"You think I didn't ask them?" His mood is black again. "You think I am so vain that I believe I take the whole world with me when I cross one shitty frontier? At first they flattered me. To win over such a great intellect as mine would signify a notable moral victory for the forces of progress. I told them that was bullshit. I was a left-wing minor West German academic with no chance of acceptance by a major university. I was no sort of victory for anybody. Then they admitted me to what they blushingly described as their little secret. My defection would frustrate the counterrevolutionary activities of the increasingly influential Herr Pastor and his fascistic fellow conspirators in Schleswig-Holstein. Millions of American dollars were being siphoned through church channels into the coffers of anti-Communist agitators in North Germany. Local newspapers, radio and television were being infiltrated by capitalistic subversives and spies. For the Herr Pastor's only son to return freely and publicly to his democratic homeland would strike a blow against the imperialist saboteurs and undermine the Herr Pastor's standing. It might even cause the CIA to withdraw some of its covert funding of West German counterrevolutionary elements. I will not conceal from you that this argument compelled me more than any other." He draws to an abrupt halt and fixes Mundy with an imploring stare. "You understand that there is nobody on God's earth with whom I can share this story apart from you? That all the rest of them are enemy, to a man, to a woman--liars, frauds, informants, living in permanent duplicity, as I am?"

"Yes. I believe I do."

"I was not so foolish as to expect a warm welcome from the GDR. Our family had committed the crime of fleeing the republic. My seducers knew I was not a Communist by conviction and I anticipated--they had prepared me for it--a humbling period of reeducation. What future I had after that could only be resolved by time. At best, an honorable place in the great anticapitalist struggle. At the least, a quiet Rousseau life, perhaps on a collective farm. Why are you laughing?"

Mundy isn't, but he has allowed himself a small smile, forgetting for a moment that jokes about Sasha are in bad taste. "I don't see you milking cows, that's all. Not even on a collective farm."

"It is immaterial. All that matters is, in a fit of culpable lunacy that I shall regret for the remainder of my life, I boarded the S-bahn to the Friedrichstrasse station and, on the advice of my seducers, surrendered myself to the East German frontier guards."

He stops speaking. It is prayer time. His fine hands have found each other and are clasped beneath his chin. His devout gaze is directed away from the clearing and sightlessly upward.

"Whores," he whispers.

"Frontier guards?"

"Defectors. All of us. While we are fresh, we are handed round and used. When our tricks are known and we are past our prime, we are tossed onto the rubbish heap. For the first weeks after my arrival I was accommodated in a pleasant apartment on the outskirts of Potsdam, and subjected to searching but benign questions about my life, my memories of my childhood in East Germany and the Herr Pastor's return from imprisonment in the Soviet Union."

"By the Professor?"

"And by his underlings. At their request, I composed an impassioned statement designed to cause the maximum consternation among the fascists and conspirators of the Herr Pastor's inner circle. I took great satisfaction in this task. I proclaimed the futility of anarchism in the face of modern realities, and my unbounded joy at returning to the bosom of the GDR. 'Anarchism destroys but communism builds,' I wrote. It was my hope, if not yet my conviction. But I had acted. Faith would follow. I also voiced my contempt for those members of the West German Lutheran movement who, while posing as messengers of Christ, accepted Judas-money from their spy-masters in America. My statement, I was assured, had found wide circulation in the Western media. Professor Wolfgang himself went so far as to declare it a world sensation, though I was shown no evidence to prove this.

"I had been led to believe, before crossing over, that immediately upon my arrival in East Berlin I would be the occasion of an international press conference. Also at the request of my hosts, I posed for a photographer and did my best to appear as happy and reconciled as was possible in the circumstances. Photographs of me were taken on the steps of the apartment house in Leipzig where I had grown up, in order to provide pictorial evidence that the erring son had returned to his socialist roots. But I waited in vain for my press conference, and when I questioned the Professor during one of his rare visits to the apartment, he was evasive. Press conferences were a matter of timing, he said. Perhaps the moment was past and my statement, together with the photographs, had done the job. I asked again: Where has my statement appeared, please? In _Spiegel? Stern? Welt? Tagesspiegel? Berliner Morgenpost?__ He replied curtly that he was not a student of reactionary disinformation and advised me to be more modest. I told him, which was the truth, that I listened daily to West German and West Berlin radio news broadcasts and had heard not a word anywhere of my defection. He replied that if I chose to immerse myself in fascist propaganda, it was unlikely that I would attain a positive understanding of Marxism-Leninism.

"A week later, I was transferred to a secure encampment in remote countryside close to the Polish border. It was a limbo, part refuge for political vagrants, part penitentiary, part interrogation center. Above all it was a place where you are sent in order to be forgotten. We called it the White Hotel. I would not award it many stars for excellence. You have heard of an East German prison called the U-boat, Teddy?"

"Afraid not." He has long ceased to be surprised by Sasha's switches of mood.

"The U-boat is a revered feature of our East German gulag. Three of my fellow guests at the White Hotel spoke enthusiastically of its facilities. Its official title is Hohenschonhausen prison in East Berlin. It was built by the considerate Soviet secret police in 1945. To keep the inmates alert, the architecture provides that they should stand, not lie. To keep them clean the cells are flooded with icy water up to the inmates' chests, and for their entertainment penetrating sounds are played at varying volume through loudspeakers. You have heard of the Red Ox?"

No, Mundy has not heard of the Red Ox either.

"The Red Ox is situated in the ancient town of Halle. It is the U-boat's sister establishment. Its mission is to provide constructive therapy for political malcontents, and to rebuild their Party awareness. Our White Hotel in East Prussia boasted several of its graduates. One, I remember, was a musician. His awareness had been so thoroughly rebuilt that he was unable to pick up his spoon to feed himself. You may say that after a few months of the White Hotel, the last of my misplaced illusions about the nature of the German Democratic Paradise had been forcibly expunged. I was learning to detest its monstrous bureaucracy and thinly disguised fascism with an ardent but secret passion. One day, without explanation, I was ordered to pack my possessions together and present myself at the guardhouse. I will admit that I had not always been a model guest. My unexplained isolation, my horizonless existence, and the horror stories told by other detainees, had not improved my manners. Neither had the wearisome interrogations about my opinions on every stray subject--political, philosophical and sexual. When I asked our distinguished hotel manager where I was being taken, he told me, 'Somewhere that will teach you to keep your fucking mouth shut.' The five-hour drive inside a wire cage fitted into the back of a builder's van did not prepare me for what lay ahead."

He stares straight ahead of him, then, like a puppet whose strings are let go, flops to Mundy's side on the grassy mound.

"Teddy, you bastard," he whispers. "Let us for God's sake have some of your whiskey!"

Mundy has forgotten all about the whiskey. Unearthing his father's pewter flask from the recesses of his anorak, he hands it first to Sasha, then takes a pull himself. Sasha resumes his story. His expression is fearful. He seems afraid he will lose a friend's respect.

"Professor Wolfgang has a nice garden," he announces. He has drawn up his spindly knees and is resting his forearms on them. "And Potsdam is a beautiful town. You have seen those old Prussian houses where the Hohenzollerns used to put their officials?"

Mundy may have done, but only on the bus drive from Weimar, when his interest in nineteenth-century architecture was limited.

"So many roses. We sat in his garden. He gave me tea and cake, then a glass of the finest Obstler. He was apologetic for having abandoned me, and complimentary about my behavior in stressful circumstances. I had acquitted myself excellently before my interrogators, he said. They had formed a high opinion of my sincerity. Since I had more than once advised my interrogators to go fuck themselves, you may imagine that I wondered where this was leading. He asked me if I wished to take a bath after my long drive. I replied that since I had been treated like a dog, it might be more appropriate if I jumped into the river. He said I had my father's sense of humor. I answered that this was scarcely a compliment, since the Herr Pastor was an arsehole and I had never in my life seen him laugh.

"'Oh, you have him wrong, Sasha. I believe your father has a famous sense of humor,' he replied. 'He merely keeps it to himself. The best jokes in life are surely those that we can laugh at when we are alone. Don't you think so?'

"I did not. I didn't know what he was talking about, and told him. He then asked me whether I ever considered making up my quarrel with my father, if only for my mother's sake. I replied that at no time in my life had such a thought occurred to me. It was my conviction that the Herr Pastor did not qualify as an object of filial affection. To the contrary, I said, he represented everything that was opportunistic, reactionary and politically amoral in society. I should add that, by this stage, the Professor had ceased to impress me intellectually. When I demanded to know at what point according to his Marxist beliefs he expected the East German state to wither away and a state of true socialism to begin, he replied with Moscow's stock answer that, for as long as the socialist revolution was menaced by the forces of reaction, such a possibility was remote." Sasha passes a hand through his cropped black hair as if to assure himself that the beret is not in place. "It was, however, no longer the subject of our discussion that was interesting me. It was his manner. It was the insinuation--manifested by the favors he was lavishing on me, the Obstler, the garden, and the civilized nature of our conversation--that, in ways I could sense but not define, I belonged to him by right. There was a bond between us, known to him but not to me. It was like a bond of family. In my confusion, I went so far as to speculate whether my host was homosexual, and intended to force his attentions on me. It was in the same light that I interpreted his mysterious tolerance towards the Herr Pastor. By intruding upon my filial feelings, I reasoned, he was by implication offering himself as a father substitute, and ultimately as my protector and lover. My suspicions were misplaced. The explanation for the Professor's intimacy was far more terrible."

He stops. Has he run out of breath--or courage? Mundy ventures not a word, but there must be comfort in his silence, for gradually Sasha rallies.

"It was soon clear to me that the Herr Pastor was to be the only material topic of our conversation in the garden. In the White Hotel I had touched no alcohol, except for one experience of Chateau Moonshine, which nearly killed me. Now the Professor was plying me with fine Obstler, and simultaneously with insinuating questions about the Herr Pastor. I would go so far as to say respectful. He referred to my father's _little ways.__ Did my father drink? How should I know? I replied, I hadn't seen him for almost twenty years. Did I remember my father talking politics in the home? Here in the GDR before he fled the republic, for example? Or afterwards in West Germany when he came back from his indoctrination course in America? Did my father ever quarrel with my poor mother? Did he have other women, sleep with colleagues' wives? Did my father take drugs, visit brothels, gamble on racehorses? Why was the Professor interrogating me like this about a father I didn't know?"

Not the Herr Pastor anymore, Mundy records. My father. Sasha has no defenses left. He must face his father as a man, no longer as a concept.

"Dusk fell and we went indoors. The furnishings were not exactly proletarian: imperial-style furniture, fine paintings, everything of the best. 'Any fool can be uncomfortable,' he said. 'There is nothing in the _Communist Manifesto__ that forbids a little luxury to those who have deserved it. Why should the devil wear all the best suits?' In a dining room with an ornate ceiling we were served roast chicken and Western wines by docile orderlies. When the orderlies retired, the Professor took me to the drawing room and beckoned me to sit beside him on the sofa, thus immediately reviving my fears regarding his sexuality. He explained that what he had to say to me was extremely secret, and that while his house was regularly swept for microphones, no word of our conversation must be overheard by the staff. He told me also that I should listen to him in complete silence, and reserve whatever comment I might have until he had finished. I can give you his exact words, since they are branded on my memory."

Sasha closes his eyes for a moment, as if preparing himself for a leap into the blue. Then begins again, speaking as the Professor.

"'As you may have gathered for yourself, my colleagues in state security are divided as to how we should regard you, which explains the regrettable inconsistencies in your treatment. You have been the football between two opposing teams and for this I offer you my personal apologies. But be assured that from now on, you are in safe hands. I shall now put to you a certain question but it is a rhetorical one. Which would you prefer to have for a father? A _Wendehals,__ a false priest, a corrupt hypocrite who consorts with counterrevolutionary agitators, or a man so dedicated to an ideal, so committed to the great cause of the revolution and the highest principles of Leninism, that he is prepared to endure the contempt of his only son? The answer, Sasha, is obvious, so you need not provide it. Now I shall put a second question to you. If such a man, from the day of his providential incarceration in the Soviet Union, had been selected by the Party organs for a life of supreme self-sacrifice--and was now lying on his deathbed far behind the enemy's lines--would you wish, as his only beloved son, to give him comfort in his last hours, or would you leave him to the mercy of those whose conspiratorial actions he has devoted his life to frustrating?' It was as well that he had forbidden me to speak, because I was struck mute. I sat. I stared at him. I listened in a trance when he told me that he had known and loved my father for forty years, that it was always my father's greatest wish that I should return to the GDR and take up his sword when it fell from his hand."

He breaks off. His eyes widen in entreaty. "_Forty years,__" he repeats incredulously. "You know what that means, Teddy? _They knew each other when they were both good Nazis together.__" His voice recovers its strength. "I did not point out to the Professor that I had come to the GDR in the expectation of destroying my father, and that it was therefore a surprise to be asked to adulate him. Perhaps, after my intransigence in the White Hotel, I was learning to conceal my emotions. Nor did I say anything when the Professor explained to me that, though my father had long dreamed of dying in the Democratic Republic, the imperatives of his mission required him to remain in exile till the bitter end." He assumes the Professor's voice again. "'The greatest joy of your beloved father's life was your statement renouncing anarchism and embracing the party of social renewal and justice.'" Sasha seems to go to sleep for a moment, then starts awake, and becomes once more the Professor. "'His delight at the photograph of his beloved son standing on the doorstep of his old apartment is not to be described. When it was shown to him by our trusted intermediary, your father was deeply moved. It was your father's wish and also mine that there would be an occasion when we might smuggle you to his bedside so that you could clasp his hand, but this has been reluctantly overruled by the highest authority on security grounds. As a compromise it has been agreed that you will be informed of the truth concerning his life before it ends, and write him an appropriate letter from the heart. You will adopt a conciliatory and humble tone, begging his forgiveness and assuring him of your respect and admiration for his ideological integrity. Nothing less will lighten his passing.'

"I do not remember how I walked the short distance from the drawing room to the desk in his study where he provided me with the necessary writing paper and pen. My head was swimming with repulsive and simultaneous revelations. _From the day of his incarceration in the Soviet Union__--do you know what those words meant to me? That on his arrival in Russian prison camp my father at once became a stool pigeon and gained the protection of the politkommissars, who recruited him as their spy and trained him for the future use of East German State Security. That when he returned to the GDR and set up as a good priest in Leipzig, any member of his flock who had oppositional tendencies was tempted to confide them to him, not knowing he was a professional Judas. Until this moment I believed I had plumbed the depths of my father's baseness. Now I realized I had been living in a fool's paradise. If there was any single moment when I came face to face with the idiocy of my decision to throw in my lot with the Communist cause, it was this. If a desire for retribution has a moment of conception, this was when it occurred. I do not remember what words of sycophantic adoration I wrote through my secret tears of rage and hatred. I remember the Professor's consoling hand on my shoulder as he informed me that I was henceforth the bearer of a considerable state secret. The Party, he said, was therefore faced with the choice of returning me to the White Hotel for an indefinite period, or permitting me to enter the portals of state security in a lowly capacity so that my movements could at all times be observed. In the short term, it was accepted that I would have some transient value as an authority on aspects of West Berlin's disintegrating anarchist and Maoist groups. In the longer view, he hoped I would aspire to become a dedicated Chekist, exhibiting my father's aptitude for conspiracy, and following in his footsteps. Such was the Professor's ambition for me. Such was the course of action that, as my father's most loyal friend and controller, he had personally urged upon his illustrious comrades. 'Now it is up to you, Sasha,' he told me, 'to show them I was right.' He assured me that my future path in the Stasi would be hard and long, and that much would depend on the extent to which I submitted my temperamental personality to the Party's will. His final words were his most vile. 'Always remember, Sasha, that henceforth you are the Comrade Professor's favourite child.'"

Does the story end here? For the time being it seems so, for Sasha, volatile as ever, has looked at his watch and, with an exclamation, sprung to his feet.

"Teddy. We must be quick. They will waste no time."

"To do what?" For now it is Mundy's turn to lose his way.

"I must seduce you. Secure you for the cause of Peace and Progress. Not all at once, but from me a compelling overture, and from you a less than convincing rejection of my advances. And tonight you will be morose--it is arranged, yes?"

_Yes, tonight it is arranged that I will be morose.__ "And a little drunk?"

_Also a little drunk, though not as drunk as I may appear.__ Sasha takes the tape recorder from his pocket, then a fresh cassette, which he brandishes in Mundy's face in warning. He slips the cassette into its housing, presses the start button, replaces the recorder in an inside pocket of his jacket, puts on his beret and with it the impassive scowl of the apparatchik who has submitted his temperamental personality to the Party's will. His voice hardens and acquires a hectoring edge.

"Teddy, I will ask you this frankly. Are you telling me you have turned your back on everything we fought for together in Berlin? That you are leaving the revolution to take care of itself--_undermining__ it even? That you are in love with your bank account, and your sweet little house, and you have put your social awareness to _sleep?__ Okay: we didn't change the world that time! We were kids, playing soldiers of the revolution. But what about joining the _real__ revolution? Your country's fallen under the spell of a fascistic warmonger--_but you don't give a fuck!__ You are the paid lackey of an antidemocratic propaganda machine--_and you don't give a fuck!__ Is this what you will be telling your petit bourgeois when it grows up? _I didn't give a fuck?__ We need you, Teddy! It makes me sick to watch you, for two nights already, how you flirt with us, show us one tit then put it back in your shirt, then show us the other one! Smirking while you sit there with the fence halfway up your arse!" His voice drops. "You know something else, Teddy? Shall I tell you something in very great confidence, just you and me and the rabbits? We're not proud. We understand human nature. When it's necessary we even _pay__ people to listen to the voice of their political conscience."

Everyone is charmed by the sight of a lanky Englishman on a bobby's bicycle arriving at the British Embassy gates dressed in a dark suit and tie and cycle-clips. And Mundy, as always when he is called upon to do so, plays the part for all it's worth. He sounds the silver bell on his handlebars as he weaves precariously between parking and departing cars, he yells, "Pardon me, madam," to a diplomatic couple whom he narrowly misses scything down, he flings up an arm to assist the braking process, and gives a drayman's "Whoa, there, girl!" as he brings his steed to a halt and takes up his place at the back of the ragged queue of fellow guests--Czech officials, British cultural representatives, dance masters and mistresses, organizers and performers. Shuffling his bike towards the sentry box, he chatters merrily with whomever he happens to be alongside, and when it's his turn to show his passport and invitation card, he takes exaggerated umbrage at the suggestion that he might leave his bicycle in the street rather than inside the embassy compound.

"Wouldn't dream of it, old boy! Your gallant citizens would pinch it in five minutes cold. Got a bike shed? Bike stand? Anywhere you say except on the roof. How about over there in the corner?"

He's in luck. His protests have been heard by a member of the embassy staff who happens to be hovering at the opening of the tented walkway that leads to the front door.

"Problem?" he inquires blandly, taking a casual look at Mundy's passport. He is the chubby man with circular spectacles who complained that Mundy had bowled him out first ball.

"Well, not really, officer," says Mundy facetiously. "I just need somewhere to park my bike."

"Here. Hand it over. I'll shove it round the back. You'll be going home on it, I take it?"

"Absolutely, if I'm sober. Got to get my deposit back."

"Well, give me a yell when you decide it's time to go. If I'm AWOL, ask for Giles. No troubles on the road?"

"None."

He walks. This is how tarts feel. Who are you, what do you want and how much will you pay for me? He is in Prague on a perfect moonlit night, striding down cobbled alleys. He is drunk, but drunk to order. He could drink twice as much and not be drunk. His head is swirling, but from Sasha's story, not from alcohol. He feels the weightlessness that he felt in Berlin on Christmas Eve when Sasha told him for the first time about the Herr Pastor. He feels the shame that comes on him when he encounters pains he can only imagine, never share. He is walking Sasha-style, one leg leading as he pounds unsteadily along. His head is everywhere, now with Kate at home, now with Sasha in his White Hotel. The streets are lit by wrought-iron lanterns. Dark shrouds of washing drift across them. The ornate houses are slatternly, their doorways barred, windows shuttered. The eloquent silence of the city accuses him, the atmosphere of quelled revolt is palpable. While we gallant students of Berlin were hoisting our red flags over the rooftops, you poor bastards were pulling yours down and getting crushed by Soviet tanks for your trouble.

Am I being followed? _First assume it, then confirm it, then relax.__ Am I sufficiently morose, distraught? Am I wrestling with a great decision, angry with Sasha for putting me on the spot? He no longer knows which parts of him are pretending. Perhaps all of him is. Perhaps he has never been anything but pretended man. A natural. A naturally pretended man.

At the embassy reception he was also a natural, the soul of wit. The British Council should be proud of him, but he knows it isn't. _Then I'm sorry too,__ says Personnel, the fairy godmother he never had.

From the embassy, he has ridden the policeman's bicycle triumphantly back to his hotel and left it in the forecourt for Sasha to reclaim. Did it feel different after Giles had removed its contents? Lighter? No, but I did. He has again telephoned Kate from his hotel room and this time he made a better job of it, even if in retrospect his end of the conversation sounds more like a letter home from school.

_This city is more beautiful than you can imagine, darling... I just so wish you were here, darling... I never knew I liked watching dance so much, darling... Tell you what, I've had a brilliant idea!__--it comes to him as he speaks. He hadn't thought of it till now--_When I get home, let's take out a couple of those season tickets to the Royal Ballet. The Council might even come up with the cost. After all, it's their fault I've become a dance junkie. Oh and to confirm: the Czechs are really super. It's always the way, isn't it, with people who have to make do on next to nothing?... And you too, darling. Deeply, truly... And our baby. Sleep well. Tschuss.__ He _is__ being followed. He has assumed it, he has confirmed it, but he has not relaxed. Across the road from him, he has recognized the staid couple who were sitting in the corner of the bar last night. Behind him two dumpy men in baggy hats and raincoats are playing Grandmother's Footsteps with him at thirty yards' distance. Abandoning the tenets of the Edinburgh School of Deportment, he stops, squares himself, swings round, cups his hands to his mouth and screams blue murder at his pursuers.

"Get off my fucking back! Get out of my hair, all of you!" His voice ricochets up and down the street. Windows are slapping open, curtains are being cautiously parted. "Fuck off, you ridiculous little people. _Now!__" Then he plonks himself on a convenient Hapsburg bench and demonstratively folds his arms. "I've told you what to do, so now let's see you do it!"

The footsteps behind him have stopped. The staid couple across the road have disappeared up a side street. In about half a minute they'll be popping up pretending to be someone else. Great. Let's all pretend to be someone else, and then perhaps we'll find out who we are. A large car crawls into the square but he refuses to be interested in it. It rolls past him, stops, reverses. Let it. His arms are still folded. He has his chin on his chest and his eyes down. He is thinking of his new baby, his new novel, tomorrow's dance contest. He is thinking of everything except what he is thinking about.

The car has drawn up. He hears a door open. And stay open. He hears footsteps climbing towards him. The square is on a slope, and he is at the upper end of it, which is why there has to be a short climb, then a leveling out as the footsteps cross the cobbled platform and come to a halt a yard away. But Mundy is too fed up, too confused and put upon, to lift his head.

Fancy German shoes. Mushroom-colored leather with brogue toe caps. Brown trousers with cuffs. A hand descends on his shoulder and gently shakes it. A voice that he refuses to recognize speaks perfumed German English to him.

"Ted? Is it you? Ted?"

After a very long pause, Mundy agrees to look up and sees a parked black saloon at the curbside with Lothar at the wheel and Sasha in his beret peering at him from the rear seat. He looks higher and sees the elegant features of the silken-haired Professor as he gazes down on him with fatherly concern.

"Ted. My dear fellow. You remember me. Wolfgang. Thank God we found you. You look all in. I understand you had a jolly interesting conversation with Sasha this afternoon. This is not the behavior we expect from a disciple of the late, great Dr. Mandelbaum. Why don't we go somewhere quiet and talk about God and the world?"

Mundy stares at him for a while in mystification. Gradually he lets the penny drop. "And why don't you move your fucking shadow," he suggests, and remains seated, his face buried in his hands, until the Professor, with Sasha's assistance, carefully raises him to his feet and guides him to the car.

_Traitors are opera stars, Edward. They have nervous breakdowns, crises of conscience and outrageous needs. The Wolfgangs of this world know that. If you don't make it hard for them they'll never believe you were worth buying.__ A classic Cold War double-agent operation is taking its first cautious steps towards consummation. If the seduction is agonizingly slow, that is because Ted Mundy in his many parts turns out to be a master of prevarication.

At an international convention of Egyptologists in Bucharest he flourishes a tantalizing sample of the sort of material he thinks he might be able to provide: a top secret plan to disrupt a forthcoming World Federation of Trade Unions in Warsaw--but can he bear to deceive his colleagues? His tempters hasten to reassure him. In the service of the true democracy, they tell him, such scruples are misplaced.

At a book fair in Budapest he provides an enticing, if retrospective, overview of how anti-Communist disinformation is fed to the Third World press. But the risk he took still scares him. He'll have to think about it. His tempters wonder aloud whether fifty thousand capitalist dollars will assist his thought processes.

At the Leningrad Festival of Peace and Song, exactly at the point where the Professor and his people dare to believe they have landed their fish, Mundy throws a convincing five-star tantrum about the proposed terms of his remuneration. What proof can they give him, when he shows up at the Bank Julius Bar in Geneva five years from now and utters the magic password, that the cashier will hand over the cash and not ring for the police? It takes a five-day seminar of international oncologists in Sofia to iron out the final details. A discreet but lavish dinner in the upper room of a grand hotel overlooking Lake Iskur marks the breakthrough.

Faking illness to Kate and his notional employers at the British Council, Mundy allows himself to be spirited from Sofia to East Berlin. In the Professor's villa in Potsdam where Sasha was first told that his father the Herr Pastor was a Stasi spy, glasses are raised to the brilliant new agent at the heart of Britain's subversive propaganda machine, and his recruiter, Sasha. Seated shoulder to shoulder at the center of the candlelit table, the two friends proudly listen as the Professor reads aloud a telegram of congratulation from his masters in Moscow.

Triumph on one side is matched by triumph on the other. In London a safe house in Bedford Square is acquired and a team assembled to perform the double duty of processing Sasha's alpha double plus material and confecting disinformation ingenious and plausible--and alarming enough--to satisfy the paranoid appetites of Mundy's masters for the next hundred years at least, since everybody on both sides knows that's how long the Cold War's going to last.

Insiders including Mundy learn to refer to the house as the Wool Factory, wool being the commodity that it proposes to pull over the Stasi's eyes.

The effect of the twin victory upon Mundy himself is mixed. At the age of thirty-two, the pseudo-artist, pseudo-radical, pseudo-failure and pseudo everything else he accuses himself of being has finally discovered his natural art form. On the other hand, there are snags. The strains of running two successful careers within a single marriage are well known; the strains of running three, less so--particularly when one of them is a top secret mission vital to the security of your nation, rated alpha double plus and not discussable with your partner.

9.

KATE IS GETTING ALONG splendidly.

So is young Jake, now aged eight.

Jake is a boisterous, rough-cut fellow who, according to family lore, bears no resemblance to either of his parents but is the dead spit of his granddad Des: stocky, outspoken, large-hearted but quick to anger, and no friend of fine distinctions. Unlike Mundy or Sasha, Jake entered the world without mishap. After a squally infancy, he passed his first year at primary with flying colors, to the relief of his parents who were beginning to fear he might need specialized attention. The present anxiety is how he will handle the move to Kate's hometown of Doncaster where, if she is to stand any chance of reversing the pro-Tory swing in her marginal constituency, she must reclaim her roots.

In the years between, Kate's political ambitions have made impressive strides. She is billed as one of the Labor Party's rising modernizers. Her blistering denunciation of the wreckers of St. Pancras--FEARLESS SCHOOLMARM BLASTS 'ENEMIES WITHIN,' _Hampstead & Highgate Express__--did not escape the eye of Labor Party headquarters. Her fighting nomination speech as parliamentary candidate for her native constituency of Doncaster Trent, praised for its unsparing realism, earned her loud applause from the new centrists. And while she is heartbroken to be saying goodbye to her pupils and colleagues in Hampstead--not to mention uprooting Jake just when he's settling down at last--well, the best-rated secondary in South Yorkshire is bidding for her services, there's a house that comes with the job, and a primary for Jake right round the corner and a kids' sports center where he can let off steam.

But it's Ted, as the whole family agrees, who's come through this looking like the trooper Des always said he was. Without Ted's support, Kate would never have made it out of the trap, says Des, who loves a greyhound. He goes one further, inspiring a family joke that never quite goes to rest, much as Mundy might wish it to: "I'll tell you this, and in a minute I'm going to drink to it," he warns, while Mundy carves the Sunday beef and Jake tries to get everyone to join him in "One Man Went to Mow."

"When our Kate takes up residence at Number Ten, which she will, I'm not joking--_Jake, shut up a minute, will you?__--when she does, _Ted__ here is going to do a bloody sight better job than what Denis Thatcher is doing today, or should I say _not__ doing? Ted here will _not__ be playing golf all day, and he will _not__ be more than somewhat refreshed by four o'clock in the afternoon or somewhat sooner--_In a minute, all right, Jake darling?__--Ted here, unlike Denis the Menace, will be where he belongs, at my darling daughter's side, giving her moral support from every angle in exactly the way--_Belt up, Jake!__--in the same way that Prince Albert did for Queen Victoria--don't laugh, Kate, please, I am totally serious. He'll be your _consort__ is what he'll be. And he'll be the best bloody consort there ever was, bar none. So here's to you, Ted old son, and God bless you. All right, Jake, let's have a sing then."

The move to Doncaster raises complications for the whole family, but Kate and Ted, as two rational people, are not about to be thrown by them. With Jake they hope asleep upstairs, Kate sets out the invariables of the situation. Ted has passed the big four-O, so it would be daylight madness for him to give up his pension rights and promotion prospects unless something equally good and preferably better comes along. And that's putting the best face on it, says Kate. Because frankly, Ted, at your age, in your position... She tactfully leaves the sentence unfinished, just as she has left unfinished an earlier speech on the subject of Our Marriage and Its Shortcomings, principal among which are Mundy's frequent absences, and his peculiar otherworldliness before and after them, which might well lead any other wife to conclude he had _another interest,__ but since he swears he hasn't, she'll let that go.

Returning to Ted's career prospects, or lack of them, Kate takes it to be common ground that he has hit a plateau at the Council. This special job they gave him as Traveling Representative Eastern Europe all those years ago has not turned out to be quite the path to glory Ted was led to expect. Put bluntly, it's become a backwater, not to say dead end, she goes on. And why they now insist on calling him an _auxiliary__ traveling representative strikes her as most extraordinary. She can only imagine Ted blotted his copybook in some way that he won't tell her about. Or perhaps, after all, they have found out about his not having a degree. She just wishes she could confront those wretched people in his personnel department, who according to Ted look straight through him these days.

"And you, my darling, as we all know, are the very _last__ person to speak up for yourself. It's your public-school hang-up about not being pushy. Well, these days we _all__ have to be pushy because that's what Thatcherism's brought us to."

Kate next applies her analytical head to the feasibility of Mundy living in Doncaster and commuting to London. Unfortunately, that too is a nonstarter. Quite apart from the astronomic cost of a Doncaster-King's Cross season ticket, neither of them can see Ted sitting on a train for four hours a day, _plus__ the Underground--particularly if Thatcher does what she's threatening to do with the railways. Also, Kate's going to need some paid help with looking after Jake while she's getting round her constituency. Her political agent, a mother herself, says there's a good supply of Sri Lankans if you tap into the right lot, but they cost.

"Anyway, completely rationally, if you count up weekends, bank holidays _and__ your leave entitlement"--which, as it happens, Kate has already done--"they amount to very nearly half the year. So let's think of it that way, shall we? Bearing in mind that, ever since you took up your present job, you've been averaging nine weeks abroad per year, thanks to the academic conferences and student exchange programs which for some _extraordinary__ reason they've thrown at you in addition to your cultural festivals."

Not for the first time in recent years, Mundy wonders who Kate is. The woman before him seems to have no relation to the woman he longs for when he is away from her. She has not evolved, she has simply been replaced. If she were Kate's double, he wouldn't be surprised. On the other hand, it occurs to him that Kate may well be having similar thoughts about himself.

"Next question, obviously: Can we afford to maintain two households and, following on from _that,__ what do we do with Estelle Road, particularly given that the housing market, after being deliberately inflated by the City banks for their own purposes, is in a state of collapse? Might we, for instance, keep the house, but let off the two spare bedrooms--say to medical students or nurses from the Royal Free Hospital? You could keep the master bedroom, drawing room and kitchen, and they could have the rest."

Mundy is not attracted by the prospect of adding boardinghouse keeper to his many roles in life, but doesn't say so. They agree to discuss the possibilities with Des. Maybe a loft conversion is the answer. But Mundy also feels obliged to obtain a second opinion from Amory, who together with the Professor owns the controlling interest in Mundy Incorporated.

Amory finds much to commend the idea of two households. If there is a financial shortfall, he adds cautiously, London might make it up to him. And London can afford to, he might have added. As a prized Stasi agent, Mundy receives a fat retainer, bonuses and incentive payments. The conventions of the trade, however, require him to turn these sums over to his true masters, whose remunerations are more modest, since London, unlike the Stasi, takes his loyalty for granted. Obscure lockaway trusts and life policies lodged in City banks have little meaning for him. A monthly brown envelope containing what Amory calls "play money" is all he is otherwise allowed, since an unnatural improvement in his lifestyle would not only attract the curiosity of British Security, from which Amory's Service likes to keep a healthy distance, but of the family accountant, Kate.

"Perfect way to keep your flavors apart, Edward. Once Jake knows the form, he'll settle down in no time. How's his cricket coming on?"

"Fine. Super."

"What's the problem?"

"Kate likes to do her door-to-door stuff at weekends when voters are at home."

"Tell her to do it on weekday evenings when you're not there," Amory advises, and perhaps he really has a wife to whom he can talk like that.

Suddenly the schism is real. Mundy hires a van, Des and a friend of his called Wilf help load it up with the bits of furniture that Kate has marked in advance with lengths of pink tape. Jake, who is no supporter of the move, barricades himself in his room and lobs its contents out of the window, including his duvet, blankets, toy fire station and, for the finale, the cradle Des and Mundy made for him before he was born.

With Jake firing off abuse from the back of the van they arrive at a very new housing estate on the outskirts of Doncaster. Its dominant feature is a redbrick church with a freestanding bell tower which to Mundy resembles a hanged man swinging from a gibbet. The semi-bungalow which is henceforth the candidate's family home is an orange-roofed box with picture windows and a rectangle of mown lawn front and back like two fresh graves. After two days of boisterous unpacking, punctuated by bursts of kids' cricket on the community playground, and Mundy's entire repertoire of funny voices, not to mention the glad-handing of next-door neighbors and other members of the electorate, he drives the empty van back to London and begins his new life as a weekly boarder.

In his early mornings he pounds the Heath and tries not to remember the mornings when he walked Kate to work, and the evenings when he stood around with the mothers waiting for her to come out of class, and the sandpit where he and Jake fought the Battle of Waterloo, and the corner of the playing field where they threw Frisbees, and played England versus Pakistan test cricket until Jake made it clear that he preferred his disobliging peers to anything Mundy had to offer.

Jake's rages are accusing. He seems to be having them for all the family: for Kate, who in anger merely purses her lips, and for Mundy whose first line of defense is to make silly jokes and bark with laughter till the cloud has passed. But Jake has inherited neither of these tactics. When Jake is shushed, he roars. When he feels frustrated or perplexed or disregarded, he roars. To Mundy in despondent mood, Jake's message is clear: _You're a fraud, Dad. I've observed your clowning, I have listened carefully to your funny voices and your crappy bird noises. I am familiar with the full range of your insincere facial expressions, and I've rumbled you. You're a revolutionary tourist turned capitalist spy and there's not a true bone in your ugly, overlong body. But because my tender years preclude me from articulating these sentiments, I roar. Signed Jake.__ But look on the bright side, Mundy urges himself, with one of those compulsive reaches for the sky which his right arm undertakes by itself these days. All right, I'm not quite the father I hoped I'd be. But I'm not a cashiered ex-Indian Army drunk either, and Jake's got a real, live, upwardly mobile mother instead of a dead aristocrat turned bog-Irish housemaid. It's not my fault that I'm six different people.

At first, Mundy's daily routine proceeds much as before. All morning he sits or paces in his room at the British Council, engaging in what Amory is pleased to call his cover job, making the odd phone call, signing off the odd policy document and being affable in the canteen, where he is regarded as some sort of remittance man. It is required of him by Amory that he present, where challenged, a soured, antiestablishment sort of image and despite his affability he contrives this without too much difficulty. The old rebellious fires may not be exactly raging, but thanks to Mrs. Thatcher there are plenty of embers around.

Lunch, always a relief, is a variable affair. If he's lucky, his cover work will require him to be entertained by a fellow cultural diplomat from an Iron Curtain embassy, someone who may be reckoned to wear more than one hat. On such occasions Mundy will adopt an even more seditious attitude on the reasonable assumption that his words will get back to the Professor. Sometimes his host will venture an intelligence pass, which Mundy will politely decline. He can hardly explain that he is already fully engaged on both sides of the ideological abyss.