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to the dark I saw that the far side of the room was filled with a silvery sheen.
    ‘Dorf,’ said the voice of Stok. It boomed almost like an amplifier. There was a click from his desk; the yellow tungsten light came on. Stok was sitting behind his desk almost obscured by a dense cloud of cigar smoke. There was Scandinavianstyle East German furniture in the room. On the table behind me there was a Hohner simple buttonkey accordion, piles of newspapers, and a chessboard with some of the pieces fallen over. There was a folding bed near the wall with two army blankets on it and high leather boots placed together at the head. Near the door was a tiny sink and a cupboard that might have held clothes.
    ‘My dear Dorf,’ said Stok. ‘Have I caused you great inconvenience?’
    He emerged from the cigar smoke in an anklelength black leather overcoat.
    ‘Not unless you count being scared half to death,’ I said.
    ‘Ha ha ha,’ said Stok, then he exhaled another great billow of cigar smoke like a 4.6.2 pulling out of King’s Cross.
    ‘I wanted to contact you,’ he spoke with the cigar held between tight lips, ‘without Vulkan.’
    ‘Another time,’ I said, ‘write.’
    There was another tap at the door. Stok moved across the room like a wounded crow. The greyhaired one brought two lemon teas.
    ‘There is no milk today I am afraid,’ said Stok; he drew the overcoat around him.
    ‘And so Russian tea was invented,’ I said.
    Stok laughed again in a perfunctory sort of way. I drank the scalding hot tea. It made me feel better, like digging your finger nails into your palm does.
    ‘What is it?’ I said.
    Stok waited while the grey-haired one closedthe door behind her. Then he said, ‘Let’s stop quarrelling, shall we?’
    ‘You mean personally?’ I said. ‘Or are you speaking on behalf of the Soviet Union?’
    ‘I mean it,’ said Stok. ‘We can do far better for ourselves if we co-operate than if we obstruct each other.’ Stok paused and smiled with studied charm.
    ‘This scientist Semitsa is not important to the Soviet Union. We have other younger men with newer and better ideas. Your people on the other hand will think you marvellous if you can deliver him to London.’ Stok shrugged his shoulders at the idiocy of the world of politics.
    ‘Caveat emptor?’ I said.
    ‘Not half,’ said Stok in a skilful piece of idiom. ‘Buyer watch out.’ Stok rolled the cigar across his mouth and said, ‘Buyer watch out,’ a couple of times. I just drank the lemon tea and said nothing. Stok ambled across to the chessboard on the sidetable, his leather coat creaking like a windjammer.
    ‘Are you a chess player, English?’ he said.
    ‘I prefer games where there’s a better chance to cheat,’ I said.
    ‘I agree with you,’ said Stok. ‘The preoccupation with rules doesn’t sit well upon the creative mind.’
    ‘Like communism?’ I said.
    Stok picked up a knight. ‘But the pattern of chess is the pattern of your capitalist world. The world of bishops and castles and kings and knights.’
    ‘Don’t look at me,’ I said. ‘I’m just a pawn. I’mhere in the front rank.’ Stok grinned and looked down at the board.
    ‘I’m a good player,’ he said. ‘Your friend Vulkan is one of the few men in Berlin who can consistently beat me.’
    ‘That’s because he is part of the pattern of our capitalist world.’
    ‘The pattern,’ said Stok, ‘has been revised. The knight is the most important piece on the board. Queens have been made…impotent. Can you say impotent of a queen?’
    ‘On this side of the wall you can say what you like,’ I said.
    Stok nodded. ‘The knights—the generals—run your western world. General Walker of the 24th Infantry Division lectured all his troops that the President of the USA was a communist.’
    ‘You don’t agree?’ I asked.
    ‘You are a fool,’ boomed Stok in his Boris Godunov voice.
    ‘I am trying to tell you that these people…’ he waved the knight in my