'Why you?' I said. 'You were very young.'

'The world was very young,' said Bret. ' Britain and the US had won the war. We were going to be arm in arm together while we won the peace too.'

'Because you were American?'

'Right. An American could look at what was going on in Berlin and be impartial about it. I was to be the one who went there and unified the Limeys and the Yanks and made them into a team again. That was the theory; the fact was that the only unification came from the way they all hated and despised me. The Berlin intelligence community got together just to baffle and bamboozle me. They led me a merry dance, Bernard; they made sure that I couldn't get to the people I wanted, get the documents I wanted, or get competent office help. I didn't even have a proper office, did you know that? Did Lange tell you how he made sure that no German would work for me?'

'The way I heard it, they gave you a big apartment and two servants.'

'Is that the way Lange tells it? By now he probably even believes it. And what about the Russian princess?'

'He mentioned her.'

'The real story is that those bastards made sure the only office space I had was shared with a clerk who went through my files every day and told them what I was doing. When I tried to get other accommodation they blocked every move I made. Finally I contacted a friend of my mother's. She wasn't young, she wasn't a princess, and she had never been in Russia, although her mother was distantly related to White Russian aristocracy. She had a big apartment in Heerstrasse, and by offering half of it to me she was able to prevent it being commandeered for use by some other Allied military outfit. I used that place as an office and I got her neighbour to do my typing.'

'Lange said she was a Nazi, your friend.'

'She'd lived in Berlin right through the war and her folks had been murdered by the Bolsheviks, so I guess she didn't go around waving any red flags. But she had close friends among the July twentieth conspirators. When Hitler was blown up in 1944 she was taken in for questioning by the SD. She spent three nights in the cells at Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. It was touch and go whether they sent her to a camp, but there were so many suspected persons to be detained that they grew short of cells to hold them, so they let her go.'

'There was a row about Lange's brother-in-law,' I said.

'Damn right there was. If Lange had learned how to keep his head down and his mouth shut, maybe it wouldn't have blown up like that. But Lange has to be the big man on campus. And he particularly resented me because I was a fellow American. He wanted the exclusive title of tame Yank, and he'd got a lot of leeway playing that role. The office let him get away with all kinds of tricks because they thought it was just another example of good old Yankee know-how and the unconventional American way of tackling things.'

'So he resigned?'

'It was tough for him, but he'd been told enough times about that woman he married. There was no way I could ignore an SS man living in Lange's parlour while I was lowering the boom on guys who'd done nothing more than joining the party to save their school-teaching jobs.'

I didn't answer. I tried to reconcile Bret's version of these events with Lange's burning hatred. 'They were not good times,' I said.

'Did you ever hear of CROWCASS?' said Bret.

'Vaguely. What is it?'

'Right after the fighting ended, SHAEF started building a file of suspected war criminals. CROWCASS was the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects. Maybe it was a muddle, the way everyone said it was afterwards, but at the time CROWCASS was gospel, and Lange's brother-in-law had his name on that registry.'

'Did Lange know that?'

'Sure he did.'

'When did he find out?'

'I don't know when he found out, but he knew about the brother-in-law having served in the Waffen-SS before he got married. I know that because I found in the file a copy of the letter he'd been sent warning him not to go ahead. And all ex-members of the SS and Waffen-SS were automatically arrested unless they'd already faced an enquiry and been cleared. But Lange didn't care about any of that. He was playing the American card again. He let the British think he'd got special dispensation from the Americans and vice versa. He's a slippery one; I guess you know that.'

'Didn't you know it?' I said.

'I know that, and I knew it then. But everyone was telling me what a wonderful network he was running. They wouldn't let me see anything he was producing, of course – security wouldn't permit. So I just had to take their word for it.'

'He brought us some good people. He'd been in Berlin before the war. He knew everybody. He still does.'

'So what was I to do?' said Bret defensively. 'His goddamned brother-in-law was running around with a Kennkarte that identified him as a payroll clerk with a building company. It had a denazification stamp. He 'liked to tell everyone he'd been a Navy medic. He was picked up brawling in a bar in Wedding. He was stinking drunk and still fighting when they took him downtown and threw him into the drunk tank. They put these drunks under the cold showers to cool them off, and a cop who'd got hit on the nose began wondering how this Navy medic came to have an SS blood-group tattoo under his arm.'

Outside, the river and the fields beyond were obliterated by grey mist and rain was beating against the window. Bret was lost in the shadows and his voice was impersonal, like a recording machine delivering some computer judgement.

'I couldn't ignore it,' he said. 'It was a police report. It was delivered to the office, but no one there wanted a hot potato like that on their desk. They sent it right along to me. It was probably the only piece of paperwork that they forwarded to me in the proper way.' I said nothing. Bret realized that his explanation was convincing and he pursued it. 'Lange thought himself indispensable,' said Bret. 'It's tempting to think that at any time, but it was especially tempting for someone heading up several networks – good networks, by all accounts. But no one is indispensable. The Berlin System managed without Lange. Your dad put the pieces together.'

'Lange thinks my father would have helped him. He thinks my father was deliberately moved out of Berlin so that you could go in there and get rid of him.'

'That's crap and Lange knows it. Your dad had done very well in Berlin. Silas Gaunt was his boss and when Silas got a promotion in London he brought your father back to London with him. Nothing was ever written on paper, but it was understood that your dad would go up the ladder with Silas. He had a fine career waiting for him in London Central.'

'So what happened?' I said.

'When Lange got sore, he tried to sell all his networks to the US Army. They wouldn't touch him, of course.'

'He had good networks,' I said.

'Very good, but even if they'd been twice as good, I doubt if he could have sold the Counter Intelligence Corps on the idea of taking them over.'

'Why?'

'The CIC weren't concerned with what was happening in the Russian Zone. Their task was security. They were looking for Nazis, neo-Nazi groups, and Communist subversives operating in the West.'

'So why not pass Lange on to some other department?'

'In those days the US had no organization spying on the Russians. Congress wanted America to play Mr Nice Guy. There were a few retreads from the old OSS and they were working for something that called itself the War Department Detachment, which in turn was a part of something called the Central Intelligence Group. But this was amateur stuff; the Russians were laughing at it. Lange tried everywhere, but no one wanted his networks.'

'It sounds like a meat market.'

'And that's the way the field agents saw it when the news filtered through to them. They were demoralized, and Lange wasn't very popular.'