The Berlin Assignment (35 page)

Hanbury realized that behind the veneer of happy enthusiasm existed a woman who had managed to triumph over her past. “I'm sorry. I didn't want to bring up bad memories.”

Zella smiled. “No complaints. I had friends there. Real ones. It's been more difficult since. Deep down I still live in Yellowknife.”

Afterwards they walked along the Ku'damm where decorated trees twinkled. The temperature had dropped below freezing and Hanbury wrapped a protective arm around Zella. Occasionally, as in the taxi where she sat half-turned to glance backwards through the window, she looked behind. “Looking for Santa?” he joked.

Back in the bungalow, Hanbury placed a disc in the stereo and joined Zella on the sofa where they sipped champagne. At a certain moment their communication became wordless and a gentle kissing began. Immodest chuckling initiated a game of I-dare-you-to-go-further. A shirt and a blouse became unbuttoned. After more unspoken signalling they left a trail of clothing on the floor and made their way to Tony's bed.

The whole next day spent roaming through Berlin, Zella was excited as a schoolgirl. She loved Schloss Charlottenburg, was
overwhelmed by the bust of Queen Nefertiti on show across the street, trilled out sounds of joy on the Christmas market next to the ruin of the Memorial Church and spent so much buying trinkets that she joked she could soon open a stand in a Turkish bazaar. The cold, dry weather was holding. Happily swinging their plastic shopping bags, in step and arm in arm, they retraced their Ku'damm walk of the night before.

“Are there security problems here?” Zella asked casually. Hanbury said there were instances of coloured people being assaulted by skinheads.

“I mean, for you. Diplomats. Do you have security escorts?”

“Only the Israeli and the Turk, I think.”

“I have the feeling someone is keeping an eye on us.”

“Nonsense. That used to happen on the other side of the Wall. Those days are gone.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I worked in the Crypt once. We were trained to be aware of our surroundings. Yesterday I thought the same car was behind us the whole way in from the airport. Last night, when we walked, I wasn't sure, but the same figure seemed never far away. Today there's someone fiddling with a map always in the middle distance.”

Hanbury made light of it. Investitures was following her, he joked. Someone dispatched by Irving Heywood was making sure she would take up the Ankara assignment. He was about to begin a slow turn, as in the old days on Alexanderplatz, but Zella, laughing aloud with a sudden show of mirth, stopped him. The grip she put on him was fierce. Rising on her toes to kiss his cheek she gave a cold order. “Don't let them know we know they're there. Keep walking. Tell me your life story. Make it silly.” Her fingers sunk into his arm like talons.

Once more they walked. When Hanbury had collected himself, he said, “My life story? If written down it would be the thinnest book on earth. This is crazy, Zella.” She giggled at what he said, gripping his arm once more. “If you don't believe me, at least pretend. Let me feel
better. Let's play we're going to give them the slip.” Hanbury was ready to do that much for Zella. “Of course!” he roared with side-splitting laughter. He swung the shopping bag – heavy with ceramic Christmas ornaments, wood carved candlesticks and pewter angels – exuberantly at his side. “Know the subway system?” Zella grinned. “Is there a station where lines cross?” She threw her arm around him and snuggled her head against his shoulder. “Lots do,” he said, hugging Zella with his free arm. “OK,” she smiled. “Time for the rails. Do as I say.”

Filled with the spirit of the season, they went into the underground and studied the transport map. Even Hanbury noticed someone dressed in grey with a street map arriving on the platform. Zella wanted to be shown the connections. They made a show of tracing a journey. Zella liked the confluence of lines at Wittenbergplatz. The train came. The platform cleared. At the next stop they stepped off and followed a passage over and around to a connecting line to Wittenbergplatz. The figure appeared too, and took his turn studying a schema on the wall of train lines. On a new train as it rumbled off, Zella explained what would happen next. “We'll get onto a connecting train at the next station and when the doors close we jump. You double over with laughter and point in the opposite direction. We'll see if he gets off. Even if he doesn't make it, stay in character. It doesn't mean we're out of the woods. There's such a thing as double-teaming.” It sounded like she was quoting a paragraph in a manual that exists in numbered copies only in the Crypt.

“Zella,” Hanbury argued, “it may not even be single teaming. Why would we be followed? Those days are over, here. That stint in the Crypt has done things to your imagination. In a big city there's always somebody behind you.”

“Keep laughing,” Zella warned with a sweet look. “No one should go through life without one assignment in the Crypt. You get a clearer view of human nature.”

At Wittenbergplatz they did it like professionals. They got on a train to Ruhleben. When a mechanism hissed Zella yanked Hanbury out as the doors were slamming shut. On cue he burst into laughter and pointed at the opposite rails. A platform attendant harangued them.
Mensch! Sie sollten zurückbleiben!
Idiots! You're supposed to stay back! The attendant looked up and down the train. All the doors were sealed. He signalled the all clear and the train rolled off. “Sorry,” Hanbury shouted. “Wrong direction.” The attendant, resigned to having witnessed yet another near death on his platform, dismissed them with a wave.

Zella and Tony took a train east. At the next underground hub they made yet another connection, this one north. Numerous people were changing trains and Zella was uncertain whether double-teaming was taking place. But once off at Friedrichstrasse and going up to ground level, she had no more doubts. There they stood entirely alone. “Did a plague pass through?” Zella asked in the middle of the deserted street. Cranes were motionless and bulldozers in the pits stood around like toys forgotten in a sand box. “You'd notice if someone was on your tail around here.” The solitude relaxed her.

The afternoon brought more exclamations of childlike joy from Zella, first as she stood before the trays of pastries in the Opera Café, then, half an hour later, on the steps of the ancient altar of Pergamon in the museum. She showed a proprietary interest there in a relief map of Asia Minor which portrayed important Turkish archaeological sites. “All waiting for me,” she said. In the afternoon's descending darkness, after a beer in the Nikolaiviertel and a bus up the Prenzlauer Allee – Zella casually confirming no one was behind them – they walked a short distance to the Gethsemane Church. Inside, with a few other early arrivals for the service, Hanbury explained that East Berliners had marched from here to topple a communist regime. Zella, impressed, studied the ceiling.

The church filled to standing room only. Between Christmas carols belted into the holy night, the preacher spoke about freedom, their gratitude for the gift of German reunification, the need for patience to make it work, and the necessity for vigilance against too much power ever again being held by the state. Afterwards, in a boisterous Prenzlauerberg pub populated by other refugees from Christmas Eve, Zella asked about the preacher's sermon. The stillness as he spoke had impressed her. “Even Christmas around here is political,” she concluded when Hanbury finished explaining.

Later, in the bungalow, Zella motioned to keep the front room dark while she studied the street and the parked cars. “Phantom viewing?” Hanbury asked with a hand on the light switch. Zella concentrated like an animal sensing danger. With a shrug she turned and flicked a finger, a sign for Hanbury to flip the switch. “All the world's a stage and I'm in charge of lighting,” he said. A disc went into the stereo. “Theme music for the play you're producing,” he joked. “What is our play, Zella? A spy thriller? A light comedy?”

Hanbury's lack of alarm threw a switch in Zella too. She approached, intertwining her fingers with his. “How about something adult?” she said. But on the sofa she talked about the church service again. It had moved her. She wondered how the people there had survived Communism. She had met several Russian ambassadors in her day who always had an air of distance. She said she often thought of Russia, especially its lack of stability. It worried her.

“I was pretty close to what was going on in Russia in the Priory,” Hanbury replied. “Some of the information in classified reports I read was frightening.” The disc had run its course. He stood up to replace it with something lighter. “Take all that uranium and plutonium that's sitting around,” he said. “Weapons-grade nuclear material like that has value.” Zella, shaking her head at absurd, yet real and frightening possibilities, agreed. “I know it's possible to buy it,” she said. “There's
dealers around. There's a market for it.” Music once more came out of the speakers. “We'll leave that problem to the CIA,” Hanbury declared. “Do we really want to talk about that? I have a Christmas present for you.” He produced a small hand-painted porcelain bowl from Meissen. Zella was deeply touched.

The next day, before she did anything, before even putting on a robe, Zella got up, went to the front room and studied the cars on the street. Afterwards she crawled back into bed. “What was that about?” he asked, reaching for her. “A weather check.” “It must be freezing out there. It's cooled you right off. Come here.”

After breakfast, they went walking in the Grunewald. “I took a look at the parked cars this morning,” Zella said. “About thirty metres down the street one of them had someone inside studying your house. The same car was there last night, but I couldn't see if it was occupied. When we left just now, the car was gone, but another one, same model, was parked in the other direction, also someone in it.”

“Someone waiting for his girlfriend,” Hanbury said.

“Would you mind stopping to retie your shoe?”

“Sure, Zella. Want me to switch socks while I'm at it?” He bent down. Zella took a few more steps, then turned to watch him. “Well,” he asked. “More phantoms?”

“Somebody back there just stopped.”

They continued their walk, taking side trails deep into the forest. Eventually, if there had been a phantom, he was gone. As they came out the forest Zella, masking premonitions about distant apparitions, asked breezily, “What's on tonight?”

“How about a transvestite show?”

“Perfect!” she cried, clapping her hands.

“I know one in a nice neighbourhood.”

Later in the day on the way there, they repeated the routine of jumping from a train as doors were closing. “Just in case,” she said grimly.

That evening the transvestites – one of them, Hanbury supposed, was Sturm's Juliette – were in top form. Lithe, slender-limbed men. They had the neighbourhood audience in stitches. Hanbury was a failure at translating their repartee, but Zella, drinking glass after glass, rose above the limitations of language and developed transexual empathy. The Juliettes made her fight tears. “If I could live in a neighbourhood like this I'd stop travelling,” she said during a break. “I'd settle down and get to know my neighbours. They're wonderful.”

In the early hours they crawled first into a taxi and then directly into bed.

“No checking of parked cars?” Hanbury asked in the darkness.

“It's over tomorrow,” Zella murmured. “I'm going to miss this.”

“The phantoms too?”

“I guess we'll find out if it's you or me they're after.”

“I'm sure it's me,” he said pensively. “No one would tangle with you.”

“No more talking,” Zella whispered. “Let's get close. I want to feel you.”

The next morning, Zella instructed the taxi driver to head for Bahnhof Zoo. “But you're flying.”

“The railway station,” she said firmly. They entered Bahnhof Zoo quickly. At the last moment, Zella turned from the stairs going up to the railway lines and dragged him down into the underground. They took the first train that came along, went one stop and got off. “I think you're taking this a little far,” he complained.

“No. We were being followed again. I don't want them to know I'm flying. A computer could figure out in seconds which passengers today arrived three days ago. My name would jump out in neon lights. I don't know if it's you or me, but something's going on. We're supposed to report stuff like this.”

“It's the Russians wanting to recruit you because of your experience in the Crypt.”

“Don't make jokes like that, not about the Crypt.”

“No? They must die laughing reading reports on people like us.”

In the next taxi, this time to the airport, Zella became more relaxed after a few checks through the back window turned up nothing. At the terminal she kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I had a lovely time.”

Hanbury kissed her back. “Christmas would have been dreary without you. You made the days come alive. I got used to you being there day and night. I'll remember it.”

“My turn next to show you an exciting place,” she said warmly.

“Yellowknife?”

“You're on.”

“I guess that's it then.”

“I hoped it would be like it was. You've got your career, Tony. I have mine. We intersected for three days. You made me feel good about myself. Thank you.”

Hanbury kissed her other cheek.

“One last thing. Stop trusting. Look over your shoulder. Think about what's coming at you from behind.”

At the gate she blew him a final kiss and disappeared. Hanbury felt empty. Performing a slow turn, he scanned the area, but no one in a grey coat and fiddling with a map was anywhere in sight.