She went back to the pagoda-top Mercedes and got a black briefcase and slammed the door. 'Show me your driver's licence and your insurance, please.' A bus came past, throwing out a wave of slush, but she didn't move when it hit her jackboots, knew how to concentrate.

'Let's go in there,' I said, 'or we'll freeze.'

She glanced at the steamed-up window of the restaurant, then at her watch, then back to me.

'Let me see your identity card.'

I showed it to her, the official one with the HUA insignia, and she gave me a closer look, dark eyes, pale skin, a hard straight mouth. 'Very well, captain.'

The place was almost dark inside, either trying to look like a night-club or keep down the electricity bill. She put her briefcase onto a bench inside the door and zipped it open, her hands ungloved now, her movements deft. The other two women had been slower, less controlled. 'Here is my licence. May I please see yours?'

We exchanged notes; one of her gloves dropped and I picked it up; she didn't thank me. The window shook as something big went past, and a man in a moth-eaten fur hat came in and slammed the door and banged his feet up and down to get the slush off; but I was more interested in the woman — First Lieutenant Lena Pabst, Werneuchen Airforce Base, thirty-two, status unmarried — and the way she wrote, quickly, vertically, the way she stood, straight, balanced, totally confident.

'Thank you, comrade captain.'

'I haven't eaten since this morning,' I told her. 'Will you join me for a meal?'

I think I got the tone right: it wasn't an invitation, only a suggestion. We weren't so much a man and a woman as a secret police captain-and an Airforce lieutenant in a communist state; she'd pay her own bill when we left, if she decided to stay.

'Very well. I have time.'

The other two had been more feminine, more relaxed, and neither of them had known anything about Moscow, hadn't particularly cared, and that was why I hadn't gone any further with them. This one was into a fairly sophisticated summary, halfway through the meal, of her thoughts on the future of Europe.

'It's impossible for Greater Germany to remain bifurcated for much longer, given the climate of world-political thinking inside the Kremlin — given the undoubted genius of Gorbachev. And it's impossible to conceive of the new Germany following the corrupt and bourgeois system of the decadent West. The direction we shall be taking is obvious.'

We hadn't ordered wine. I'm driving. But when I get to my apartment I shall drink Underberg. She hadn't said when I get home.

'Have you been in the West?'

'Only for a few days,' she said, 'to the other side.'

'You were allowed to cross?'

She moved her head quickly to look at me. 'A group of us made a request to go there, for educational purposes. It was granted. There was no question of "being allowed" to go.'

I'd made a slip and she'd picked it up at once; I was thinking like a Westerner and I'd have to watch it.

'And how did it strike you?'

'Have you been there, comrade captain?'

'My name's Kurt, as you know. May I call you Lena?'

It stopped everything dead and she glanced down, and when she looked up again her eyes had changed. I'd thrown a personal note into the relationship, and her reaction was the same as when I'd suggested we have a meal together, but stronger, and she held my eyes for a moment, watchful, engaged.

'Very well, you may call me Lena.'

'"Thank you. Yes, I've been into West Berlin.'

In a moment, looking down again, her strong fingers toying with a crust, 'I found it pathetic. I don't think it's important that people can drive up to a bank and do business without having to get out of their car. I don't need the choice of a dozen different brands of breakfast cereal, all of which contain fifty per cent refined sugar. I need bread. Bread, food, work to do for the world. But the difference between the East and West isn't really significant. The people wear much the same clothes, have children, go to the movies, drive cars. War springs from fear, not from the slight difference in ways of life, and while there are these two all-powerful nations pitched together on the same planet there's bound to be fear. We need one world, not of nations but of people, earthlings, living in harmony, working for the future, poised on the threshold of space, the ultimate adventure. To achieve that, a last war is necessary. My air base, Werneuchen — ' she twisted in her chair to face me '- is in the front line of that war, and the thought excites me beyond all words. I am in the front line of the last war on earth, and when it's over I shall still be here to see the dawn of the new world. When I think of it in the night it's like an orgasm.'

The dark eyes were liquid suddenly, shimmering, the mouth parted and the tips of the sharp teeth touching together, the small face drawn into a rictus, fierce, vulpine, carnal.

'I can imagine,' I said.

Third time lucky: I'd creased the rear ends of a Fiat and a VW last night and toyed with schweinfleisch and sauerkraut in two shifts and hadn't got anywhere, but this was the one I wanted, manic, obsessed and pro-Gorbachev.

''That surprised me.' She was still twisted in her chair, watching me.

'What did?'

'My reference to orgasm.'

'When feelings get intense enough, there's nowhere else they can finish up.'

'You don't seem,' she said, 'the kind of man who lets his brakes fail.'

Still watching me, her eyes dipping to my mouth, lifting to my eyes again.

'It didn't have to look like a pickup.'

'But that isn't all it is.'

'No.'

The man in the moth-eaten fur hat had been sitting opposite, under the portraits of Lenin and Honecker; now he was leaving, shrugging to his coat. I'd been checking him, because he'd come in here soon after I had; but I was satisfied; he'd sat too close, and was known here, a regular. And Werneuchen Air Force Base was eighteen kilometres from Berlin and I'd driven here with enough feints and detours to arrive totally clean. That was essential. Back in Berlin I would have to leave myself open again, but I was here to get information and I didn't want to be disturbed.

'I'm not the type,' she said, 'that men want to pick up.'

'Most men are conservative.'

In a moment, her eyes still on me, 'I think we have a lot in common. You're very disciplined. So am I.'

'I don't take it. But I could give it.'

'I'm more complicated,' she said, 'than that.'

I looked for the boy in the apron. 'Would you like some more coffee?'

'No. I'm going now. Will you come with me?'

'Of course.'

Underberg, black, bitter, gold-rimmed on the surface, the German version of Fernet Branca, lighter but not much, in a shot-glass, scented, viscid.

Light came from slits in a shutter, blue light falling across black leather, black silk, turning the smoke milky, the tendril of smoke curling from the incense in the black lacquer bowl. A single gold eye, fixed in the brow of a mask on the wall, watched.

'There are these,' she said, the blue light dwelling on pale skin and the darkness of coarse hair, the shadows sculpting the long lines of muscle.

Metal glinted, chased, knurled, cloisonne; the smell of leather came into the air, underlying the sandalwood and the emanations from her body.

'Where did you get them?'

'I collect them.'

It wasn't an answer. Heat came in waves from a floor unit, the thermostat cutting on and off.

'How did you get them through the customs?'

'Are you serious? They were smuggled in from Poland.'

Faintly, from inside the building, the voice of the guardian. Someone coming in late.

'Feel this,' she said. 'Feel it now.'

The thermostat cut on, cut off. Try this one, look how they made it. Have you ever seen such imagination? There was no fierceness in her now, in this different aspect of her obsessiveness; she became loosened, languid, pliant. I wasn't uninterested; the libido is linked with the urgent needs of the psyche, not the body, and there were the same dark reaches in her that were in me, the same urge to go beyond the knowable. Here was the demesne not of Eros but Thanatos, and this had nothing to do with the creation of life, but with the expression of the fear of death.