The Innocent Read Online Free PDF Page B

needed to see the apartment for “professional and technical reasons.”
    On the way they drove along a section of the Kurfürstendamm. Glass pointed out with some pride the brave elegance of new stores flanked by ruins, the crowds of shoppers, the famous Hotel am Zoo, the neon Cinzano and Bosch signswaiting to be turned on. By the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church with its shorn spire there was even a small traffic jam.
    Glass did not, as Leonard half expected, search the apartment for concealed listening devices. Instead he went from room to room, taking up a central position in each one and looking around before moving on. It did not seem right that he should go into the bedroom, with the bed unmade and yesterday’s socks on the floor. But Leonard said nothing. He waited in the living room, and still thought he was about to hear a security assessment when Glass came in at last.
    The American spread his hands. “It’s incredible. It’s beyond belief. You’ve seen where I live. How does a fucking technical assistant at the Post Office get a place like this?” Glass glared across his beard at Leonard as though he really expected an answer.
    Leonard had no ready means to respond to an insult. He had not received one in adult life. He was nice to people, and they were generally nice back to him. His heart beat hard, confusing his thoughts. He said, “I expect it was a mistake.”
    Without appearing to change the subject Glass said, “Look, I’ll come by round about seven-thirty. Show you some places.”
    He was moving out of the room. Leonard, relieved that they were not to have a fistfight after all, accompanied his guest to the front door with earnest, polite thanks for the morning’s tour and for the evening to come.
    When Glass had gone he returned to the sitting room feeling sick with contradictory, unarticulated emotion. His breath tasted meaty, like a dog’s. His stomach was still gaseous and tight. He sat down and loosened his tie.

Three
    T wenty minutes later he was sitting at the dining room table filling his fountain pen. He wiped the nib with a rag he kept for the purpose. He squared a sheet of paper in front of him. Now that he had a workplace he was content, despite the confusion around Glass. His impulse was to set things in order. He was preparing to write the first shopping list of his life. He contemplated his needs. It was difficult to think about food. He was not at all hungry. He had everything he needed. A job, a place where he was expected. He would have a pass, he was part of a team, a sharer in asecret. He was a member of the clandestine elite, Glass’s five or ten thousand, who gave the city its real purpose. He wrote
Salz
. He had seen his mother make her effortless lists on a sheet of Basildon Bond: 1 lb. mt, 2 lb. crts, 5 lb. pots. Such feeble encodings were not appropriate to a member of the intelligence community, one with level three clearance in Operation Gold. And he could not cook. He considered Glass’s domestic arrangements, crossed out
Salz
and wrote
Kaffee und Zucker
. He consulted his dictionary for powdered milk:
Milchpulver
. Now the list was easy. As it grew longer he seemed to be inventing and defining himself. He would have no food in the house, no mess, no mundanity. At twelve deutsche marks to the pound, he could afford to eat in a
Kneipe
in the evening and at the Altglienicke canteen during the day. He looked in the dictionary again and wrote
Tee, Zigaretten, Streichhölzer, Schokolade
. The last was to keep his blood sugar level up when he worked late at night. He read the list through as he stood. He felt himself to be precisely what his list suggested: unencumbered, manly, serious.
    He walked to Reichskanzlerplatz and found a line of shops in a street near the
Kneipe
where he had eaten his supper. The buildings that had once faced directly onto the pavement had been blasted away to expose a second rank of structures sixty feet back, whose empty upper storeys had been