The Secret Houses

by John Gardner

  ‘And I have missed you.’ His voice was soft with affection. Later, they sat across the table from one another. Herbie had produced the bottle of Schnapps and the large piece of ham, together with the heel of bread he had brought with him. They drank her soup first and then ate the ham.

  ‘It’s a banquet,’ she said. ‘A feast for your return.’

  ‘We must save some.’ He looked into her grey eyes and saw a movement – maybe concern or just affection.

  ‘Save? Yes? There is another mouth to feed?’

  ‘Several, possibly. It depends on you. I have money and can bring food from the British and American zones if we need to feed more. But there is a most important job to do.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Don’t beat about the bush with Helene. Get straight to the point – she can lead you to others.

  ‘I have a secret.’ Herbie still locked eyes with her. ‘It must become your secret also, and, if you love me, then you will keep it our secret. If you cannot lock it away in your mind, then you hold my life captive.’

  She looked frightened, but was intrigued by this talk of secrets. ‘Go on’ – she swallowed – ‘darling Eberhardt, tell me.’

  ‘I have not been ill. I have not been in the hospital. What I have to say concerns the Russians I asked you about – the officer of their NKVD. The Russian called Rogov.’

  ‘Aha.’ The noise from her throat was neutral – part surprise, part fear, part excitement.

  ‘You do not like the Russians?’

  She gave a little shrug. ‘They pay me to work.’

  ‘But you do not like them. What did they do to your parents? What did they do to you, Helene?’

  She flushed, and he repeated, ‘I must know how you feel. If you are willing to take revenge for what they did to you and your family. You like them or you do not like them? Which?’

  She had turned very red, and he saw that the movement in her eyes was one of anger. Then, after what seemed a lifetime, Helene Schtabelle nodded. ‘It is not a question of liking or disliking. If you are a Russian informer then I put my life in your hands. I hate them.’

  Herbie slapped the table. ‘Good! For that answer you get British cigarettes.’ He produced a tin box of Players Navy Cut. Her eyes widened. It was a box of fifty. ‘You could buy almost anything with that in some parts of the city.’ Her voice quivered, and Herbie smiled. ‘Then I could probably buy the entire city,’ he said. ‘I have three boxes of these and I can get more.’

  She looked frightened again. ‘Some would kill you for these.’ Her thin hand hovered over the box. ‘There are Russian soldiers in Karlshorst who would cut your throat.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said simply, lighting a cigarette and offering them to her. Helene’s hand shook as she took one, inhaling the strong tobacco, then coughing.

  ‘I hope to pay for some services, yes.’ Herbie gave her a conspiratorial smile. ‘But I hope to find people who will do what I wish for no payment at all. People who hate as you hate. I will tell you everything now.’ He started to talk, but of course told her only a part of it, for if things went wrong it was better that she did not know too much.

  ‘Can you find me people who will help?’ he asked at the end.

  ‘Plenty.’ This time she looked at him in a different way. She embraced him with her grey eyes which spoke of reverence and not a fragment of fear. ‘I can name you four people who would help you tomorrow. I can invite them here.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You don’t know – ’ she began.

  ‘I think I do.’

  ‘No, you cannot know how deeply so many of us hate these people. We never talked of it before, Eberhardt, but I have longed for some opportunity… You don’t know the humiliation of having to work for them, after… after what they have done.’ She lowered her head, as though she could no longer look at him. ‘I have told you about my mother – how she was raped – but I never told everything.’

  ‘I can guess.’

  ‘Can you?’ Her blurred eyes flitted up and then away again. ‘It killed my mother. Me it did not kill, even though twenty of them took me and left me for dead. I was bleeding for nearly a month. Until then I was a virgin. In the house where I was born, Eberhardt. On the stairs. Twenty of them.’ She raised her head and he saw the tears making great deltas down her cheeks. ‘I have never told anyone about it properly. They came at night. A squad of big Russian men. They stank of sweat and guns, oil and spirits. Some of them were drunk. My father said we should humour them…’

  Helene talked it away between burst of tears and anguish. How the soldiers had bludgeoned her father to death in their little parlour and then dragged her mother upstairs. ‘I still hear her screams. She was always such a gentle person, Mutti… Oh, my God, Mutti!’ It was as though she called for her murdered mother. Herbie went over to her, putting an arm around her, comforting, drawing her close to his massive chest. She told how they stripped her and gang-raped her, some coming straight from her mother to her. Then how they left and she pulled herself upstairs to find her mother’s body and see the indignities of their last horrific acts.

  ‘You have been the only other man – ever; ever in my life, and I thought I might hate you also. But I love you, Eberhardt. You’ve given me respect again. You cannot know what hatred for those pigs burns in women like me.’

  ‘Then you must show me.’ He held her very close, and presently they went to bed, not to make love, but to be near each other. Helene clung to him like a child and sobbed even after she had fallen into a deep sleep. Even after all this, the boy Kruger sensed she had not told him everything.

  The next morning she said that she would bring some people back with her in the evening. She could contact them during the day.

  Herbie went out, into the American Zone, where he walked about a lot, listened to Mahler’s Second Symphony in his head, looked at the ruins and the building work, and used his special papers to buy more ham, bread, and Schnapps – they had given him a fortune in paper money that could be spent in the American or British zones.

  At five-thirty he returned to the one small room near the Alexanderplatz and laid out the food. Helene came in an hour later. She was followed – at intervals – by two young men and two girls. So Herbie first met the team who would make Brimstone possible. Their names were Willy Blenden, Gertrude Muller, Kurt Kutte, and Ingrid Mann. Not one was over twenty years of age.

  They ate, drank, and smoked the cigarettes. Then Herbie questioned each one of them in turn, getting to know them. It was risky, but the only way he knew, so he began to talk. ‘This concerns a Russian officer – a high-ranking man of their secret police. We will have to identify him, and Helene will help us with that. Then we shall have to find some way of following him – watching him, especially seeing what he does in the evenings and in his off-duty periods. This is not going to be a simple business. It will also be dangerous, so if any of you think you haven’t the stomach, it would be best to leave now.’

  He looked at each in turn, praying they would all stay, because if one left he would personally have to seek out him – or her – and kill.

  They all looked back at Herbie, their eyes glowing with interest. He thought – blasphemously, he considered later – that this was what the disciples must have looked like when they listened to Jesus preaching.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Like most young people in Berlin they were all scruffy. Clothes were not easy to come by. Willy himself was a big lad, not as large as Herbie but strong in the limbs and with obviously muscular shoulders. He was the best-dressed of the team, sporting a leather jacket and thick field-grey trousers.

  Girls seemed to attach themselves to Willy like flies to flypaper, so he obviously had great charisma. Certainly he possessed a relaxed manner – what today would be called ‘laid-back’ – and a quick-witted tongue. Herbie always felt he might become a liability to the team, unlike Kurt Kutte, who was small and inoffensive-looking, a definite asset, for he possessed a v
ery sharp intelligence and that particular way some people have of becoming almost completely invisible, even in a small group.

  All of them were, thankfully, able to blend into any given background. Only Herbie felt his size was against him in matters of surveillance. ‘My body does not suit this job; someone sees me and never forgets,’ he would say sadly. Yet he was soon able to turn this to an advantage by cultivating the slow, dull, and unreliable style that would in later years make him such an asset to the Secret Intelligence Service.

  On the first night – when Herbie gave them the rough outline of what was to happen – it was agreed that Helene would try to discover Rogov’s general pattern of movements – when he had free time and, if possible, what he did with it. Until they had some idea of how Rogov occupied his off-duty hours, there was no point in starting any watching operation.

  To keep surveillance on the NKVD man with only a team of four young people would be difficult enough – at Warminster they had told Herbie that this kind of job really required interchangeable teams, and he knew that made sense, just as he knew there was no way for him to recruit any large teams at short notice. In the field you had to improvise. It was one of the first, lasting, lessons he learned.

  Herbie had only one option regarding how he spent his days – keeping up the already established fiction of going off to work in the British Zone and returning each evening.

  It took two days for Helene to make any progress. On the third night she came to Herbie’s own room, in a battered old apartment house overlooking the river, near what had been the Markusstrasse – now an area containing little more than rubble which was gradually being cleared into neat piles.

  ‘Eberhardt, when’re you going to do something about this place?’ Helene had asked this ever since her very first visit.

  Kruger gave a giant shrug and a foolish grin. ‘Oh, I’m looking for a better place. What’s the use of doing anything to this?’ A large hand swept slowly around the room as if he were proud of the cracked and dirty walls, the small iron bedstead, the packing cases that served for chairs and tables, and the one electric bulb that burned dully overhead. ‘They’ll soon pull this place down for sure.’ Another of his grins. ‘Anyhow, it’s cosy.’

  ‘It’s as cosy as a rat’s nest.’ Helene wrinkled her nose. ‘Come to my place, Eberhardt. Please, at least it’s clean.’

  Herbie gave his most stupid grin and nodded slowly. In truth he needed no bidding to get out of this dump. ‘You’ve got news?’ he asked, as though this was the last thing that mattered.

  She gave a nod of pleasure. ‘Yes, but I’ll tell you at home. Why don’t you move in with me properly, Eberhardt? It would make life less complicated.’

  ‘Less and more complicated, Liebling.’ He rose from the packing case on which he was sitting. ‘I have to keep a little bolt-hole for myself. You understand?’

  Back in Helene’s room he sat in one of her old chairs while she talked and prepared a simple meal for them. ‘The gossip is that he has a lady friend. An illegal lady, because they’re not really allowed to mix with the German population.’

  Herbie’s eyebrows shot up at the thought of there being a woman involved. ‘But they all mix with the local girls.’ He allowed the bemused expression to remain on his face and in his eyes. ‘I have seen them.’

  ‘True, but NKVD must use great care. Anyway, he is off duty every Wednesday afternoon, from one o’clock until curfew. He takes one of the cars from the officers’ garages and drives out of Karlshorst. Nobody knows where he goes, but when they have jokes with him, the other officers say he visits a lady. He just smiles and looks like a sheep. This proves it, they say.’

  ‘Does he always use the same car?’ Already Herbie could see difficulties. Even bicycles would not be easy to procure for his team; while trying to follow a car on a bicycle was an almost impossible task.

  ‘Yes, he has a car for private use. German, of course, one of the old VWs – the little one, you know.’

  ‘Yes. Colour?’

  ‘What d’you think? Dull green, like all of them.’

  ‘Does it have a registration plate?’

  ‘Just numbers: 85942.’ She looked at him with great pride. ‘There, I should get a prize. I learned everything – ’

  ‘Everything except where he goes.’

  ‘Ah.’ She gave a secret smile.

  ‘You know where he goes?’

  ‘No, but I know he drives west.’

  ‘Into one of the other zones?’ He heard the alarm in his own voice.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head a number of times. ‘He drives west inside the Russian Zone and uses what streets are available to bring him to the western end of the Unter den Linden – along the Friedrichstrasse. Then turns right. One of the other secretaries has seen him repeatedly. She also has Wednesday afternoons off duty.’

  ‘Perhaps this other secretary meets him?’ Herbie thought of the consternation it would cause if the English Russian really was meeting a woman.

  ‘I hardly think so.’ Helene giggled. ‘You don’t know Berta!’ She puffed out her cheeks and prescribed a great circle around her body, with her hands. ‘The other girls call her Brünnhilde.’

  ‘So.’ Herbie became lost in thought. After a while, when Helene brought soup and bread to the table, he told her he would bring food back from the British or American zones tomorrow. She was to arrange for the whole group to gather at her room, just as before.

  On the following night he told them that it was important they should do exactly as he instructed. He drew a little map, showing each of the team where they should station themselves so they could get a picture of Rogov’s exact movements – at least from the Karlshorst barracks to the Unter den Linden. He stationed Willy on the Linden itself, near its intersection with the Friedrichstrasse, in the hope that he would be able to spot the little car and track it for at least some of the way. Everything was set for next Wednesday. They would hold another meeting on Thursday evening.

  For once Herbie altered his rules. The days were slipping past, and Naldo had told him time was important. So on Wednesday Herbie did not go into the British Zone. Instead he made his own way up the Unter den Linden at a little after eleven-thirty in the morning.

  The sun was weak and watery – it had rained the previous evening and Berlin smelled of smoke and carnage. Rain brought this smouldering smell out of the ruins and the earth. If there was thunder with the rain, people could easily imagine the Russian assault was here once more, or the Amis were bombing them, haunting the present with the horror of the past.

  The almost undamaged Brandenburger Tor stood out, black and sharp, at the western end of what had once been a great wide thoroughfare – Berlin’s answer to London’s Bond Street or Paris’ Champs-Elysées. Herbie turned right, going east and walking slowly, lumbering but looking as though he was on important business and knew exactly what he was doing – which indeed he did. In the past twenty-four hours he had made discreet inquiries – mainly from those who inhabited the twilight world of illegal drinking dens or lived rough among the ruins. Some were not eager to talk, but Herbie had money, which was a key to the city’s other world.

  Along the Unter den Linden, structures were starting to rise awkwardly from the ruins – some of which seemed to form a kind of cloister along the pavement. A few makeshift shops had been opened, but appeared to be very short of things to sell; women stood in line for a pile of half-rotten cabbages and beetroot. Yet civilians crowded the restructured sidewalks, and some of the women even wore hats of the latest fashion from the Western zones. Russian soldiers also moved among the people, occasionally stopping to check papers or give orders to building workers. There was very little traffic – mainly Russian transport, which blasted innocent cyclists out of their way with constantly blaring horns.

  Herbie recognised the gaps where streets had once emptied onto the wide thoroughfare. With terrible nostalgia he recognised a metal sign which hung awkwardly from a blackened
wall. Zigarren. Lotterie it said, taking Kruger back to childhood, for he knew exactly where he was and could recall his father’s strong hand holding his, leading him into the shop smelling of spicy tobacco. The memory brought tears to his eyes and the longing for some magic power which could reverse time. He heard Mahler in his head, and the words, sung from the Second Symphony –

  Was entstanden ist, das muss vergehen –

  All that arose must perish

  All that perished, rise again!

  Cease thy trembling!

  Prepare thyself to live!

  Then, almost before he realised it, he was at the point where the Unter den Linden opened up onto the Platz am Opernhaus and the Platz am Zeughaus. Domes had become skeletal structures, walls remained with their windows now blank unglazed eyes. What had once been glory was now a dark and terrifying monument of man’s folly.

  He stood for a moment and then chose his route, leading through the piles of masonry and half-broken walls until he found what he had been looking for – a side street with some houses still standing. There, in the protection of the remaining buildings, in doorways and by the curbsides, he saw them.

  There were about half a dozen, crouched in the shadows or loitering on the pavement. Young men – all of whom seemed to have taken care with their appearance, for they looked reasonably, if garishly, dressed, and neat; their hair longish but clean and thick. When they walked they did so with a kind of arrogance, a bounce, even a sway.

  As Herbie proceeded, one young man detached himself from a half-ruined doorway and asked if he had a cigarette. Herbie’s hand went to his pocket, passing a whole pack to the boy, who smiled as though to lure him, asking if he could do anything for him. ‘I have a room. Not far away,’ the boy said, coming closer so that, with a shock, Herbie realised he had rouge on his cheeks and his lips were painted scarlet.