by John Lawton
Wilderness shouldered him aside.
“Frank, for crying out loud!”
Kostya slumped to the floor.
A trail of blood crept across his chin, but then Wilderness remembered he’d had a tooth out and Frank probably hadn’t hit him—yet.
“He’s trying to scam us. Says he hasn’t got the money!”
Wilderness pulled Kostya to his feet.
“Is this true? Your mother says you hold the purse strings.”
“Shto?”
“That you keep the money for both of you.”
“Тогда моя мать не сказала правды.”
Frank erupted.
“In English, you sonovabitch!”
“He says his mother lied to us.”
“All dollars I ever have I am give to you for first hundred jars. My mother keep other monies.”
“OK. So where’s your fuckin’ mother now?”
Wilderness echoed Frank, used a softer tone, but still one of concern.
“Kostya, where is Volga now? Does she have our money?”
“My mother since three o’clock on road to Moscow. Her … подразделение …”
“Her unit,” Wilderness prompted.
“Отозвано.”
“He says her unit’s been recalled to Moscow.”
Frank kicked over the table. “Shit, shit, shit.”
And Wilderness recalled Krasnaya’s last word to Volga Zolotukhina—“Don’t be late”—and in the mind’s eye he could see a mile-long column of tanks and half-tracks crawling across the dull plain that was Prussia.
“This comes out of your hide, kid.”
“No,” said Wilderness. “Take it out of my hide, or if you really feel you need to hurt someone there’s a bloke outside who’s already asked you to shoot him.”
“Three hundred bucks, Joe!”
“Peanuts, Frank. If you’re really that upset about it … take it out of the stash. Take it all out of my share and forget about it. Kostya hasn’t scammed you. His mother has.”
“What was it you said? I need to know who to trust? I need to know who to trust? It’s you who needs to know who to trust!”
Wilderness sincerely hoped that was Frank’s last word on the matter. His impulse was to walk out, take the jeep and leave Frank to find his way back west on the U-Bahn. But that would mean leaving him alone with Kostya.
Frank’s cap had fallen to the floor in the scuffle. Wilderness picked it up, knocked off the dust and handed it back to Frank. “Here. Take the jeep. I’ll find my own way back.”
Frank put his cap on, with a couple of overly demonstrative, fastidious adjustments. Then he feigned a lunge at Kostya, growling as he did so. Kostya fell back against the wall. Frank laughed and left.
Wilderness held out a hand to help Kostya up and, as he did so, heard Frank encounter the Wehrmacht veterans once more.
“Losers!”
§7
Wilderness went home to Grünetümmlerstraße, to his lover, Nell. He was “Franked” out—a common enough condition—quite possibly Eddie’s permanent one—and while Nell could never be a guarantee of a relaxing time, an easy time (he was not at all sure she understood the idea of “easy” in any language) she did at least provide balance, being almost the moral opposite of Frank, who after all was all but devoid of morals.
Yet again, as every evening since the blockade of Berlin began, the canned food—the solid stuff, as Frank would have it, the stuff they stole from the PX and the NAAFI on a daily basis—sat unopened on the dresser as Nell and Wilderness ate an “austerity” meal of whatever was available for honest Deutschmarks at the local honest market. Tonight it was cabbage-and-bread soup with a hint of fresh parsley grown in their window box—a poor man’s ribollita. On the dresser were prawns in aspic, two foot-long salamis and a dozen cans of Green Giant yellow sweet corn. And Wilderness’s threatening to pawn the can opener if she didn’t use it did not dent her resolve for a second.
“Wir sind Berliner. We are Berliners, Joe. The common fate of our people is our fate. We live like Berliners, we eat like Berliners.”
Substitute “Londoner” for “Berliner” and still the idea meant nothing to Wilderness. On Forces Radio, Flanagan and Allen’s “Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner” had been the hit song of 1947. Wilderness thought it pure schmaltz. He’d no more “love” London than he’d do “The Lambeth Walk.” It was all nonsense. Fate? Fate was never common. Fate was what you made of it.
Nell’s one concession to the black market was eggs from Yuri’s Eishaus. But that was sentimentality, not vice. Since 1945, when Yuri had become her mother’s lover and protector, protecting her from an army of Russian rapists, Yuri had brought eggs. She would never reject his eggs, it would be like rejecting the memory of her mother. Wilderness merely wished that Yuri brought them more often or that today he had bought some himself and passed them off as a gift from Yuri. Lies and more lies.
Wilderness had no problem with lies. You lied and you were lied to. A good Schieber survived by being able to know when he was being lied to whilst lying himself. Not that he liked lying, not that he disliked lying. What was there to have any feeling about? Lying was life—the air you breathed. But … but he had told Nell so many lies, and in his heart—that hysterical, unreliable organ—perhaps he wished he hadn’t or perhaps he wished that the necessity to lie wasn’t there?
He’d lied to her between the sheets tonight.
He was relishing the silence that was not quite silence. The sensual rhythm of Nell’s breathing. The perfect mechanical rhythm of the piston engines in the airlift planes overhead—all those Lancasters and Yorks, all those Douglas C-54s—into Tegel, into Gatow … all the food to keep a city, well … half a city, alive. And the imperfect arrhythmia of takeoff and landing. What was it? A plane every thirty seconds? Every sixty seconds? The Cold War’s metronome. It might become music. It had long ago ceased to be simply noise.
She spoke first.
“You went East today?”
“Yep.” True.
“You’ll have to stop soon. If the airlift goes on, smuggling will become so much more dangerous.”
“Yep.” True.
“So,” a fingertip traced the edge of his left ear, and her lips breathed warmly on his neck. “You will stop, won’t you?”
“Yep.” Lie.
If she knew what he was planning now, knew what tangled thoughts had woven their way into a mental web, knew what he and Frank had cooked up next … she’d leave him. Of course there’d be no more runs to the East with a jeep full of black market goodies. He’d found a tunnel. If the Russians controlled the surface, he and Frank would control the underground, deep beneath the Tiergarten, all the way to the ruins of Monbijou on the far bank of the Spree. And if Nell ever found out … she’d leave him.
Nell Burkhardt was probably the most moral creature he’d ever met. Raised by thieves and whores back in London’s East End, he had come to regard honesty as aberrant. Nell had never stolen anything, had lied, if at all, only in omission and, her association with Wilderness notwithstanding, led a blameless life, and steered a course through it by the unwavering compass of her selfless altruism.
Oh yes, Nell would definitely leave him.
§8
All the same, it came as a surprise when, a few months later, she did. Even more of a surprise was that he would not set eyes on her again for fifteen years, that the 1950s would roll into the 1960s without a glimpse of her.
From time to time he’d hear of Nell—Nell became, after all, little short of famous—from time to time a woman using L’aimant by Coty would pass him in the street, in London or Paris, Rome or Helsinki … and his head would turn involuntarily or his feet would follow, helpless. On one stupid, stupid occasion he’d caught up with a woman, touched her arm, seen the look of fear and commingled scorn in her eyes as he said Nell’s name, then apologised and retraced his steps. He’d learn to mask whatever he mig
ht have felt, that little frisson, that tingle in the spine, the goose-pimples up and down his arms, beneath the desirable, inescapable necessities of being first a husband and latterly a father.
He still told lies, but now he lied for England.
And of course he lied to England.
Vienna
§
Vienna, The Imperial Hotel: September 1955
I am not drunk, he told himself with the drunk’s acute sense of euphemism, I am tipsy.
Perhaps it was the booze. Perhaps it was the innate connection between being off duty and off guard. The first blow, to the belly, doubled him up, and the second, to the face, sent him to the floor scarcely conscious. He’d just about taken in the fact of the attack when he found himself dragged by his shirt collar to the bathroom. His eyes returned to focussing in time to see the bath full of water before his head was plunged in.
When he thought he was dying, hands yanked him back up, he sucked in air, and as his head went down again a voice uttered one of the few words that was common to most European languages: “Idiot.”
After the third dunking, the hands let him go, and he fell against the side of the bath, wheezing.
He looked up. The little Russian was sitting on the painted wicker chair by the bathroom door—a semiautomatic in his right hand.
“Идиот,” he said again. “You treat me like an idiot.”
Wilderness got to his feet. Stripped off his sodden jacket. He felt blood on his face and in his mouth. He leaned over the basin, spitting. The gun stayed on him.
“At the Gare du Nord, you are out in the open as though you think you are invisible. On the Orient Express you linger over your meals and gaze out of the window as though you have nothing better to do.”
Wilderness stuck two fingers in his mouth and wiggled a loose tooth. Then he cupped water in his palm and rinsed a pink trail into the basin. He looked in the mirror. This bloke wasn’t wearing gloves, and there were no prints on the mirror. He’d been very careful in his search and wiped it down—or he hadn’t looked.
“In Venice you … you English have a bird word for it … you swan around like a tourist …”
“Bamdid,” Wilderness said.
“Что?”
“Band-aid.”
The Russian just waved the gun.
Wilderness opened the cupboard. His Browning .25 was still taped to the back of the mirror. The Russian could have found it. He could have emptied the magazine. He could have stuck the gun back up. But, then, the point of taping it up had been that any movement of the tape would probably show. It looked to be as he had left it, but there was really only one way to find out. He’d know by the weight as soon as he had it in his hand.
He took out the roll of Elastoplast and closed the door.
The Russian set down his gun in his lap and lit up a cigarette. Cocky, casual, but he could grab the gun in a split second.
“And in the Nordbahnhof this morning, you practically waved a camera in my face. And still you think I do not notice you. English, you treat me like an idiot.”
Wilderness tore off a strip, slapped it on the cut on his right cheek.
The discourse rattled on. “Idiot, amateur, dilettante, бабочка.” Accomplished bore finds captive audience. Indeed, it occurred to Wilderness that the bugger might have gone to the trouble of sandbagging him simply to be able to give him a piece of his mind.
He opened the cupboard door, put the roll of Elastoplast back, pulled the Browning free and aimed.
The Russian just grinned—cigarette in his left hand, fingertips of his right resting on his gun. He took another long drag on his cigarette, exhaled a plume of utterly contemptuous smoke.
“You’re doing it again. Treating me like an idiot. I know you English. You’re all just amateurs. Play the game, chaps, play the game. Sticky wicket, googly, maiden over. You think of Agincourt and cannot begin to imagine Stalingrad. What an absurd nation you English are. I know all about you. Gentlemen and players. Professionalism is vulgar, practice is cheating. Gentlemen and players? Ha! You won’t shoot. Your kind never does.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
II
Tea and Stollen
§9
West Berlin: Late September 1965
Willy Brandt was a nice guy, one of the good guys. Everybody said so. There might be Germans who would never forgive him for fighting against Germany in the war or for accepting Norwegian citizenship, but foreign politicians adored him. He’d got on well with JFK, reasonably well with LBJ and De Gaulle and very well with England’s new prime minister, Harold Wilson—he could almost hear the phrase “Good German” on his lips, but hoped he never would.
Brandt hated losing.
He’d spent what seemed an age in Bonn, just lost the election for chancellor of the Bundesrepublik, otherwise known as West Germany. Now he was back in Berlin—his old job, his old office—suffering from … what was Churchill’s term for it? … “Black Dog Days.”
His chief of staff found him lying on the floor, his head propped up with a thick book—Goethes Sämtliche Werke Band VI. The Grundig radiogram, which sat in the corner squat as a harmonium, softly playing Schubert’s Swan Song.
“Miserable stuff,” Nell said. “Is this the mood you’re in?”
“Yes. And no.”
She put a cup of coffee within arm’s reach. Pulled up a chair and looked down at him. “The staff—your staff—would like to see something of you. They’d like a word from the mayor of West Berlin, not the hermit of the Rathaus.”
“Instead they’ve got the return of the prodigal loser.”
“Never cared for self-pity and dare I say it’s out of character.”
Brandt eased himself up, wrapped his hands round the mug of coffee.
“I said I’ll never run again.”
“Yes. We all heard that. It was the last thing you said before you fell down the well.”
“Before the dog bit me … much more appropriate. But … I was lying.”
“To the staff? To us?”
“To myself.”
Nell shrugged.
“Well. Plenty of time to change your mind a dozen times if you want. No election for four years.”
“This government won’t last four years. I need to keep … to keep a finger on the pulse in Bonn.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Did you enjoy our time in Bonn, Nell?”
“I say again, why are you telling me any of this?”
“I want you to go back. I want you to be my eyes and ears in Bonn.”
This required no thought, so Nell gave it none.
“No.”
“Is that your last word?”
“Until you start your charm offensive and wear me down.”
“What can I do to make the prospect appealing to you?”
“Nothing. I hated Bonn. It’s a hole. It’s a company town and the product is politics. I’d sooner be in KdF Stadt making Volkswagens. At least the product is tangible. Bonn is what I imagine Washington to be … the cave dwellers … everything is politics, every other person is a diplomat … the man you sit next to on the tram is a Swedish delegate, the woman ahead of you in the market queue is the British ambassador’s secretary. None of it, none of them is real.”
“You wouldn’t have to live there. Just … regular visits.”
“The answer’s still no. Fire me if you like, but I’m staying in Berlin.”
“I know … I know … you are the Berliner and I’m not. There are times I feel like a stranger in my own land. Let me finish the coffee you so kindly brought me and then I might be fired up enough for the charm offensive.”
“Fine. I’ll be in my office—in Berlin.”
§10
At six o’clock Nell did not go straight home. Instead she went to Grünetümmlerstraße, to the house she had lived in, all those years ago just after the war, with Joe Wilderness. Two years in that flat above Erno Schreiber. Another lifeti
me. Joe had moved on—or rather she had thrown him out—she had moved on. Erno had not. Erno had stayed. Erno had grown old in a three-room flat he had occupied since he walked home, slouching not marching, from Amiens on the Western Front in 1918, and decided the best use for his Pickelhaube was as a coal scuttle.
A young woman was poking the fire in the iron stove, shovelling in a few lumps of coal from the steel helmet, as Erno fussed about his tea and teapot. She was blonde, pretty—about the age Nell had been when she had finally moved out—the bloom of youth upon her, worn with a carelessness Nell had never managed.
“You know Trudie,” Erno said, not asking a question.
But Nell did not know Trudie.
“Ach … she has your old room.”
Trudie closed the stove door and stood up.
“I’m Nell,” said Nell. “Nell Burkhardt.”
“Of course,” Trudie replied. “Erno often talks of you and of Joe.”
Nell glared at Erno. It was an unwritten rule. They did not talk about Joe Wilderness.
But Erno merely smiled and set three cups on three saucers, and tore at the wrapper of a stollen cake.
“Not for me, Erno,” said Trudie. “I will leave you to talk.”
A scant exchange of the pleasantries of departing and Nell and Erno were alone.
He put a knitted tea cosy on the pot, eased his backside into a sagging armchair. “So, you think out of sight is out of mind?”
“I don’t want to talk about Joe. I didn’t come here to talk about Joe.”
“You don’t have to come here to talk about anyone. You are welcome even in silence.”
She sat opposite, perched herself on the hard edge of the chaise longue. “But I did come here to talk about someone—Brandt.”
“So—pour tea, cut cake and tell me.”
When Nell had finished, Erno said, “You’ve never lacked ambition.”
“Meaning what?”
“You have been trying to set the world to rights since you were nine years old. Your mother always said to beware your stamping foot and your po-face.”
