London Match

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‘I don’t know …’

‘Sure, sure,’ said Lange. ‘I know, you’re not in the Department any more; you’re over here to conduct a concert of Christmas carols for the British garrison.’

‘What did Bret Rensselaer do?’

‘Do? He dismantled three networks that I was running into the Russian Zone. Everything was going smoothly until he arrived. He put a spanner into the works and eventually got London to pack me off to Hamburg.’

‘What was his explanation?’ I persisted.

‘Bret didn’t provide any explanations. You know him better than that. No one could stop him. Bret was only on temporary attachment to us at that time, but he’d been given some piece of paper in London Central that said he could do anything.’

‘And what did my father do?’

‘Your father wasn’t here. They got him out of the way before Bret arrived. I had no one to appeal to; that was part of the setup.’

‘Setup? Were you set up?’ I said.

‘Sure I was set up. Bret was going out to get me. Mine was the only desk in Berlin that was getting good material from the Russians. Jesus. I had a guy in Karlshorst who was bringing me day-to-day material from the Russian commandant’s office. You can’t do better than that.’

‘And he was stopped?’

‘He was one of the first we lost. I went across to the US Army to offer them what I had left, but Bret had already been there. I got the cold shoulder. I had no friends there because of the showdown I’d had with them during the early days. So I went to Hamburg just as London Central wanted.’

‘But you didn’t stay.’

‘In Hamburg? No, I didn’t stay in Hamburg. Berlin is my town, mister. I just went to Hamburg long enough to work my way through my resignation and then I got out. Bret Rensselaer had got what he wanted.’

‘What was that?’

‘He’d showed us what a big shot he was. He’d denazified the Berlin office and wrecked our best networks. “Denazified”, that’s what he called it. Who the hell did he think we could find who would risk their necks prying secrets from the Russkies – Socialists, Communists, left-wing liberals? We had to use ex-Nazis; they were the only pros we had. By the time your dad came back and tried to pick up the pieces, Bret was reading philosophy at some fancy college. Your dad wanted me to work with him again. But I said, “No dice.” I didn’t want to work for London Central, not if I was going to be looking over my shoulder in case Bret came back to breathe fire all over me again. No, sir.’

‘It was my fault, Bernard,’ said Mrs Koby. Again she spoke my name as if it was unfamiliar to her. Perhaps she always felt self-conscious as a German amongst Lange’s American and British friends.

‘No, no, no,’ said Lange.

‘It was my brother,’ she persisted. ‘He came back from the war so sick. He was injured in Hungary just before the end. He had nowhere to go. Lange let him stay with us.’

‘Nah!’ said Lange angrily. ‘It was nothing to do with Stefan.’

‘Stefan was a wonderful boy.’ She said it with heartfelt earnestness as if she was pleading for him.

‘Stefan was a bastard,’ said Lange.

‘You didn’t know him until afterwards … It was the pain, the constant pain that made him so ill-natured. But before he went off to the war he was a kind and gentle boy. Hitler destroyed him.’

‘Oh, sure, blame Hitler,’ said Lange. ‘That’s the style nowadays. Everything was Hitler’s fault. How would Germans manage without the Nazis to blame everything on?’