25

At midnight the front door to Lisl Hennig's hotel was locked. That had always been the routine, ever since I could remember. Any hotel guest who occasionally returned after that time was given a key on request. Any guest frequently returning after that time was asked to find another hotel.

Guests arriving there after midnight without a key had to tug the old bellpuil. You couldn't hear the bell from outside in the street and sometimes guests made a great deal of noise before they got in. I couldn't hear the bell from my little garret room at the very top of the house. Lisl could hear the bell. She slept downstairs – she'd been sleeping.downstairs ever since her arthritis had got really bad. Lisl never went down to open the door, of course; just that one flight of stone stairs, from the salon to the front hall, was something she didn't attempt very often. One of the servants opened the door if the bell rang. They took it in turns. Usually it was Klara, but on that night after Werner went over to the East it was Richard, a youngish man from Bremen who worked in the kitchen. Klara was not out that night, of course – she was in bed and asleep and awakened by the bell as always. But when she was off duty, she was off duty, and she just turned over and forgot about it.

So it was Richard who went down to the front door when the bell went at 2:30 a.m. It was dark and still raining, and Richard took with him the wooden bat used for flattening slices of veal to make Wiener schnitzels. As he said afterwards, he knew that there were no guests still not back and he wanted something to defend himself with.

So it was Richard who woke me up out of a deep sleep in which I was dreaming about old Mr Storch who was making me recite a poem about Hitler. It was a silly dream in which I knew no poems about Hitler except a rude one which I was frightened to tell Mr Storch.

'A gentleman to see you, sir,' said Richard, having shaken me by the shoulder and put Storch and my classmates to flight. 'There's a gentleman to see you.' He said it in English. I suspected that he'd got it from one of those film butlers because he had exactly the right accent and inflection whereas the rest of his English was appalling.

'Who?' I said. I switched on the bedside light. Its yellow plastic shade made patterns on the wall and its light made Richard look jaundiced and ferocious.

'It's me.' I put my glasses on and looked towards the doorway. It was Bret Rensselaer. I could hardly believe my eyes. For a moment I thought it was all a part of my dream. I got out of bed and put on my dressing gown.

'My God, Bret, what are you doing in Berlin?' I said. 'It's okay,' I told Richard. 'It's a friend of mine.'

As Richard left and closed the door, Bret stepped into the light. He was hardly recognizable. This wasn't the Bret I knew. His dark overcoat was so soaked with rain that it was dripping pools onto the ancient carpet. There was mud on his shoes. He had no necktie and his shirt was dirty and open at the throat. His staring eyes were deep sunk into his ashen face and he needed a shave badly.

'You look like you could do with a drink,' I said, opening the corner cupboard where I had a bottle of duty-free Johnnie Walker and some glasses. I poured him a big shot of whisky. He almost snatched it from me and drank a couple of gulps.

'I had to find you, Bernard. You're the only one who can help me.'

Was this really Bret Rensselaer? I never thought I'd see the day when Bret was asking anyone for help, let alone asking me. 'What's wrong, Bret?'

'You're the only one I can trust any more.'

'Sit down,' I said. 'Get out of that wet coat and take the weight off your feet.'

He did as I told him, moving with the shambling robotic pace of the sleepwalker. They'll go for you too,' said Bret.

'Start at the beginning, Bret,' I said.

But he was too tired to understand. He didn't look up at me, he was slumped on the chair studying his muddy shoes. 'They arrested me.' He said it very quietly so that I had to lean close to him to hear.

'Who did?'

'A team from Five… it was all kosher. They had all the documentation,,, even a chit from the Deputy with the two authorized signatures.'

'Morgan had signed?'

'Yes, Morgan had signed. But it's not all Morgan's doing; they've got a whole file on me.'

I poured myself a drink while I pulled my thoughts together. Was Bret admitting to me that he was a KGB mole? Had he come to me convinced that I was a KGB agent too? And how the hell was I going to find out? I sipped the drink and felt the warmth of it slide down my throat. It didn't make my thinking any clearer, but it was waking me up in the best possible way. 'What now?' I said tentatively. 'How can I help?'

'It all began when the committee went down to Berwick House,' said Bret, as if he hadn't heard my question. 'Some of them wanted to be present at an interrogation. There had been a lot of argument about whether Stinnes was really cooperating or just playing us along. Ladbrook was there. Ladbrook's straight, you know that.'

I nodded. Ladbrook was the senior interrogator. He kept out of office politics as much as possible.

'We used one of the big downstairs rooms; there wasn't room for everyone in the recording room.' Bret held out his glass for another drink. I poured him one, a small one this time. He didn't drink it right away. He swirled it round in his hands. Bret said, 'The interrogation was concerned with codes and communications. I wasn't listening all that closely at first; I figured that it was all stuff I'd heard before. But then I realized that Stinnes was offering some goodies. Five had one of their communications boffins assigned to the committee just for that sequence, and he got excited. He didn't jump up and down and sing 'Rule, Britannia!' but he might have if there'd been more leg room.'

'Stuff you hadn't heard before?'

'Really good material, Bernard. Stinnes started out by offering us the whole signals procedure at the Embassy, and the boffin from Five asked some questions that Stinnes answered easily and unequivocally. This was a different sort of Stinnes I was seeing; he was smooth and charming and polite and deferential. He cut a hell of a good figure with them. Jokes too. They were even laughing, and Stinnes was more at ease than I'd ever seen him before. Then one of the Five people said it was a pity that he hadn't given us some of this material a few weeks earlier because there were sure to be signals alterations any time now, in the light of Stinnes changing sides. And Stinnes calmly said that he'd told me all this stuff in the first days I saw him.'

'And you denied it?'

Bret's voice was shrill. 'He never gave us any of that hard intelligence. He didn't give it to me, he didn't give it to Ladbrook, and he didn't give it to you.'

'So what was your reaction?'

'I'm the chairman of that lousy committee. What am I supposed to do, call myself to order and appoint a subcommittee? I let it roll. What could I do, except sit there and listen to all that crap.'

'And they swallowed it?'

A thought struck Bret Rensselaer. 'He didn't tell you any of that stuff, did he? Codes and communications? Embassy contact lists? Foreign country routings? Signals room security? Did he tell you any of that? For God's sake… '

'No, he didn't tell me any of that,' I said.

'Thank Christ for that.' He wiped his brow. 'There are moments when I wonder if I'm tipping off my trolley.'

They arrested you?'

'That wasn't until two days later. From what I heard afterwards, it seems that the people from Five got together that night for some kind of council. They were excited, Bernard, and convinced. They hadn't seen Stinnes before. All they knew about him was this smooth, dynamic guy who's falling over himself trying to give away Soviet secrets. What are they supposed to think except that I've been sitting on him?'