A SMALL TOWN IN GERMANY by John le Carré

‘He set up his own office. He wrote letters and received replies. All on Embassy paper. He headed off the Chancery mail as it came in and extracted anything addressed to him. He ran it like he ran his own life: secretly and efficiently. Trusting nobody, confiding in nobody; playing the different ends off against each other… Sometimes he made little jour­neys, consulted records, Ministries, church registers, survivor groups… all on Embassy paper. He collected press cuttings, took copies, did his own typing and put on his own sealing wax. He even pinched an official seal. He headed his letters Claims and Consular, so most of them came to him in the first place anyway. He compared every detail: birth certificates, marriage, death of mother, hunting licences – he was looking for discrepancies all the time: anything to prove that Karfeld hadn’t fought at the Russian front. He put together a bloody great dossier. It’s hardly surprising Siebkron got on to him. There’s scarcely a Government agency he hasn’t consulted under one pretext or another-‘

‘Oh my God,’ Bradfield whispered, laying down his pen in a momentary gesture of defeat.

‘By the end of January, he’d come to the only possible conclusion: that Karfeld had been lying in his teeth, and some­one – it looked like someone high up, and it looked very much like Siebkron – someone had been covering up for him. They tell me Siebkron has ambitions of his own – hitch his wagon to any star as long as it was on the move.’

‘That’s true enough,’ Bradfield conceded, lost in private thoughts.

‘Like Praschko in the old days… You see where we’re getting, don’t you? And of course before long, as he very well knew, Siebkron was going to notice that the Embassy was making some pretty way-out enquiries, even for Claims and Consular. And that somebody was going to be bloody angry, and perhaps a bit rough as well. Specially when Leo found the proof.’

‘What proof? How can he possibly prove such a charge now, twenty or more years after the crime?’

‘It’s all in Registry,’ Turner said, with sudden reluctance. ‘You’d do better to see for yourself.’

‘I’ve no time and I am used to hearing unsavoury facts.’

‘And discounting them.’

‘I insist that you tell me.’ He made no drama of his insistence.

‘Very well. Last year, Karfeld decided to take a doctorate. He was a big fellow by then; he was worth a fortune in the chemical industry – his administrative talent had paid off in a big way – and he was making fair headway in local politics in Essen, and he wanted to be Doctor. Maybe he was like Leo; he’d left a job undone and he wanted to get the record straight. Or maybe he thought a handle would be a useful asset: Vote for Doctor Karfeld. They like a doctorate here in a Chancellor… So he went back to school and wrote a learned thesis. He didn’t do much research and everyone was very impressed, specially his tutors. Wonderful, they said, the way he found the time.’

‘And?’

‘It’s a study of the effects of certain toxic gases on the human body. They thought very highly of it apparently; caused quite a little stir at the time.’

‘That is hardly conclusive.’

‘Oh yes it is. Karfeld based his whole analysis on the detailed examination of thirty-one fatal cases.’

Bradfield had closed his eyes.

‘It is not proof,’ Bradfield said at last; he was very pale but the pen in his hand was as firm as ever. ‘You know it is not proof. It raises suppositions I agree. It suggests he was at Hapstorf. It is not even half-way to proof.’

‘Pity we can’t tell Leo.’

‘The information came to him in the course of his industrial experience; that is what Karfeld would argue. He acquired it from a third party; that would be his fall-back position.’

‘From the real bastards.’

‘Even if it could be shown that the information came from Hapstorf, there are a dozen explanations as to how it came into Karfeld’s hands. You said yourself, he was not even engaged in research -‘

‘No. He sat at a desk. It’s been done before.’

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