So Rourke laughs too, good rich laughter while he refreshes their glasses.

"So no, right? You did them no favors? No little errands. I'm relieved."

There is no way out. He has to ask "Why? What have they done?"

"Oh, they haven't _done__ it yet. But they will. Thirty years apiece for spying for the Sovs. No kids, thank God. It's always hardest on the kids."

Mundy watches Rourke smile into his balloon glass while he cradles it in his palm. But in his mind's eye it is Nita he sees, stretched beside him in the hacienda, and bearded little Bernie leaning wild-eyed across her, boasting that he is riding on the revolutionary train.

"But Bernie's a fantasist," he manages to protest. "He'd say anything that came into his head, just for effect. What could they possibly know that would be useful to the Russians? You'd have to be a fool to believe anything Bernie told you."

"Oh, they never got to the Russians, we made sure of that. Bernie called up the Sov consulate in Miami, gave a funny name, said he was pro-Cuban and would like to serve the cause. Sovs didn't take him up on his offer. We did. Sweetest little sting I ever saw. Ran for six long months before it dawned on Bernie that he was working for Uncle Sam and not the Sovs."

"Where does Nita come in?"

Rourke shakes his head in happy reminiscence. "Carried for him. Smarter than he was by a mile. Women usually are."

He rolls genially on.

"Ted."

"Jay."

"Can I ask you this one more question before you tear me limb from limb? A really _bad__ one."

"If you must."

"You're public school, right?"

"Not my choice actually."

"A lost boy."

"In those days. Probably."

"Parentless."

"Well, not always."

"But by the time you got to Berlin."

"Yes."

"So we have one Brit, one Kraut, both parentless, even if Sasha wants to be but isn't. Both lost boys, both--I don't know--_mouvemente,__ kinetic, thirsting for life. You mentioned Isherwood. I liked that. Can I go on?"

"Can I stop you?" He already wishes he could.

"And you _bond.__ You're creating a perfect society together. You share your dreams. You share a radical lifestyle. You share a room. You share a girl--okay, okay, calm down, you share her consecutively, _not__ concurrently. There's a difference, I respect that. But Ted, hand on Bible, no taboos, no microphones, man-to-man within these four well-swept walls--are you _really__ telling me you and Sasha never shared each _other?__"

"Didn't happen," Mundy barks, blushing. "Didn't anywhere _near__ happen. Never on the cards. That answer your question?" And puts his hand to his mouth again to cover his embarrassment.

"Good session with Jay last night?" Amory asks next afternoon.

"Fine. Great."

"Did he call you a scream?"

"Once."

"Bubbled yourself dry yet?"

"Probably. He wants to take me to Glyndebourne next week. I thought I should clear it with you."

"Ever been?"

"No."

"Well, now's your chance then, isn't it?"

But Glyndebourne never comes. A few days later--following a trying weekend in Doncaster devoted to persuading Jake's headmaster to give him another chance while Kate conducts her parliamentary candidate's clinic--Mundy arrives at Bedford Square to find Rourke's desk gone, his room empty and the door wide open as if to air it. A burning joss stick in a milk bottle stands in the center of the bare floor.

For a month and more Amory refuses to remark on Rourke's disappearance. In itself this has no significance. Other members of the team have disappeared from time to time with as little explanation. But Rourke's different. Rourke, detached, urbane, easy to talk to and cleared for access, is the closest thing Mundy has had in recent years to a confidant, apart from Amory himself.

"He's done his job and gone home. That's all you need to know."

"So what _was__ his job?" Mundy insists, refusing to back down. "Why couldn't he at least say goodbye?"

"You've passed," Amory replies tersely. "Be thankful and shut up."

"I've _what?__"

"On the advice of Orville J. Rourke, the CIA has of its goodness decreed that you are a loyal British agent, a double but not a triple, and that Sasha, though German and mad, is another." Then most unusually his anger gets the better of him. "And for Christ's sake stop looking as if somebody's stolen your fluffy dog. It was a legitimate concern. He did a good job. You're white as snow."

Then why the joss? Mundy wonders.

Is there room, among all these Mundys, for another? The answer, unfortunately, is that since the door to his life is wide open, everyone is invited in and no one who has made himself at home there is ever turned away.

Enter then Ted Mundy, hero of the Helmstedt autobahn and the Steel Coffin. He is so scared of what these versions of himself get up to that it's like opening the bowling for the public schools' cricket team every time, multiplied by about a hundred.

The logic is simple enough. Sometimes there just aren't enough East European arts festivals and book fairs and academic seminars to keep up with Sasha's rate of productivity. Sometimes Sasha has an important scoop in his sights, and the Communist culture circuit can't deliver soon enough to satisfy Amory's customers in London. Sometimes the prudent side of Amory decides that the frequency of Mundy's eastern jaunts is making things a little bit too easy for the Professor, and that it's time for Mundy to go sick, throw a tantrum at having to live out of a suitcase, or be lent to some other, harmless section pending a reshuffle among the Black Propaganda espiocrats.

But Sasha will accept no substitutes. He wants Mundy and nobody but Mundy, if only for as long as it takes to pass a matchbox from hand to hand. Sasha is a one-man dog but, unlike Mundy, a real one. So every few months an altogether different kind of meeting must be achieved between the players. The instructions are Sasha's, conveyed by way of the most recent batch of microfilm, and executed with due professionalism by Amory and his team.

It is thus that Mundy finds himself at dead of night, wearing night-vision glasses and wading over a boggy strip of borderland that for a few hours has been left unguarded for the convenience of some unknown Stasi agent from West Germany who requires a moment with his controller--only for Sasha to get wind of the arrangement, and exploit it for his own purposes.

Or Mundy is a humble soldier for a day, his father's son at last, wrapped in a Tommy's greatcoat and riding in the back of a fifteen-hundredweight truck that is part of a convoy of British troops making its way up the corridor from Helmstedt to the Berlin garrison. The convoy slows down, its tail crawls, a dispatcher slaps Mundy on the shoulder. Masked by trucks behind and in front of him, he tears off his greatcoat and, dressed as an East German laborer, leaps from the moving truck and in the best Edinburgh tradition hits the ground running. A bicycle is flung after him, he rides hell for leather down an unpaved lane until a pin light winks at him from a cattle shed. The two men embrace, Sasha hands over his package. Leaving the bicycle to look after itself, Mundy returns by hidden paths to wait in a ditch for the truck or car that, with false papers and a recently vacated seat, will smuggle him to safety.

But worst by far is the Steel Coffin, his Room 101, his ultimate nightmare come true. Like the Major in his final days, Mundy has a living horror of enclosure. Perhaps his fear is commensurate with the length of him that has to be enclosed. To climb into the coffin, lie facedown with his mouth over the airholes while Amory's dispatchers screw him in, takes more courage than he thought he possessed. Staring wide-eyed into the pitch darkness as he is clamped underneath the railway car, he commends his sinner's soul to heaven, and reminds himself of Dr. Mandelbaum's advice not to live in a bubble. And though there's an abort button, and it's only a few sweltering, bone-breaking minutes across the border to the marshaling yard where Sasha will be waiting with a monkey wrench to receive him, he can't help feeling there are better ways to spend a summer's evening in the prime of his confusing life.

10.

A MOOD OF MUTED festivity informs Mundy's forty-ninth mission behind the Iron Curtain, and all Bedford Square shares it.

"One more trip, Ted, and you'll have notched up the half-ton," says Paul, the head dispatcher, as he makes a last check of Mundy's pockets, suitcase, wallet and diary for the nightmare clue that could spell the end of ten years of alpha double plus material. "And after that, you won't want to know us, will you?"

At the door, the girls give him a kiss and Amory, as usual, tells him to watch his arse.

It's a beautiful day, six in the morning. Spring is in the air and so is Gorbachev's perestroika. The marionette dictatorships of Eastern Europe are under serious threat at last. A few months earlier in New York, Gorbachev unilaterally volunteered massive tank and troop withdrawals, and repudiated the Brezhnev doctrine of intervention in the affairs of client states. The old oligarchs, he was telling them, are on their own. Though on the surface relations between Washington and the Evil Empire remain as frozen as ever, the stirrings beneath the ice are enough to persuade the wishful that one day, maybe not in our generation but the next, sanity will break through. And Mundy, as he sets course for Victoria station air terminal on his way to the International Convention of Medieval Archaeologists in Gdansk, is one of the wishful. Maybe Sasha and I have played a part, he thinks. Maybe we've helped the thaw. Amory says they have, but then he would.

True, Mundy has the usual predeparture butterflies--when didn't he? Amory and the sages of Edinburgh will never let him forget that the longer an operation runs, the hairier it gets and the more there is to lose. But as soon as he starts to compare his lot with Sasha's--which he does every time he embarks on one of these journeys, and on this day particularly--he sees himself as the spoiled dilettante and Sasha as the real thing.

Who briefs Sasha? he argues. Nobody does. Who grooms him, dispatches him? Nobody. Who dresses the shot for him when he steals his photographs? Nobody. The finger shadows and the camera-shake and the misfires happen in the heat of battle while he waits for the footfall in the corridor that could lead straight to a bullet in the back of the head.

And look at the sheer distance the man's covered, the miles and miles of impossible achievement! How in heaven's name did he ever get from there to here? How does a lame East German child-refugee turned West German anarchist recross the border and emerge as the improbable provider of information vital to the national security--theirs as well as ours--all in the space of a few years?

All right, thanks to the Herr Pastor, the Professor adopted him as his favourite son, and for love of his old chum gave him a head start in the family business. But that doesn't include a free pass to roam the Stasi's archives at will, cherry-picking whatever he reckons will do most damage to his employers.

Mundy's British delegation of medievalists is traveling independently to Gdansk. Tomorrow he will field them as they land. Sipping his Bloody Mary in the departure lounge, or seated in the half-empty plane and staring out of the window at a white nothing, he pieces together as much as he knows of the pilgrim Sasha's progress over the last decade. The picture is far from complete. Sasha does not take gracefully to being questioned about how he obtains his information. Perhaps his prickliness conceals a certain shame.

In the beginning was the anger. That much Sasha admits.

And the source of Sasha's anger was the revelation that he had been lured across the border under false pretenses and had been hating his father for the wrong reasons.

And after the anger, hatred.

Hatred of the malodorous and heartless bureaucracy that by its size and weight squeezed the very breath out of its citizenry in the name of democracy.

Of the police state that posed as the cradle of liberty. Of its craven subservience to Moscow.

Above all, of its systematic, wholesale betrayal of the sacred socialist dream.

And with the anger and the hatred came the cunning. Sasha was a prisoner in a bourgeois fascist state posing as a workers' paradise. To prevail against his captors he would use their own perfidious weapons. He would dissemble, lie and ingratiate himself. To strike at the very source of their unlawful power, he would steal what they loved most: their secrets.

His plan at the outset was modest.

He would bear witness.

He would steal their secrets and make of them an archive for posterity.

Working entirely alone, he would make sure that the lies, deceptions and hypocrisies that were being perpetrated all round him by the Nazis in red shirts could not be hidden from later generations.

And that was all. The sole beneficiaries of his endeavors would be future German historians. That was the limit of his ambition.

The only question was how to achieve it. For enlightenment he availed himself of the Stasi library and consulted the leading authorities on guerrilla warfare. _To float on the enemy's current... to conceal yourself among his hordes... to use the enemy's weight to bring him down.__ Following his incarceration in the White Hotel, Sasha passed weeks of unlikely recuperation lounging around the Professor's house in Potsdam, walking the Professor's German shepherds in the People's Park, weeding the Professor's flowerbeds, chauffeuring his wife when she went shopping. For yes, the Professor, who was not after all homosexual, possessed a wife, a veritable dragon of a wife, whose single merit in Sasha's eyes was that she detested her husband.

But not even she can restrain the Professor from exercising his self-appointed role of Sasha's patron, power broker and protector. If Sasha promised to behave himself like a true comrade--the Professor's words--and guarded his tongue, and was respectful at all times to other highly placed protectors of the state, the Professor would undertake to guide his footsteps to the light. For the Professor--it is a point he is never tired of repeating--loved Sasha's father like a brother, and possessed no son of his own.

And Sasha gritted his teeth and promised. He behaved himself. He took other wives shopping as well as the Professor's. He carried their shopping up to their apartments for them, and sometimes all the way into the bedroom. Sasha never boasted about his conquests. Discretion was his watchword. But like a bartered bride, he put a metaphorical handkerchief in his mouth, and did not cry out in his repugnance. In the People's Paradise, compliant silence was everything.

"Did you get any fun out of it, or was it all strictly business?" Mundy inquires, as the two of them stroll in one of Leningrad's parks.

Sasha rounds on him in fury. "Go down to the Smolny docks, please, Teddy," he snaps, flinging an arm towards the bleak gray outlines of ships and cranes. "Pick up a ten-ruble whore, and ask her whether it's fun or strictly business."

Under the Professor's auspices, Sasha the favored son acquired a tiny one-room apartment all his own, and was admitted to the lowest rungs of the Stasi's ladder of beings. By the time of his initiation he had mastered, as best his crabby body allowed, the official Party walk. With it went the official Party expression--a nonlook, delivered with the chin raised, to the pavement fifteen yards ahead of him. He wore it as he wheeled the coffee trolley down the disinfected corridors of the Professor's linoleum empire, and set china cups on the desks of state protectors too elevated to acknowledge his existence.

And just occasionally, when Sasha held open the door of a limousine for a great protector, or delivered a package to a comrade's sumptuous villa, a hand would grasp his arm confidingly and a voice would murmur, "Welcome home, Sasha. Your father was a great man."

Such words were balm to his ears. They told him he was one of them, and refueled the fires of his secret anger.

Did Sasha ever _advance__ inside the Stasi? Mundy used to wonder. And if he did, to what rank, office, and when?

It is a question that after all these years Sasha still brushes irritably aside. And when London's analysts from time to time dig out their Stasi orders of battle in search of him, his name does not feature among the distinguished section heads, nor even in the lowest categories of archivist or clerk.

"Promotion, Teddy, I would say, is in inverse proportion to knowledge," he pontificates. "The butler knows more than the lord of the manor. The lord of the manor knows more than the Queen. I know more than all of them."

Sasha does not advance, he entrenches, which in a spy is probably a better way to go. Since his aim is not power but knowledge, he devotes himself to the systematic acquisition of menial responsibilities, keys, combination numbers and protectors' wives. Put together, they make a traitor's kingdom. What Mundy Two pretends to do in the virtual world, Sasha does in the real one.

A secure storeroom is to be established for files that are out of action but not yet officially dead? _But of course, Comrade Counselor! Yours to command, Comrade Counselor! Three bags full, Comrade Counselor!__ An immediate destruction program is to be implemented for certain sensitive material that should have been got rid of months ago? _No problem, Comrade Counselor! Sasha will give up his free weekend so that state protectors burdened with heavier responsibilities than his own may take their well-deserved ease.__ The Frau Oberst is expecting an important visitor from Moscow and has nobody to mow her lawn for her? _The Frau Oberst's grass need not wait another minute. Sasha is standing brushed and shiny on her doorstep with a mower and an able-bodied serf!__ Yet how can all this take place, Mundy asks himself repeatedly over the years, in such an immense, all-powerful and vigilant state security system as the Stasi? Is not the Stasi a model of legendary Prussian efficiency, of the sort that accounts for every ball bearing, stub of pencil and gold tooth?

Under London's promptings, the long-suffering Mundy has put the question to Sasha in a dozen different ways, and always received the same answer: in a mammoth bureaucracy obsessed with its own secrecy, the fault lines are best observed by those who, instead of peering down from the top, stand at the bottom and look up.

Sasha's entrenchment quickly yielded unexpected prizes. One of the earliest was an old safe, locked and apparently disused, that stood inside the antechamber to the office of the Professor's prodigiously overweight female first assistant, a Sasha conquest. Its only perceptible function was to act as a table for a vase of plastic flowers with which she brightened her drab surroundings. She said the safe had long been empty and, when Sasha accidentally on purpose banged his coffee trolley into it, it rang reassuringly hollow. Undertaking a discreet search of the sump of her enormous handbag one night, he came upon an orphan key with a label on it. The safe became his treasure chest, the deniable storehouse for his expanding crock of gold.

In the absence of a fellow underling on holiday, Sasha was given custody of a storeroom full of obsolete operational equipment awaiting shipment to a Third World ally in the common struggle against the imperialist enemy. By the time the colleague returned, Sasha was unofficial owner of a subminiature camera, a user's handbook and two family-sized cartons of subminiature film cartridges. Henceforth, instead of attempting to smuggle his stolen documents out of the building, Sasha could photograph them and then destroy them or, if needful, return them to their rightful homes. Smuggling out subminiature film cartridges presented no problem unless he was intimately searched. By tacit edict, the Professor's chosen son is not subjected to this indignity.

"Any qualms I had about the life expectation of my undeveloped films were put to rest by the handbook," Sasha recalls drily. "First I should seal the cartridges in a condom, then I should bury the condom in a tub of ice cream. Comrades operating in conditions where no refrigerators, ice cream, electricity or condoms are available should presumably consult a different handbook."

For his memoranda of conversations overheard, he availed himself of the same technique.

"I committed my thoughts to paper in the comfort of my apartment. I photographed the paper with my thirty-five millimeter domestic camera. I then burned the paper and added the undeveloped film to my collection."

Then came a golden Friday evening when Sasha was going about his weekly chore of logging visa applications from citizens of nonsocialist countries who wished to enter the GDR on official business. Staring up at him were the unmistakable features of Mundy, Edward Arthur, born Lahore, Pakistan, husband of Kate nee Andrews, occupation British Council traveling representative. And attached to it, the information thrown up by Stasi Central Records: 1968-69: member Oxford University Socialist Club and Society of Cultural Relations with the USSR, peace activist, various marches... while a student of the Free University of Berlin (West) engaged in anticapitalist, pro-peace demonstrations... suffered severe beating at hands of West Berlin police... later deported from West Berlin for riotous and anarchistic tendencies (West Berlin police report, source CESAR).

Sasha's breathless account of what he did next will resound in Mundy's memory forevermore. They are crouched in a bar in Dresden during a conference of international agrarians.

"At the sight of your not very beautiful face, Teddy, I experienced a revelation comparable to that of Archimedes. My undeveloped films need not after all spend a thousand years frozen into condoms. On the Monday morning when I took your visa application to the Professor, my hand was shaking. The Professor observed this. How could he not? It had been shaking all weekend. 'Sasha,' he asked me. 'Why is your hand shaking?'

"'Comrade Professor,' I replied, 'on Friday evening providence delivered me the opportunity I have been dreaming of. With your wise help I believe I am at last able to repay the trust you have invested in me, and assume an active role in the struggle against those who wish to frustrate the advance of socialism. I beg you, comrade: Please, as my patron, as the lifelong counselor and friend of my heroic father, grant me this chance to prove that I am worthy of him. The Englishman Mundy is an incurable bourgeois but he cares for the human condition and makes radical if incorrect perceptions, as his record shows. If you allow me to develop him aggressively under your incomparable guidance, I swear you will not be disappointed.'"

"And you didn't mind?" Mundy asks diffidently.

"Mind what?"--Sasha, combative as ever.