The Innocent Read Free Page A

acid bath. The paintwork was rough to the touch. From the interior all comforts had been stripped away: the ashtrays, the carpets, the plastic moldings round the door handles, even the gearstick knob. The silencer was deficient, or had been tampered with to enhance the effect of a serious military machine.
    A blur of road surface was visible through a perfectly round hole in the floor. In this cold and resonating shell of tin they were creeping under the bridges of the Anhalter Bahnhof at a roar. Glass’s method was to put the car in fourth and drive it like an automatic. At nineteen miles an hour the frame was shuddering. The pace was not timid but proprietorial; Glass clenched the top of the wheel in both hands and fiercely surveyed pedestrians and other drivers. His beard was raised up. He was an American, and this was the American sector.
    Once they were on the wider run of Gneisenau Strasse, Glass opened out to twenty-five miles an hour and moved his right hand off the steering wheel to grip the stem of the gearstick.
    “Now,” he called out, settling deeper into his seat like a jet pilot. “We’re heading south to Altglienicke. We’ve built a radar station just across from the Russian sector. You’ve heard of the AN/APR9? No? It’s an advanced receiver. The Soviets have an airbase nearby, at Schönefeld. We’ll be picking up their emissions.”
    Leonard was uneasy. He knew nothing about radar. At the G.P.O. research laboratories his work had been in telephones.
    “Your stuff is in a room there. You’ll have testing facilities. Anything you want, you tell me, okay? You don’t ask anyone else. Is that clear?”
    Leonard nodded. He stared ahead, sensing a terrible mistake. But he knew from experience that it was poor policy to express doubts about a procedure until it was absolutely necessary. The reticent made, or appeared to make, fewer mistakes.
    They were approaching a red light. Glass dropped his speed to fifteen before riding the clutch until they had stopped. Then he shifted to neutral. He turned right around in his seat to face his silent passenger. “Come on, Marnham. Leonard. For Chrissakes, loosen up. Speak to me. Say something.” Leonard was about to say he knew nothing about radar, but Glass was embarked on a series of indignant questions. “Are you married or what? Where did you go to school? What do you like? What do you think?” It was the changing light and the search for first gear that interrupted him.
    In his orderly fashion, Leonard dealt with the questions in reciprocal sequence. “No, I’m not married. Haven’t even been close to it. I’m still living at home. I went to Birmingham University, where I did electronics. I found out last night that I like German beer. And what I think is that if you want someone to look at radar equipment—”
    Glass raised his hand. “Don’t tell me. It all comes back to that asshole Sheldrake. We’re not going to a radar station, Leonard. You know that. I know that. The aerial on the roof connects to nothing. But you don’t have level three clearance yet. So we are going to a radar station. The screwup, the real humiliation, is going to come at the gate. They’re not going to let you through. But that’s my problem. You like girls, Leonard?”
    “Well, yes, actually, I do, as a matter of fact.”
    “Fine. We’ll do something together tonight.”
    Within twenty minutes they were leaving the suburbs for flat, charmless countryside. There were large brown fields divided by ditches choked with sodden, matted grasses, and there were bare, solitary trees and telegraph poles. The farmhouses crouched low in their domains with their backs to the road. Up muddy tracks were half-built houses on reclaimed portions of fields—the new suburbs. There was even a half-built apartment building rising from the center of a field. Further on, right by the roadside, were shacks of recycled wood and corrugated tin which, Glass explained, belonged to refugees