Spy Line Read Free Page B

understand and the other two swerved out into the road as if to get behind us.
    My gun was in my hand without my making any conscious decision about needing it. I reached out and steadied myself against the cold stone wall as I took aim.
    ‘Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!’ I heard Werner shout with a note of horrified alarm that was so unfamiliar that I froze.
    It was at that moment that I felt the sharp blow as Werner’s arm knocked my gun up.
    ‘They’re just kids, Bernie. Just kids!’
    The boys ran on past us shouting and shoving and jostling as they played some ritual of which we were not a part. I put away my gun and said, ‘I’m getting jumpy.’
    ‘You over-reacted,’ said Werner. ‘I do it all the time.’ But he looked at me in a way that belied his words. The car was at the kerbside. I climbed in beside him. Werner said, ‘Why not put the gun into the glove compartment?’
    ‘Because I might want to shoot somebody,’ I said, irrit able at being treated like a child, although by then I should have become used to Werner’s nannying. He shrugged and switched the heater on so that a blast of hot air hit me. We sat there in silence for a moment. I was trembling, the warmth comforted me. Huge silver coins smacked against the windscreen glass, turned to icy slush and then dribbled away. It was a red VW Golf that the dealer had lent him while hisnew BMW was being repaired. He still didn’t drive away: we sat there with the engine running. Werner was watching his mirror and waiting until all other traffic was clear. Then he let in the clutch and, with a squeal of injured rubber, he did a U-turn and sped away, cutting through the backstreets, past the derelict railway yards to Yorckstrasse and then to my squat in Kreuzberg.
    Beyond the snow clouds the first light of day was peering through the narrow lattice of morning. There was no room in the sky for pink or red. Berlin’s dawn can be bleak and colourless, like the grey stone city which reflects its light.
    My pad was not in that part of Kreuzberg that is slowly being yuppified with smart little eating places, and apartment blocks with newly painted front doors that ask you who you are when you press the bell push. Kreuzberg 36 was up against the Wall: a place where the cops walked in pairs and stepped carefully over the winos and the excrement.
    We passed a derelict apartment block that had been patched up to house ‘alternative’ ventures: shops for bean sprouts and broken bicycles, a cooperative kindergarten, a feminist art gallery and a workshop that printed Marxist books, pamphlets and leaflets; mostly leaflets. In the street outside this block – dressed in traditional Turkish clothes, face obscured by a scarf – there was a young woman diligently spraying a slogan on the wall.
    The block in which I was living had on its façade two enormous angels wielding machine guns and surrounded by men in top hats standing under huge irregular patches of colour that was the underpainting for clouds. It was to have been a gigantic political mural called ‘the massacre of the innocents’ but the artist died of a drug overdose soon after getting the money for the paint.
    Werner insisted upon coming inside with me. He wanted to make sure that no unfriendly visitor was waiting to surprise me in my little apartment which opened off the rear courtyard. ‘You needn’t worry about that, Werner,’ I told him.‘I don’t think the Department will locate me here, and even if they did, would Frank find anyone stouthearted enough to venture into this part of town?’
    ‘Better safe than sorry,’ said Werner. From the other end of the hallway there came the sound of Indian music. Werner opened the door cautiously and switched on the light. It was a bare low-wattage bulb suspended from the ceiling. He looked round the squalid room; the paper was hanging off the damp plaster and my bed was a dirty mattress and a couple of blankets. On the wall there was a tattered poster: a