The Innocent by Ian McEwan Page A

was looking down at them. Could he possibly believe, like the sentries on the gate, that he was guarding a warehouse, or even a radar station?
    Leonard waited until MacNamee had straightened and they had stepped into the tunnel. The fluorescent striplights barely dispersed the blackness. The acoustic was dead. Leonard’s voice sounded flat in his ears. “Actually, it’s level three.”
    MacNamee was walking ahead of him, his hands deep in his trouser pockets for warmth. “Well, I suppose we might have to bring you into four. I’ll see about that tomorrow.”
    They were making a shallow descent as they walked betweenthe rails. There were puddles underfoot, and on the walls, where the steel plates had been bolted together to make a continuous tube, condensation glistened. There was a constant hum of a groundwater pump. On both sides of the tunnel sandbags were piled to shoulder height to support cables and pipes. A number of bags had split and were spilling their contents. Earth and water were pressing in on all sides, waiting to reclaim the space.
    They arrived at a place where tight coils of barbed wire were stacked by a pile of sandbags. MacNamee waited for Leonard to draw level. “We’re stepping into the Russian sector now. When they break in on us, which is bound to happen one of these days, we’re meant to spread the wire across as we retreat. Make them respect the border.” He smiled at his little irony, revealing his pitiful teeth. They teetered at all angles, like old gravestones. He caught Leonard’s gaze. He tapped his mouth with his forefinger and spoke right into the younger man’s embarrassment. “Milk teeth. The other lot never came through. I think perhaps I never wanted to grow up.”
    They continued along level ground. A hundred yards ahead a group of men stepped through a steel door and came toward them. They appeared deep in conversation, but as they came closer, Leonard realized they were making no sound. They jostled in and out of single file. When they were thirty feet away Leonard caught the sibilants of their whispers. Those ceased too as the two groups squeezed by each other with wary nods.
    “The general rule is no noise, especially once you’ve crossed the border.” MacNamee was speaking in a voice fractionally above a whisper. “As you know, low frequencies, men’s voices, penetrate very easily.”
    Leonard whispered “Yes,” but his reply was lost to the sound of the pumps.
    Running along the tops of the twin banks of sandbags were power lines, the air-conditioning conduit and the lines from the recording room, encased in a lead sheath. Along the way there were telephones mounted on the wall, and fire extinguishers,fuseboxes, emergency power switches. At intervals there were green and red warning lights, like miniature traffic signals. It was a toytown, packed with boyish invention. Leonard remembered the secret camps, the tunnels through the undergrowth he used to make with friends in a scrap of woodland near his house. And the gigantic train set in Hamleys, the toy store—the safe world of its motionless sheep and cows cropping the sudden green hills that were no more than pretexts for tunnels. Tunnels were stealth and safety; boys and trains crept through them, lost to sight and care, and then emerged unscathed.
    MacNamee murmured in his ear again. “I tell you what I like about this project. The attitude. Once the Americans decide to do a thing, they do it well, and hang the cost. I’ve had everything I wanted, never a murmur. None of this can-you-get-by-with-half-a-ball-of-string nonsense.”
    Leonard was flattered to be confided in. He tried to be humorous in agreement. “Look at all the trouble they take with the food. I love the way they do their chips.”
    MacNamee looked away. It seemed this puerile observation drifted with them down the tunnel until they reached the steel door.
    Beyond it was air-conditioning equipment banked up on both sides to make a narrow