'Is that so? The way I heard it she was whoring for him.'

'I don't think so,' I said. He opened a simple but beautifully made wooden box. From it he took a sword and held it up to me. 'Personally inscribed as a presentation sword for General Hoyotaro Kimura.'

I looked at it and nodded my appreciation. But swords all look very alike to pacifists like me.

Perhaps sensing that, he added, 'Burma: the commander of the Japanese 15th Army.'

'Yes,' I said as he put the sword away in its box again.

'You were always sweet on her. In Berlin . . . when you were a teenager doing little jobs for your Dad. I remember you were mad about her then.'

'No,' I said. Harry looked at me with raised eyebrow. 'We were just kids,' I said. 'Silly teenagers.'

'Not her. She'd grown up in a hurry. Women had to grow up fast in Berlin in those funny old times. She was jumping into bed with everyone who beckoned. Five cigarettes a time is the way I heard it. American cigarettes.'

'You always were a romantic,' I said.

'And you always were a pragmatist, weren't you, Bernard?'

'I don't know; I've never pragmarred.'

'You didn't come down here so that your kids could play hide-and-seek among my dead cabbages. And to get a bellyful of canned lager and that lousy rubber quiche, which I notice even you didn't finish.'

'Why did I come?' I said.

He stared at me and furrowed his brow as if thinking about it for the first time. 'Perhaps because I spent nearly five years sitting in the Deputy Director-General's office filling in his appointment books and keeping the riffraff at bay. That's usually why Department people want to see me out of office hours.'

So there were others? He'd only been retired five minutes. Or did he mean before retirement? 'Never a social call?'

'Sometimes. But not from you, Bernard. You are not a starry-eyed teenager any longer. You haven't been starry-eyed for a long time. You've changed a lot.' I wanted to explain but he waved me silent. He'd warmed to the idea of guessing what I had come to discuss with him. 'Which year would it be . . . ' he said, as if thinking aloud. 'It won't be anything about your Dad. I wasn't there at the right time to have ever dealt with your Dad's personal files. No, it will be something about that time when the German Desk fell vacant, and you and Dicky Cruyer were the contenders for it.' He looked at me and smiled. 'You had a lot of ardent supporters, Bernard. Let me say it — you were the best man for the job. Is that what you wanted to know about? The arguments and the meetings and how the old man finally turned you down for it?'

The pained smile was back on his leathery face. His eyes moved as if he was daring me to say yes. As if he could provide me with some remarkable and scandalous facts if I wanted to hear them.

'It wasn't about that,' I said.

'No?' His face was set in that jovial but omnipotent grimace that you see in cheap bronze Buddhas. After his field work he'd come to the office and ended up as a not-unusual example of the Eton Oxbridge Buddha class: sadistic, self-sufficient apparatchiks who controlled Whitehall by stealth, wealth and consanguinity and — no matter how friendly — inevitably closed ranks against intruders like me. Could I have become a Harry Strang? A close friend of my father, Silas Gaunt, had put my name down for Eton and offered to pay the fees, but my self-made father was strongly opposed to having his son made into a janissary who would fight the battles of the ruling class. Better, said my father, that I remained with my family, went to the local school with the Berlin boys I played with in the street. My father told his friends (although he never told me) that I would grow up with such an intimacy with Germany and Germans that I would inevitably rise to become Director-General.

Well, Dad proved wrong. A Berlin school — even if you were the top scholar there — was no preparation for Whitehall. Or for boys like Harry Strang and Dicky Cruyer, who had grown up learning how to survive the loves, tear-, and terrors of expensive English boys' boarding schools; learning how to conceal all human feelings until they faded and stopped coming back.

'No,' I said. 'I want to know about the night we brought my wife out of the East.'

'What can I tell you about that, Bernard? You were there. You shot the bastards who trapped her. You brought her to Helmstedt and safety.'

'I need some background,' I said. 'Who gave the order? Who chose that night for it?'

'You remember. There was that fancy-dress party . . . Half Berlin was celebrating at Tante Lisl's hotel. It was perfect timing.'

'There must have been a written order?'

'No. It would have been left to the people on the spot,'

'I don't think so, Harry,' I said. 'Frank Harrington, the Berlin Rezident, was technically the senior man. He certainly didn't know it was happening until the Sunday morning. Dicky Cruyer, from London, was at the party. He came out to find me and ask what was happening. Who gave the order, Harry? It would require at least twenty-four hours to fix up all the preparations. There was a chopper waiting at Helmstedt, and the RAF positioned a big transport plane for us. We were flown directly to America that same night. There was a hell of a lot of planning. Interservice planning; you know how long that takes.'

'Yes, you're right. There were a lot of people on stand-by: soldiers, field agents and our own liaison people at the border posts. It's coming back to me now. The RAF were phoning and complaining about the delay. They'd been told to supply a doctor, and after six hours waiting in the transit barracks the quack buggered off to a local bar and got paralytic drunk.'

'So who arranged it all?'

'You did, in effect. You were briefed by Frank weren't you? You went to the rendezvous and blew away two Stasi men, or KGB or whatever they were.'

'Why do you say that?'

'It was in the report you wrote.'

'I never wrote any report.'

'Then you must have told Bret Rensselaer when he debriefed you in California.'

'And he told you?' Harry smiled one of his inscrutable smiles. Artfully he had led the conversation away from my question. 'But I am still curious about who gave the order. When was the decision made? There must have been meetings with someone at top level.'

'There was no time.'

'Even a phone call would have gone into the log, Harry.'

'Not this one.'

'Planting my wife in the DDR was the greatest hit the Department ever scored. It was vital to bring her out happy, healthy and intact. It had to be a story to be told to the politicians, and that means one with a happy ending. The decision about when and how to bring her out was going to be decisive. The D-G would have to be kept informed, even if he didn't give the order.'

'I was the personal assistant to the Deputy, not to the D-G himself The D-D-G was not always a party to the day-to-day operational doings. Especially tricky ones.'

'That famous Strang total recall is letting you down, Harry,' I said. 'You weren't with the Deputy at that time. The D-G's PA was in hospital; you worked for the D-G while the Deputy's secretary filled in for you with the Deputy.'

'What a memory you've got, Bernard,' he said, without demonstrating unbridled admiration or delight. 'Yes, of course, young Morgan was in hospital with gunshot wounds.' He smiled. Morgan — the old man's personal assistant — had suffered multiple minor wounds to his leg when a fellow guest at a weekend shooting party discharged a shotgun by accident. By the time the story got to the office, it was inevitably Morgan's ass that was the target, and in some embellishments it was an irate husband who fired the gun. Harry Strang allowed himself a chuckle; Morgan was not the most popular man in London Central. I waited. I could see that Harry was putting something together in his mind. 'Yes, there were meetings. But I don't know who he was with, or where they took place.'