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same heavy door that protected his stamps, and had given us perhaps groundless confidence in the old days, was still in place, and the peep-hole through which he’d met the eyes of the Gestapo now was used to survey me.
    â€˜My boy! How wonderful to see you.’
    â€˜Hello, Serge.’
    â€˜And a chance to practise my English,’ he said. He reached forward with a white bony hand, and gripped me firmly enough for me to feel the two gold rings that he wore.
    It was easy to imagine Serge Frankel as a youth: a frail-looking small-boned teenager with frizzy hair and a large forehead and the same style of gold-rimmed spectacles as he was wearing now.
    We went into the study. It was a high-ceilinged room lined with books, their titles in a dozen or more languages. Not only stamp catalogues and reference books, but philosophy from Cicero to Ortega y Gasset.
    He sat in the same button-back leather chair now as he had then. Smiling the same inscrutable and humourless smile, and brushing at the ash that spilled down the same sort of waistcoat, leaving there a grey smear like a mark of penitence. It was inevitable that we should talk of old times.
    Serge Frankel was a Communist – student of Marx, devotee of Lenin and servant of Stalin. Born in Berlin, he’d been hunted from end to end of Hitler’s Third Reich, and had not seen his wife and children since the day he waved goodbye to them at Cologne railway station, wearing a new moustache and carrying papers that described him as an undertaker from Stettin.
    During the Civil War in Spain, Frankel had been a political commissar with the International Brigade. During the tank assault on the Prado, Frankel had destroyed an Italian tank single-handed, using a wine bottle hastily filled with petrol.
    â€˜Tea?’ said Frankel. I remembered him making tea then as he made it now: pouring boiling water from a dented electric kettle into an antique teapot with a chipped lid. Even this room was enigmatic. Was he a pauper, hoarding the cash value of the skeleton clock and the tiny Corot etching, or a Croesus, indifferent to his plastic teaspoons and museum postcards of Rouault?
    â€˜And what can I do for you, young man?’ He rubbed his hands together, exactly as he had done the day I first visited him. Then, my briefing could hardly have been more simple: find Communists and give them money, they had told me. But most of life’s impossible tasks – from alchemy to squaring the circle – are similarly concise. At that time the British had virtually no networks in Western Europe. A kidnapping on the German–Dutch border in November 1939 had put both the European chief of SIS and his deputy into the hands of the Abwehr. A suitcase full of contact addresses captured in The Hague in May 1940, and the fall of France, had given the
coup de grâce
to the remainder. Champion and I were ‘blind’, as jargon has it, and halt and lame, too, if the truth be told. We had no contacts except Serge Frankel, who’d done the office a couple of favours in 1938 and 1939 and had never been contacted since.
    â€˜Communists.’ I remembered the way that Frankel had said it, ‘Communists’, as though he’d not heard the word before. I had been posing as an American reporter, for America was still a neutral country. He looked again at the papers I had laid out on his writing table. There was a forged US passport sent hurriedly from the office in Berne, an accreditation to the New York
Herald Tribune
and a membership card of The American Rally for a Free Press, which the British Embassy in Washington recommended as the reddest of American organizations. Frankel had jabbed his finger on that card and pushed it to the end of the row, like a man playing patience. ‘Now that the Germans have an Abwehr office here, Communists are lying low, my friend.’ He had poured tea for us.
    â€˜But Hitler and Stalin have signed the peace pact. In