The Linden Tree Read online

  He made a business of frowning at his watch. ‘Well … perhaps one quick cup – thank you.’

  I nodded pleasantly at the porter who looked at me impassively over her clicking needles, and Kurt led me towards a lift. There was one other passenger in it, and we rode to the top floor in silence. The long corridor was empty, but Kurt put a warning finger to his lips and I followed him silently to a door numbered 6327. He took a key from his pocket, threw the door open and announced heartily: ‘Safely back again then, Comrade. Kind of you to invite me for coffee. I’d appreciate that … Splendid apartment, isn’t it? I very much admire the view …’

  Talking all the time he crossed the bed-sitting-room to the tiny kitchen, turned the cold tap full on and left it splashing water loudly into the sink.

  He made no move to fill the kettle and for a moment I stared at him incredulously. Why on earth leave a tap running?

  But I’d watched thrillers on television, hadn’t I? I’d watched the news, and documentaries. I knew that in cold fact, as well as in fiction, hotel rooms and offices could be bugged. I also knew that by creating a background of noise it was possible to prevent the listening devices from picking up conversations.

  So the apartment that Elisabeth had been loaned for her visit, while its owner was on holiday, was bugged. She was being spied on. But why? Why did the East German officials let her go to the West at all, if they wanted to check on her as closely as that?

  Not that the reasons need concern me. It didn’t matter a pfennig to me why they wanted to listen to her conversations. The fact was that if they were doing so, if they really were checking on her that closely, I hadn’t a hope of getting away with my deception.

  Chapter Eleven

  I followed Kurt to the kitchen. He must have noticed my shocked look, because he gave me one of his rare, reassuring smiles.

  ‘This is probably not necessary,’ he said, close to my ear. ‘But one never knows. It’s always best to take routine precautions.’

  I felt relieved. Perhaps I was worrying for nothing, perhaps Elisabeth wasn’t being watched at all. But Kurt’s matter-of-fact acceptance that anyone’s apartment might be bugged was, I found, distinctly chilling.

  He went back to the sitting-room, hunted for and found a transistor radio, and turned it to music. Then he stood in the kitchen doorway, looking at me with slightly embarrassed approval.

  ‘You have done very well indeed,’ he said. ‘You were utterly convincing. But then, I believe that you are an actress? Frankly, when I had a message from Allen to say that he knew a girl who would be able to take Elisabeth’s place so that she could stay longer in the West, I was sceptical. But he insisted that you would be perfect in every way, and now I know that he was right.’

  ‘Thank you – but I’m not too happy about it,’ I said glumly. ‘That officer at the checkpoint –’

  ‘Yes, that was an awkward moment. I was ready to deal with any official questioning, but I was not prepared for an officer who took a fancy to you! He wasn’t on duty when I took Elisabeth through, and we must hope that he won’t be there tomorrow. But really, you dealt with him splendidly. Half your task is done now, so you can relax. I’m afraid that you will probably find it very dull here on your own until tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s what Nicolas said. Still,’ I glanced round the room, ‘there are books, television, the radio – I shall be able to pass the time. Would you really like some coffee, by the way? It seems a pity to waste all that water.’

  ‘Please don’t bother – it will help to occupy your time when I’ve gone.’ He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘You are an old friend of Allen, I believe?’

  ‘We knew each other as children. We haven’t met for years, though.’

  ‘But now that you have met again, your friendship has resumed?’ He tried some jocular gallantry. ‘Don’t deny it, I could see that for myself!’

  I knew that my colour was rising. ‘I like him very much.’

  ‘And he finds you very attractive. Well, this means that there will be a happy ending to this adventure of yours. I’m sure he will be waiting anxiously for your return tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, he won’t actually …’

  I hesitated. Although Kurt was a man I could trust, Nicolas had so insistently drummed into my head the ‘need to know’ principle that I instinctively stopped myself from blurting out the fact that Nicolas wouldn’t be waiting for me because he had another job to do. I coloured again, knowing that even those few words, coupled with my awkward stumble into silence, had already given far too much away.

  But Kurt came immediately to my rescue. ‘Please don’t think that I was trying to test you!’ he protested, smiling. ‘Though I’m glad to see that Allen has trained you well – but that’s understandable. He has an excellent reputation and a bright career ahead of him, I’m sure of that.’

  ‘Has he?’ Ridiculously, considering the shortness of the time we had spent together, I felt strange without Nicolas by my side; almost as though I had lost a limb. I found myself eager to discuss him, in compensation.

  ‘He doesn’t talk about his job, of course,’ I went on, choosing my words with care, ‘except to grumble about being used as an errand boy.’

  ‘He’s a little more than that, I assure you! We’ve worked in co-operation on several occasions, and I’ve always been most impressed by him. That’s why I was so glad to have the opportunity to meet him today for the first time.’

  ‘He doesn’t come to East Berlin, then?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. His work is in the West, screening East Germans who ask for political asylum. Oh, I imagine that he knows East Berlin, but there are people on this side who would very much like to get their hands on him, so if he comes here he does it very quietly. A professionally inconspicuous man, your friend Nicolas Allen!’

  Kurt looked at his watch. ‘I have to go now. I think you will find that Elisabeth has left you everything that you will need. If you want exercise, by all means stroll to the end of the block, but otherwise please stay quietly here. Oh, and don’t let that porter involve you in conversation, she’s a gossip – and worse.’

  ‘Worse?’

  He shrugged. ‘These are government apartments and she’s a government employee. You might say that it’s part of her job to gossip … But as Elisabeth Lorenz who has just visited her dying grandmother, you have a perfect excuse for being uncommunicative. Don’t forget that, will you?’

  Kurt turned off the tap and lowered the volume of the radio.

  ‘Thank you so much for the coffee, Comrade,’ he said clearly. ‘Until tomorrow morning, then – please be ready at ten twenty-five exactly.’

  He handed me the key of the apartment and smiled, the shyness lifting from his brown eyes. Then, in the old German fashion, he took my hand and bowed over it stiffly before letting himself out.

  I watched him go, and as I did so I knew exactly what had been subconsciously bothering me about the way he was dressed.

  His clothes reminded me strangely of the clothes that Nicolas had worn.

  Not in colour, material or age. Kurt was wearing a plain grey town suit, made of some kind of ersatz worsted; from the sharpness of the creases it looked almost new, though the quality of the cloth would never stand up to the kind of wear that Nicolas’s suit had weathered. No, the similarity between their clothes was in the cut.

  That was it, of course! The clothes of the East Berliners had been conspicuously different from those of the West because of a time-lag in fashion. In terms of fashion, crossing the Wall had set me back years. The girls in the East were wearing mini-skirts, the men narrow trousers.

  Kurt’s new suit had narrow trousers; so had Nicolas’s old suit.

  In fashion-conscious West Berlin, the cut of Nicolas’s suit had made him look drably outdated. That might even have been why he preferred to eat at a pavement restaurant, rather than go indoors under the brighter lights. But if he came over here, to East Berlin, there would be nothing remarkab
le about his appearance at all …

  What was it Kurt had said? ‘… A professionally inconspicuous man, your friend Mr Allen …’

  And what had Nicolas said at the restaurant last night when he was telling me about his job? Something about it being a good career – as long as you remembered to keep a low profile.

  And then … then he’d said something about being used for target practice.

  I hadn’t had the sense to see it at the time. I’d been too worried about my impersonation of Elisabeth, and I’d even thought bitterly of Nicolas enjoying himself in West Berlin while I was in danger in the East. Instead of that, he was almost certainly coming here himself – possibly he was here already, somewhere out on the streets of East Berlin, where Kurt had said there were people who wanted to get their hands on him.

  Or, as he’d said himself, people who wanted to use him for target practice.

  Nicolas was in far greater danger than I was. And in the moment when I realized it I found myself forced to acknowledge that – even though he had another girl-friend, even though I knew that he was simply making use of me – the sick sensation of anguish in my heart was occasioned quite simply by love.

  The day dragged.

  I made myself some coffee, then wandered round the apartment looking at books and newspapers and came to the conclusion that Ilse Schmidt, whose home it was, was a teacher of mathematics and an enthusiastic member of the East German Communist Party.

  Then I had lunch. Elisabeth had kindly shopped for me before she left, and I found butter, cheese and eggs in the refrigerator, bread and apples in the cabinet. She herself had left hardly any traces of her occupation, except for the suitcase beside the bed, and I wondered how she had passed the time in the confines of the room.

  After I had eaten, washed up everything I could find and cleaned the sink meticulously, I could bear the inactivity no longer and decided to go out for a walk. I patted my hair into place, slung Elisabeth’s raincoat round my shoulders and went down to the entrance hall. Fortunately the porter was busy with a tenant who was complaining volubly about a blocked sink and I was able to walk past without being involved in conversation, but her sharp eyes swivelled as I passed. There was no doubt that she missed very little.

  The straight lines and depressingly solid architecture of Lenin Allee made it an unexciting place for a walk. I would very much have preferred to explore the more interesting parts of East Berlin – but not in the persona of Elisabeth Lorenz. Kurt had advised me to go no further than the end of the block, and that was exactly what I did. And as I walked, conscious all the time that East Berlin was an alarmingly foreign foreign city, I tried to imagine that Nicolas, in his inconspicuous suit, was somewhere near, keeping a friendly eye on me.

  It was foolish to imagine that he might be in Lenin Allee, of course. It would have been a pointless activity for him to watch over me, a waste of his professional time. But at least it took my mind off the uneasy possibility that my movements might be watched by anyone else.

  Trying to remember that I was Elisabeth Lorenz from Thuringia, in the city for perhaps the first time, I made a point of slowing my pace on the way back and lingering to look in the windows of the stores. The displays were attractive, but there was none of the quantity, the frivolity, the quality, the variety, the extravagance that I had seen in the stores of West Berlin.

  I ran almost gaily up the steps of the apartment block, thinking of my return to the West, and England, and Nicolas. The porter, presiding over nothing but her knitting, looked up at me with disapproval.

  ‘You’ve enjoyed your walk, Comrade?’

  I sobered, remembering that I had momentarily forgotten my role. ‘Oh – oh yes, very much. I enjoyed looking at the shop windows.’

  Her thick fingers deftly whirled the wool over her flashing needles. ‘But they’re not as good as those in the West, I dare say?’

  I must have crimsoned. It had been madness for me to allow my guard to drop in public, even for a moment. Did she know that I wasn’t Elisabeth? Was she just guessing? Or did she believe that I was Elisabeth, but suspect me of planning to defect tomorrow?

  ‘I – er – I really don’t know, Comrade,’ I stammered. ‘I simply visited my grandmother’s house – I didn’t see any of the stores.’

  Her fingers still flew, but her gaze was fixed unwaveringly on my face. I couldn’t read what was in it: disbelief? suspicion? contempt?

  ‘And you drove through the West with your eyes shut?’ she said mockingly.

  ‘No I didn’t, of course not … but my grandmother lives in a residential district, there are no big shops there at all, nothing to compare with Lenin Allee …’

  ‘Hmmm. I’d have expected you to take more notice than that a girl like you. Aren’t you curious about the West, then?’

  ‘Oh, I’m perfectly happy in Eisenach, I assure you.’ I began to move crab-wise towards the lift. ‘I’ve no wish to go anywhere else.’

  The porter turned a row and laughed sceptically. ‘That’s not what my poor cousin Herta says about Eisenach! She married a butcher from the town – a dreary hole, she says it is, though anywhere would be dreary tied to a boorish husband like that. I can’t think why she married him. Never did like the Thuringians myself … no offence to you, Comrade, of course, but I knew your accent right away. “Here comes one of poor cousin Herta’s fellow-countrywomen,” I said to myself when you arrived yesterday, and then it turns out that you come from the very same town!’

  I edged as far as the lift and pressed the button hard. ‘Yes, well …’ I said awkwardly, ‘you feel differently about a place when you’re born and bred in it, don’t you?’ I pressed the button again, urgently.

  The needles clacked on. ‘I suppose you do,’ the porter conceded. ‘Then I’m sure you must know Eisenach like the back of your hand, eh? I expect you’ll know my cousin’s husband’s shop, corner of Finkelstrasse and Bahnhofstrasse? Walter Schinken, butcher – that was his father’s name, a very old-established business in the town. You must know it, I’m sure?’

  Was it a trap? I swallowed painfully, trying to keep a smile tacked on to my face as I leaned against the bell and prayed for the lift to come. What an idiot I’d been to stray from the security of my room! And Kurt had warned me about the porter, yet I had still allowed her to talk me into this untenable position. If the shop existed, presumably Elisabeth would know it – but suppose it didn’t exist, suppose the woman was deliberately trying to trick me …?

  ‘I – er – I’m not quite sure –’ I began, hedging desperately. It had been all very well for Nicolas to say that as an actress I was ideal for this job, but I was used to working from scripts. And here I was, right in the middle of the terrifying nightmare that comes recurrently to all actors: alone in the centre of the stage with an expectant audience and no idea of the plot, let alone of my words.

  Only this time I wasn’t dreaming, and the audience wouldn’t just catcall or give me a slow handclap, and it certainly wouldn’t get up and walk out.

  Instead, it put down its knitting.

  I looked desperately at the main door. If only this were a play, Nicolas would come bursting in to my rescue.

  And at that moment, dead on cue, the door did indeed swing open, to admit an elderly postman who grumbled about his fallen arches as he hobbled across to the desk to slap down a pile of letters.

  I had never seen anyone quite so beautiful. I beamed at him, slipped into the lift which had just bumped to a halt, pressed the button for the sixth floor and scuttled back to the safety of my burrow.

  For a few moments after I had slammed and locked the door behind me, I leaned on it and shivered. The experience had shaken me even more than the crossing of the Wall, because at least Kurt had been with me there. I was angry with myself for my folly, and terrified that the porter would be sufficiently suspicious of me to come and make further enquiries. I forced myself to act naturally and make and drink a cup of coffee, but for every moment of the next
hour I expected a knock to come to the door.

  I didn’t, and gradually I relaxed. Of course the porter wasn’t trying to trap me, she was merely gossiping about her cousin to pass the time. I listened to a concert on the radio, made myself a cheese omelette for supper, watched some beautifully-controlled ballet-like gymnastics on television, and decided to have an early night.

  Elisabeth had gone to considerable trouble on my behalf, making up the bed with clean linen and even laying out for me a clean, chaste – not to say unalluring – nightie. I very much missed my hairbrush and toothbrush, but I took a bath and rubbed some of her gritty paste on my teeth with my finger, and then washed out my undies and spread them to dry on the towel rail. I was extremely glad that I had kept my own: cheap they may have been, but at least they were cheerful – St Michael at his most herbaceous.

  Tomorrow, I thought as I lay awake for a few moments, tomorrow this will be all over. There will just be the trip back through the Wall with Kurt, and then the moment I’m back in Elisabeth’s grandmother’s house I can pick up my own life again. Nicolas’s friend George will meet me in the cellar, and then I’ll be taken back to Norfolk with no more worry or effort on my part.

  And at the week-end Nicolas will be home at the farm, and he couldn’t not come to see me, not after all I’ve done. And we’ll go sailing, and he’ll show me the Georgian house he wants to live in and … and after that, who knows?

  I felt content to leave it at that, and fell asleep.

  I slept well, almost dreamlessly, and woke happy. There was a serviceably plain wrap hanging behind the bathroom door, either Elisabeth’s or Ilse Schmidt’s, and I slipped it on while I pottered about making coffee and tidying the flat.

  Kurt was due at ten twenty-five. There was still a quarter of an hour to go when I heard the knock, and I still hadn’t dressed, but I was so eager to start the journey back that I ran to open the door immediately.

  It wasn’t Kurt.

  Instead, two men in grey suits and trilby hats stood looking at me impassively.