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The house in Schoneberg chosen for the meeting had
been used on several previous occasions, and had long
been considered one of the safest locations in the city. It
had not proved so the previous evening however. KGB
men had apparently followed Mironenko to the house,
and then attempted to break the party up. There was
nobody to testify to what had happened subsequently
- both the men who had accompanied Cripps, one of
them Ballard's old colleague Odell - were dead; Cripps
himself was in a coma.
'And Mironenko?' Ballard inquired.
Suckling shrugged. They took him home to the
Motherland, presumably,' he said.
Ballard caught a whiff of deceit off the man.
Tm touched that you're keeping me up to date,' he
said to Suckling. 'But why?
'You and Odell were friends, weren't you?' came the
reply. 'With Cripps out of the picture you don't have
many of those left.'
'Is that so?'
'No offence intended,' Suckling said hurriedly. 'But
you've got a reputation as a maverick.'
'Get to the point,' said Ballard.
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'There is no point,' Suckling protested. 'I just thought
you ought to know what had happened. I'm putting my
neck on the line here.'
'Nice try,' said Ballard. He stopped walking. Suckling
wandered on a pace or two before turning to find Ballard
grinning at him.
'Who sent you?'
'Nobody sent me,' Suckling said.
'Clever to send the court gossip. I almost fell for it.
You're very plausible.'
 There wasn't enough fat on Suckling's face to hide
the tic in his cheek.
'What do they suspect me of? Do they think I'm
conniving with Mironenko, is that it? No, I don't think
they're that stupid.'
Suckling shook his head, like a doctor in the presence
of some incurable disease. 'You like making enemies?'
he said.
'Occupational hazard. I wouldn't lose any sleep over
it. I don't.'
'There's changes in the air,' Suckling said. 'I'd make
sure you have your answers ready.'
'Fuck the answers,' Ballard said courteously. 'I think
it's about time I worked out the right questions.'
Sending Suckling to sound him out smacked of des-
peration. They wanted inside information; but about
what? Could they seriously believe he had some
involvement with Mironenko; or worse, with the
RGB itself? He let his resentment subside; it was
stirring up too much mud, and he needed clear water
if he was to find his way free of this confusion. In
one regard, Suckling was perfectly correct: he did have
enemies, and with Cripps indisposed he was vulnerable.
In such circumstances there were two courses of action.
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He could return to London, and there lie low, or wait
around in Berlin to see what manoeuvre they tried next.
He decided on the latter. The charm of hide-and-seek
was rapidly wearing thin.
As he turned North onto Leibnizstrasse he caught the
reflection of a grey-coated man in a shop window. It was
a glimpse, no more, but he had the feeling that he knew
the fellow's face. Had they put a watch-dog onto him,
he wondered? He turned, and caught the man's eye,
holding it. The suspect seemed embarrassed, and looked
away. A performance perhaps; and then again, perhaps
not. It mattered little, Ballard thought. Let them watch
him all they liked. He was guiltless. If indeed there was
such a condition this side of insanity.
A strange happiness had found Sergei Mironenko; hap-
piness that came without rhyme or reason, and filled his
heart up to overflowing.
Only the previous day circumstances had seemed
unendurable. The aching in his hands and head and
spine had steadily worsened, and was now accompanied
by an itch so demanding he'd had to snip his nails to the
flesh to prevent himself doing serious damage. His body,
he had concluded, was in revolt against him. It was that
thought which he had tried to explain to Ballard: that he
was divided from himself, and feared that he would soon
be torn apart. But today the fear had gone.
Not so the pains. They were, if anything, worse than
they'd been yesterday. His sinews and ligaments ached
as if they'd been exercised beyond the limits of their
design; there were bruises at all his joints, where blood
had broken its banks beneath the skin. But that sense
of imminent rebellion had disappeared, to be replaced
with a dreamy peacefulness. And at its heart, such
happiness.
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When he tried to think back over recent events,
to work out what had cued this transformation, his
memory played tricks. He had been called to meet with
Ballard's superior; that he remembered. Whether he had
gone to the meeting, he did not. The night was a blank.
Ballard would know how things stood, he reasoned.
He had liked and trusted the Englishman from the
beginning, sensing that despite the many differences
between them they were more alike than not. If he let
his instinct lead, he would find Ballard, of that he was
certain. No doubt the Englishman would be surprised to
see him; even angered at first. But when he told Ballard
of this new-found happiness surely his trespasses would
be forgiven?
Ballard dined late, and drank until later still in The
Ring, a small transvestite bar which he had been
first taken to by Odell almost two decades ago.
No doubt his guide's intention had been to prove
his sophistication by showing his raw colleague the
decadence of Berlin, but Ballard, though he never felt
any sexual frisson in the company of The Ring's clientele,
had immediately felt at home here. His neutrality was
respected; no attempts were made to solicit him. He
was simply left to drink and watch the passing parade
of genders.
Coming here tonight raised the ghost of Odell, whose
name would now be scrubbed from conversation
because of his involvement with the Mironenko affair.
Ballard had seen this process at work before. History
did not forgive failure, unless it was so profound as to
achieve a kind of grandeur. For the Odells of the world
- ambitious men who had found themselves through
little fault of their own in a cul-de-sac from which all
retreat was barred - for such men there would be no
175
fine words spoken nor medals struck. There would only
be oblivion.
It made him melancholy to think of this, and he
drank heavily to keep his thoughts mellow, but when
- at two in the morning - he stepped out on to the
street his depression was only marginally dulled. The
good burghers of Berlin were well a-bed; tomorrow was
another working day. Only the sound of traffic from the
Kurfurstendamm offered sign of life somewhere near.
He made his way towards it, his thoughts fleecy.
Behind him, laughter. A young man - glamorously
dressed as a starlet - tottered along the pavement arm
in arm with his unsmiling escort. Ballard recognised
the transvestite as a regular at the bar; the client, to
judge by his sober suit, was an out-of-towner slaking
his thirst for boys dressed as girls behind his wife's back.
Ballard picked up his pace. The young man's laughter,
its musicality patently forced, set his teeth on edge.
He heard somebody running nearby; caught a shadow
moving out of the corner of his eye. His watch-dog, most
likely. Though alcohol had blurred his instincts, he felt
some anxiety surface, the root of which he couldn't fix.
He walked on. Featherlight tremors ran in his scalp.
A few yards on, he realised that the laughter from
the street behind him had ceased. He glanced over
his shoulder, half-expecting to see the boy and his
customer embracing. But both had disappeared; slipped
off down one of the alleyways, no doubt, to conclude
their contract in darkness. Somewhere near, a dog had
begun to bark wildly. Ballard turned round to look back
the way he'd come, daring the deserted street to display
its secrets to him. Whatever was arousing the buzz in his
head and the itch on his palms, it was no commonplace
anxiety. There was something wrong with the street,
despite its show of innocence; it hid terrors.
176
The bright lights of the Kurfurstendamm were no
more than three minutes' walk away, but he didn't want [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]