranded along the edge of the Tiergarten like the gigantic hulks of a rusting battlefleet. They are the embassy buildings that until 1945 made this 'diplomatic quarter' the centre of Berlin 's most exclusive and extravagant social life – Berlin is not the capital of West Germany; Bonn enjoys that distinction. So these roofless, derelict buildings standing on the sacrosanct foreign ground of other governments have been left untouched for almost forty years.

The ruined embassies had always fascinated me, ever since we had trespassed there to play dangerous games in my school days. There was the window from which Werner launched his model glider and fell thirty feet into the stinging nettles. Through the broken shell I could see the rafters I'd climbed as a dare and won from a boy named Binder one out of his coveted collection of forbidden Nazi badges. The roof was high and the rafters rickety. I looked at the dangers now and shuddered. I looked at many such previously encountered dangers now and shuddered; that's why I was no longer suitable for employment as a field agent.

I went round the Diplomatenviertel not once but twice. I wanted to be quite sure that I was being followed; it's so easy to become paranoid. He was not a real professional; he wasn't quick enough, for one thing, and what professional would wear a distinctive beard and short tartan-patterned coat? He was carrying a large brown-paper parcel, trying to look like someone taking a Christmas present across town, but he wasn't delivering a present to somewhere across town; he was following me; there was no doubt about that. I stopped and peered up at the old Italian Embassy. Some rooms at the back seemed to be occupied, and I wondered who would live in such a place. The bearded man stopped and seemed to wonder too.