Spy Hook by Len Deighton

whether it's true or not but it wasn't something that either of us wanted to take a chance on.
    'You can't trust music critics,' I said. Toscanini could have told him that.'
    I'll bet that his jukebox is not insured,' said Werner. He had the sort of mind that thought in terms of expenditure, percentages, interest rates, risk and insurance.
    'It was offered cheap,' I explained. 'Willi thought it would bring more teenagers.'
    'He'd make a lot of money from penniless teenagers, wouldn't he?' said Werner with heavy irony. 'He should be glad they keep away, not trying to find a way of attracting them.'
    Even after a lifetime's friendship, Werner could still surprise me. It was his often expressed view that juvenile delinquency was to be blamed on TV, single-parent families, unemployment or too much sugar in the diet. Was this new reactionary stand against teenagers a sign that Werner was growing old, the way I'd been all my life?
    Werner made his money by avalizing: which means he financed East European exports to the West with hard currency borrowed from anywhere he could get it. He paid high interest and he lived on narrow margins. It was a tough way to make a living but Werner seemed to flourish on the hazards and difficulties of this curious bywater of the financial world. Like many of his rivals he had no banking experience, and his formal education went no further than the legerdemain that comes from prodding a Japanese calculator.
    'I thought you liked young people, Werner,' I said.
    He looked at me and scowled. He was always accusing me of being intolerant and narrow-minded, but on the issue of keeping my haunts Jungend-frei I was with him, and so were a lot of Berliners. You don't have to walk far down Potsdamer Strasse before starting to believe that universal military conscription for teenagers might be a good idea.
    There was something different about Werner today. It wasn't his new beard – a fine full-set with moustache – when it was fully grown he'd look like a prosperous Edwardian beer baron or some business associate of Sir Basil Zaharoff. It wasn't just that he was noticeably overweight, he was always overweight between his dedicated summing regimes; nor the fact that he'd arrived absurdly early for our appointment. But he was unusually restless. While waiting for the meal to arrive he'd fidgeted with the salt and pepper as well as tugging at his earlobes and pinching his nose and staring out of the window as if his mind was somewhere else. I wondered if he was thinking of some other appointment he had, for Werner, in his tailormade suit and silk shirt, was not dressed for this sort of eating-place.
    We were in Leuschner's, a once famous and fashionable café near Potsdamerplatz. It was shabby now and almost empty. It had been like this for many years, for the great expanse of Potsdamerplatz – once the busiest traffic intersection in all Europe – was now a still and silent place where armed sentries patrol constantly between the massed barbed wire and, with a compassion not extended to their fellow-countrymen, carefully restrain their attack-trained dogs from running into the minefields. And as the district became a backwater, Café Leuschner became the sort of place where men were cautious what they said to strangers, and policemen came regularly to inspect everyone's identity papers.
    Once great luxury hotels stood here, adjacent to the mighty Anhalter railway terminal, that was the biggest in the world. The posters in the museum listed one hundred and forty-five trains arriving each day, eighty-two of them long-distance luxury expresses that came complete with cocktail bars, sleeping compartments and diners. Beneath the road, by means of a specially constructed tunnel, baggage porters, labouring under steamer trunks and cases made of the hides of crocodile and pig, and smartly dressed pages conducted the arriving passengers under the swirling traffic^ directly into the plush foyer of the famous Excelsior