The Innocent

Set in Cold War Berlin in 1955 and 1956, the novel follows Leonard Marnham, a 25-year-old British Post Office engineer who arrives in the divided city to work on a top-secret intelligence operation. Leonard, a sheltered young man from Tottenham who has never met an American or had a girlfriend, is placed under the supervision of Bob Glass, an energetic officer of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Glass reveals the project's true nature: From a warehouse building protected by layered cover stories, American Army sergeants are digging a tunnel beneath the border into the Russian sector to tap Soviet military telephone lines buried under the Schönefelder Chaussee, a major road. The joint American-British operation aims to intercept communications between East European capitals and Moscow. Leonard's job is to unpack, test, and fit signal activation units onto 150 Ampex tape recorders that will capture these communications.

Glass is brash and domineering. He warns Leonard about security, referencing the scandal caused by Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two British diplomats whose defection to the Soviet Union exposed them as spies, and forbids Leonard from taking any work materials home. Leonard spends weeks on grueling, repetitive work while thinking obsessively about a woman he meets one evening at the Resi, a massive West Berlin dance hall equipped with pneumatic tube messaging between tables. Glass and Russell, an announcer for American Forces Network (AFN), take Leonard there, and a message arrives from a woman across the room. Leonard meets Maria Eckdorf, a 30-year-old German woman who speaks fluent English. They hold hands in silence, and Leonard senses his life is about to change.

Maria lives alone in a small, cold-water flat in Kreuzberg, works as a typist and translator at a British Army workshop, and has a violent ex-husband named Otto who appears unpredictably to demand money and sometimes hit her. After days of longing, Leonard visits her apartment. Maria removes his glasses and tells him his eyes are beautiful. He confesses he has no sexual experience. Maria feels relief: She is freed from the conventions of seduction. They make love for the first time.

As winter deepens, Leonard gains higher security clearance. John MacNamee, a senior British government scientist, takes him through the tunnel into the Russian sector and recruits him to gather technical intelligence from the Americans about a classified discovery involving encoded messages. Meanwhile, Leonard and Maria grow closer during the brutal cold. But as Leonard's sexual confidence grows, disturbing fantasies intrude during lovemaking. He begins imagining Maria as a conquered enemy. One night, he tries to enact these fantasies, shoving her against a wall and tearing at her skirt. When she cries and tells him to leave, he stops. Maria's terror connects to wartime memories of witnessing a soldier rape a woman in a Berlin air-raid shelter in 1945. She flees to her parents in the Russian sector.

The timing is disastrous. The tap on the Soviet cables succeeds just as Maria vanishes into enemy territory. Glass frames her disappearance as a potential security breach and forces Leonard to provide her name and address. After investigation, Maria is cleared. Three weeks later, she reappears at Leonard's door. On the dark landing, she screams when he approaches, her terror rooted in memories of violence. George Blake, a neighbor who says he works for the Foreign Office, rushes upstairs to intervene. Maria calms the situation and enters the apartment. Leonard delivers an unprecedented declaration of shame, desperation, and love. Maria recognizes his vulnerability as different from the violent men she has known and crosses the room toward him.

They rebuild their relationship on more domestic terms, settling into what the narrative calls "blissful ordinariness." During the autumn Oktoberfest, Otto returns and savagely beats Maria after discovering Leonard's belongings in her flat. Over Christmas in Tottenham, Leonard decides to marry Maria. Back in Berlin, they plan an engagement party where Blake warns Leonard that associating with Glass is a security risk, revealing he knows about the tunnel operation.

On the night of their engagement celebration, Leonard and Maria return to her apartment and discover Otto drunk and asleep inside the wardrobe, having used a stolen key. A vicious argument erupts. Otto produces a document claiming rights to the apartment. Maria's skirt catches fire from a dropped cigarette; Leonard tears the blazing fabric away. Otto seizes Maria by the throat. Leonard pries him off, but Otto attacks Leonard savagely. In blinding agony, Leonard bites through Otto's cheek. Maria brings a cobbler's last, a heavy iron foot-shaped form used by shoemakers, crashing down on Otto's skull, killing him. Leonard's hand is on the last alongside hers.

They spend the night deliberating. Leonard wants to call the police and claim self-defense, but Maria dismantles each argument: The local police liked Otto and considered him a war hero, the physical evidence looks like manslaughter, and city records document Otto's housing claim, giving them a plausible murder motive. Maria insists they must dispose of the body. Leonard retrieves two large equipment cases from the tunnel, and in a harrowing scene, they dismember Otto and pack the sealed remains into the cases.

Leonard's attempt to leave the cases in luggage lockers at the Zoo station fails. He brings them home, where Blake spots them and Glass arrives furious about the security violation. Glass drives the cases to the warehouse, where Leonard bluffs past sentries by claiming classified contents. The sealed cases are stowed in the tunnel.

Realizing the cases will decompose in the tunnel's heat, Leonard crosses into the Russian sector and enters the Café Prag, a known gathering place for intelligence freelancers. One of these freelancers, a young man named Hans, approaches Leonard, and Leonard hands him a napkin map of the tunnel identifying where the Soviet lines are being tapped. That afternoon, the Russians break into the tap chamber. The tunnel is lost.

MacNamee accepts Leonard's cover story and recalls him to England. At Tempelhof airport, Maria appears radiant, insisting everything will be all right. As Leonard boards the plane, he sees Glass standing beside Maria on the observation deck, his arm apparently around her shoulder. Leonard feels betrayed and refuses to look again.

In an epilogue set in June 1987, Leonard returns to Berlin and reads a letter from Maria, now Maria Glass, writing from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Glass died of a heart attack the year before last while on a fishing trip. The letter reveals that the day after Leonard left her apartment with the cases, Glass arrived for a routine security interview and Maria told him everything. Glass discovered that the East Germans had handed the cases to the West Berlin police and a murder investigation was hours from identifying Leonard. Glass persuaded his superiors to quash the investigation to protect Western intelligence, then swore Maria to secrecy. At Tempelhof, Glass had simply arrived late and bumped into Maria; there was no affair. Maria married Glass in 1957 out of gratitude and growing affection, and they had three daughters. The letter also reveals that Blake was later convicted as a Soviet double agent who had betrayed the tunnel at its planning stage; the Russians knew about the tunnel all along and left it in place to protect Blake. Maria asks why the Russians chose that specific moment to expose the tunnel. Leonard knows the answer: Blake told his controller that a young Englishman was about to deposit equipment in the tunnel. Leonard decides to fly to Cedar Rapids unannounced, resolving that they will return to Berlin together and look at the Wall before it is all torn down.