Spooked by a Crumbling Wall

By John Skow

SPY LINE by Len Deighton; Knopf; 291 pages; $18.95

Never mind the Soviet economy, Mikhail Sergeyevich; what have you done to the spy-thriller industry? Now that the Berlin Wall has started coming down, cold warriors are not the only ones whose smiles must seem a trifle forced. Spy novelists, like Pentagon budgeteers, need the Wall to make their fictions believable. What's a secret agent to do now? Set up a kiosk and sell FREIHEIT T shirts?

The grim central image of modern spy literature is the death of Alec Leamas, shot by G.D.R. Grenzpolizisten at the Wall in the last scene of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. John le Carre's bleak and entirely believable novel was published in 1963, only two years after the East German regime built the Wall. Since then, Le Carre's surviving operatives and those of Len Deighton, another notable English spymaster, have made dodgy livings evading Vopos at the Wall, armed with little but false passports and the turned-up collars of their raincoats.

Now, with the border Vopos tossing flowers and grinning like Father Christmas, the Berlin Wall has suddenly lost the cachet it once had for spy writers. For Le Carre the timing of the Wall's decline as a cold war symbol is only slightly awkward. His latest novel, The Russia House, fails, unsurprisingly, to anticipate the collapse of the East bloc, but it does deal credibly with the slipperiness of glasnost and the refusal of U.S. hard-liners to embrace perestroika. Deighton, on the other hand, is caught embarrassingly short. Spy Line, his new novel, puts him five books into a convoluted six- volume series that depends on East Germany's walled-in villainy to sustain its gray and sunless menace.

The narrative's first volume, Berlin Game, began with heavy irony, as Deighton's hero Bernard Samson, a British agent watching for trouble at the Wall, asked his friend Werner Volkmann, "How long have we been sitting here?" and Volkmann answered sourly, "Nearly a quarter of a century." Spy Line, set in the present, starts off with a joke that might have been heard over coffee at a Tory think tank: "Glasnost is trying to escape over the Wall, and getting shot with a silenced machine gun!" Its pivotal violence is a bloody shoot-out during an attempted escape along the autobahn from Berlin to the West.

That sort of crudeness, recent events seem to be saying, is no longer imaginable. Thus agent Samson, with his perfect, idiomatic Berliner Deutsch and his deep knowledge of levels of murk and treachery on both sides of the Wall, is suddenly out of date. As are, an optimist dutifully believes, many thousands of border guards, KGB head beaters and assassins in the real world. Espionage will go on, of course, but presumably it will be of the corporate kind, waged among Japan, Korea and the European Community, which is apt to | include Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, what used to be called East Germany, and (as an associate member) what remains of the Soviet Union. Will thriller fans line up for tales of Samsung or Mitsubishi infiltrating Siemens A.G. and being foiled by plucky marketing execs?

Luckily for Deighton, there is no sign of change in his narrative's other engine of mischief, the mole-ridden, class-clotted English intelligence apparatus. A considerable part of the fun of the author's nearly endless chronicle has always been his seething contempt, and Samson's, for England's upper-class bumblers, and for Oxbridge leftists of the Kim Philby stamp. Readers who have followed Samson from Berlin Game will recall that his very upper-class wife Fiona, also an English intelligence agent, defected to East Germany and set up shop as a KGB colonel, no less.

This is parody, of course, and not just of recent, mole-infested history, but of that other cold war, the one between divorced ex-husbands and their former wives. One of Samson's deep fears has been that Fiona would get custody of their two teenage children and spirit them off to the G.D.R. Fiona surfaces with a flourish in the current novel, her fans will be glad to learn, leaving two important issues unresolved. One is whether she was a real defector or, possibly, a truly extraordinary double agent. The other is how long Gloria, Samson's newly acquired young mistress, will be willing to stay home and baby- sit the teenagers.

All this has bubbled cheerfully in the two novels that followed Berlin Game in Deighton's first Samson trilogy, Mexico Set and London Match, and then in Spy Hook, the beginning of a second trilogy, which has Samson under suspicion and on the run from his own colleagues. The current Spy Line sags just a bit, but it will lead, readers are assured, to resolution in a promised final thriller, Spy Sinker. Will Fiona and Samson retire to a cottage in Cornwall and argue over lunch? More important, will Deighton or anyone else find a menace to replace the Wall? Lite politics, whole-wheat pasta and the melting of the polar ice caps are all alarming, but they don't quite do the job. A lot of fictional heroes with turned-up rain-coat collars must be worrying about their pensions.