Len Deighton, London Match - literature save 2

'Ah, Bernd. Give me a kiss, Liebchen. Why are you so cruel to your Tante Lisl? Ibounced you on my knee in this very room, and that was before you could walk.''Yes, I know, but I couldn't get away, Lisl. It was work.'She fluttered her eyelashes like a young actress. 'One day you'll be old, darling.Then you'll know what it's like.'6Christmas morning. West Berlin was like a ghost town; as I stepped into the street thesilence was uncanny. The Ku-damm was empty of traffic and, although some of the neonsigns and shop lights were still shining, there was no one strolling on its wide pavements.I had the town virtually to myself all the way to Potsdamer Strasse.Potsdamer Strasse is Schneberg's main street, a wide thoroughfare that is calledHauptstrasse at one end and continues north to the Tiergarten. You can find everythingyou want there and a lot of things you've been trying to avoid. There are smart shops andslums, kebab counters and superb nineteenth-century houses now listed as nationalmonuments. Here is a neobaroque palace - the Volksgerichtshof - where Hitler's judgespassed death sentences at the rate of two thousand a year, so that citizens found guilty oftelling even the most feeble anti-Nazi jokes were executed.Behind the Volksgerichthof - its rooms now echoing and empty except for thoseused by the Allied Travel Office and the Allied Air Security Office (where the fourpowers control the air lanes across East Germany to Berlin) - was the street where Langelived. His top-floor apartment overlooked one of the seedier side streets. Lange was nothis family name, it was not his name at all. 'Lange' - or 'Lofty' - was the descriptivenickname the Germans had given to this very tall American. His real name was JohnKoby. Of Lithuanian extraction, his grandfather had decided that 'Kubilunas' was notAmerican enough to go over a storefront in Boston.The street door led to a grim stone staircase. The windows on every landing hadbeen boarded up. It was dark, the stairs illuminated by dim lamps protected againstvandals by wire mesh. The walls were bare of any decoration but graffiti. At the top ofthe house the apartment door was newly painted dark grey and a new plastic bell pushwas labelled JOHN KOBY - JOURNALIST. The door was opened by Mrs Koby and sheled me into a brightly lit, well-furnished apartment. 'Lange was so glad you phoned,' shewhispered. 'It was wonderful that you could come right away. He gets miserablesometimes. You'll cheer him up.' She was a small thin woman, her face pale like the facesof most Berliners when winter comes. She had dear eyes, a round face, and a fringe thatcame almost down to her eyebrows.'I'll try,' I promised.It was the sort of untidy room in which you'd expect to find a writer or even a'journalist'. There were crowded bookshelves, a desk with an old manual typewriter, andmore books and papers piled on the floor. But Lange had not been a professional writer