A Dandy in Aspic

by Derek Marlowe

  * * *

  Eberlin had just reached the corner of the street when he suddenly stopped in cold realization and turned and began to run, run back up the road, under the bridge and back toward the darkened hulk of the apartments. He was committing suicide by walking away and he knew it. He had to kill Pavel, no matter who he was, and he had to do it now. Breathing hard, his coat flapping around him and catching on the cars in the park, he ran to the entrance and saw gratefully that the lift was waiting for him. He slammed the gates and pressed the thirteenth button and the small, room-forfour lift was surging upward, breaking the silence of the building with the sound of its motor and the rattle of its cables. Eberlin no longer cared about caution or secrecy as he threw open the lift gates on the thirteenth floor and hurried to Pavel’s apartment. The door was closed but unlocked and he burst into the bedroom, but it was empty, deserted, without Pavel, without anyone. A chair had been knocked over and the bed blankets dragged to the floor. Anxiously Eberlin threw aside the pillow but the gun had gone and the hypodermic was smashed and the mattress ripped. He moved to the window in the darkness and looked down toward the car park, screwing up his eyes to put the shape of it in perspective with his limited knowledge of the area. Then he saw it. The Buick. It was still there.

  In no time, he was in the corridor again and into the lift and sweating as the enormity of time seemed endless before he arrived on ground level. And then he was running out into the dark yard and across the concrete toward the Buick, now turning and gathering up speed, heavily and slowly like a giant airliner on a narrow strip. But the engine was already warming to a speed as Eberlin reached it, his hand groping for the handle. For a brief instant he caught a glimpse of two men in the front, and the car was away and Eberlin knew it was too late. He had hesitated and he had lost. It was as simple as that By telling the girl he had told the Russians, and Rotopkin no doubt, that Pavel was known, revealed, no longer under plain cover. It mattered little in any degree, for he had seen Pavel lying crumpled in the thin pajamas, one arm tucked under his chest, and his face distorted and dead above the bruised gape of the throat. Kuzmich’s hoods had been unusually final this time.

  Eberlin walked back toward the bridge, noting that it was of rather interesting design and finer in its curve than the majority of Victorian counterparts. They would take Pavel’s body away so that it would never be found and there would be a reshuffling in the hierarchy that Eberlin always found rather dull. His own particular problem wasn’t eliminated but all he wished now was to sleep. In his own bed preferably.

  He arrived at his apartment and was horrified to discover that it was three twenty-five, but the rain had stopped and by all favorable signs, it would be a pleasant day in the morning. Eberlin made himself some hot chocolate, undressed and folded his clothes, then slid into bed and fell asleep immediately, neither dreaming of anything whatsoever nor even waking up once during the night. As he remarked to himself a few days later, it was the finest night’s sleep he had had for weeks.

  7

  Metamorphosis

  West Berliners who will not in future be able to visit

  their gardens or other property in East Berlin and

  the DDR can complain to the guilty party–the city council

  of West Berlin–and ask them for compensation.

  –THE SOVIET ZONE MINISTRY

  OF INTERNAL AFFAIRS

  Berliner Zeitung,

  June 26, 1952

  “That’s true enough,” said Candide, “but we must

  go and work in the garden.”

  –VOLTAIRE

  Common sense isn’t.

  –ALEXANDER EBERLIN

  AS expected, the favorable portents of weather were deceptive, and the next morning was recorded as one of the wettest August days for seventeen years. The rain flooded southeast England continuously for eleven hours, and in Kent nineteen people were rendered homeless and half a village sank slowly under a burst bank of fresh water. To Eberlin, it was all a fitting valete to his stay in London, for on the Wednesday, the day after the flood, he was to fly by BEA Viscount to Berlin as George Dancer, baggily trousered, narrow-minded and distasteful.

  He spent most of the day at Chesterfield Street conferring with Frazer and Flowers, retracing moves of the operation with admirably concealed apathy, and collecting last-minute necessities. It was suggested at one point, at a lull in the conversation, that he go to Wilkinson’s in Pall Mall and ask Mr. Barrett for a titanium waistcoat. Eberlin laughed and refused on the grounds that titanium was hardly a fashionable material that year, and he would feel, by wearing it, conscious that he could be shot at. The others had laughed in descending order of status and passed it off as a joke–which it was–and the waistcoat idea was dropped. However, they insisted that Eberlin take a gun, and led him to the Armory to select one. He chose a Browning Model 1922 caliber .32 ACP, a Belgian gun manufactured by Fabrique Nationale of Herstal, and signed for it, though he stated quite categorically that firearms disturbed him. He was reassured that he would probably never need to use it.

  Later he took Heather Vogler out to dinner and they sat in a quiet corner of Terrazza Trattoria and talked about themselves and about their respective roles in the next three weeks, and then Eberlin took her home and kissed her good night like an acned schoolboy, and then returned to South Street to reread the Dancer file and pack his valise. He knew now exactly what he would do in Berlin. Pavel’s unfortunate death had given him little option. He was entirely on his own, utterly without any being he could turn to. The ball, the gigantic, precarious detonated ball, was in his lap. Eberlin began to run with it next morning, quite early, by taking the Underground to Gloucester Road and waiting for his flight bus at the Terminal, sitting in the restaurant with a warm cup of tea, a copy of the Daily Mail, a shiny-seated suit and a self-conscious leer at the breasts of a friendly but hideous waitress of dubious age.

  “Call me George,” said Eberlin, helping himself to sugar.

  * * *

  He had always considered Berlin a rather unattractive city on the surface. It had neither the architectural pedigree of Munich nor the intense, strident redevelopment of Cologne or Frankfurt. Instead this apathetic whore of a capital, oblivious to its national allegiance, was a potpourri of styles, moods and ideas that were neither uniform nor, in the long run, appealing. West Berlin jarred his sense of finesse, and to him, ironically, the only aesthetic construction since the war was the beige ribbon of the Wall. That at least had a form. And so Eberlin barely glanced at the city as he emerged from the long hall of Tempelhof Airport, but hailed a waiting taxi, slumped next to the driver and stared, for most of the journey, at the encircled triangle on the hood of the car. The immense sculpture to the Air Lift in the forecourt of the airport, stuck like a concrete mantilla in the earth, reassured him that he was finally at his destination and that was all he wished to know.

  The Kliest Hotel was just off the Kurfürstendamm, tucked behind the barrage of glossy restaurants and shops. It was brown and old, having survived two world wars intact, adequately furnished inside in the traditional green, and competently suitable as a hotel except that the service was bad and the plumbing worse. Eberlin was shown up to his small room on the second floor, told in no self-conscious way of the unfortunate failings of the building, and then left alone with the striped wallpaper, a print of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Church in its original state, and an uncommanding view from the window of the top of the Ka Da We. Disturbed in not the slightest degree by this, Eberlin unpacked and spent the following four days fulfilling his role as George Dancer, visiting with overt enthusiasm, for fear of being watched, all the few tourist attractions in the city.

  On the first day, he had sent a picture postcard of the Radio Tower to Vogler with the words:

  Having a wonderful time. Just arrived. Wish you were here. Love and Kisses, George

  P.S. How’s filming?

  The next day he received a long, passionate letter from Vogler that overp
owered him, and he read it three times until he realized it was a vacuous impersonal message and so threw it away in disgust, and wrote an even more passionate letter in reply, pouring out ridiculous statements of desire and ignoring completely New Code D5. In the four days he wrote five such letters in similar vein for the sheer fun of it and as a release from the tension and boredom of the situation. On the Saturday a coded telegram arrived from the Ministry that read simply: WHAT CODE ARE YOU USING? CANNOT COMPREHEND MESSAGES.

  By this time, Eberlin didn’t care, for he had decided that by Monday he had given himself a long enough safety margin, and would quit the West. It was a simple solution to it all. He would just get on a train and return East and damn them all. He owed them nothing and was big enough to look after himself. Let’s face it, he repeated to himself, all he wanted to do was retire to his own small corner and let the rest of the world fend for itself. What could be wrong in that? He considered. And then he saw Rotopkin.

  Or at least he thought he saw Rotopkin. It had all happened so quickly that Eberlin was unsure of the true facts. He had waked up unusually nervous on the eve of his departure day, the Sunday, partly due to the heat and partly due to a nightmare. He had decided to visit the lakes on this day, and had walked the few hundred yards to the Zoo station, his hands in his pockets, attempting to enjoy the sun and the prospects of a lazy day away from the crowds. It was about eleven in the morning when he entered the cool, dark hallway of the station and paused at the kiosk to buy a copy of Newsweek, and then crossed to the counter to buy a ticket for the S-Bahn. Moving away from the circular window, the ticket clutched in his hand, Eberlin happened by chance to glance back toward the newsstand, twenty yards or so away near the entrance, and he stopped suddenly so that a woman holding a small child bumped into him and swore. The man in the Madras jacket at the kiosk turned away quickly and studied some books in a far window, but Eberlin had seen his face. It was Rotopkin. Here in Berlin. Following him. He tried to catch sight of the man again, but his line of vision was obliterated by a crowd of visiting schoolchildren and a woman was shouting in his ear. When he moved away, farther down the hallway, the man had gone. The chances that it was Rotopkin trailing him were strong for the KGB were hardly likely to allow him to wander around Berlin unobserved. He knew they were suspicious of him. But was it Rotopkin? He would probably never know for sure. He hurried upstairs to the platform and in three minutes was sitting on one of the wooden seats of the S-Bahn on the way to Wannsee.

  The long, rattling red and yellow train ran overland all the way and was now out of the residential part of the city, and was running parallel to the Avus, that arrow-straight autobahn built by Hitler as a racing circuit, to the west of the city. Eberlin had put the magazine away and was sitting smoking a Rothandel cigarette, his chin on his hand, staring out at the road and the thick forest behind. Now and again he caught sight of a U.S. Army truck or a jeep resting in the trees, and at one point passed a clearing which he knew to be the American firing range. When he had been in Berlin before, he had lived on this side of the lake and had been constantly deafened by the sound of practice mortars. Windows had been shattered. The occupying soldiers here, he reflected, went about the business of peace in such a clumsy, demonstrative way. He was prepared to guess quite confidently that there were more Sherman tanks than squirrels tucked away in the neighboring woods, obvious to all but the men inside. Ah well, he was here on holiday, and absurd trivialities concerned him no more for the present.

  Though the train traveled farther than Wannsee, Eberlin had to get out whether he liked it or not, for it was the last stop in West Berlin–the S-Bahn belonged to the East. He strolled leisurely out of the station and across the road and into the forest and down to the small jetty on the lake. The Havel was populated now by only a few boats and a dozen or so small dinghies, and the queue for the translake steamer was small for such a fine day. Eberlin was one of the first on board and he chose a bench at the bow of the ship with his back to the others and an uncluttered view of the beautiful expanse of water and the villas surrounding it. The boat went nowhere in particular, just back and forth over the Havel, which suited him since he just wanted to sit and think, smoke perhaps, and idle away his last day.

  The steamer eased away from the small jetty and manoeuvred into position and set off toward the far corner, cutting straight across the water in a direct line. Eberlin had found this a pleasant journey before, in his earlier stay in Berlin, since there were no irritating guides directing one’s attention away from one’s own choosing, and the beauty of this part of the city reminded the visitor more of the Riviera or Switzerland, never of an occupied city surrounded by alien fencing. And so Eberlin sat quietly engrossed in his own thoughts, smoking a cigarette, until halfway across the lake he was disturbed by the disquieting sound of English voices coming from behind him. High-pitched feminine giggles and chatter breaking the peaceful quiet of the scene. Two dreadful English schoolgirls on holiday, Eberlin thought without turning around to look. He quickly hid the copy of Newsweek for fear of being dragged into a conversation, and slumped farther down into the seat. The voices stopped suddenly and he assumed the girls had gone to the other end of the boat. He was mistaken. A pair of sun-tanned and not unattractive legs appeared beside him, and he saw out of the corner of his eye the white triangle of a bikini bottom delicately covering softly curved hips, and heard a voice saying, “Hello.”

  Too late to pretend to be asleep, he thought. And he assumed the wretched tweed jacket and the cravat had betrayed his supposed nationality. Heart sinking, he looked up at the smiling face of the girl. “Fancy seeing you here,” said Caroline, smiling down at him through enormous sunglasses, “I could hardly believe it when I saw you getting on the boat. I knew we’d meet again. Isn’t it super? Just bumping into each other like this. Miles from anywhere.”

  A yacht, struck by a freak wind, suddenly sailed too close to the bows of the boat and a man on the bridge shouted a warning. Eberlin stared up at the face of Caroline, tilted on an angle, framed by a translucent halo of sun-bleached hair, and then glanced behind him into the stern of the steamer at the other girl, a stranger, who was hovering self-consciously a few feet away toying with an Air France carryall.

  “You’re wondering where we’ve met before, aren’t you?” asked Caroline, taking off her sunglasses and crouching down before him.

  “What?” Eberlin replied, then looking down at her into those violet eyes, added, “Did you bring any of your Amontillado sherry with you? I suddenly feel like a drink.”

  She gave a low chuckle and tugged up the bra of her bikini. “Holiday?”

  “Yes,” Eberlin said.

  “Us too. Tour of the Continent and all that. Isn’t it super weather?”

  What the hell is she doing here? he thought. This ingenuous seductive little creature, kneeling before him on the deck of the boat in the middle of Berlin. She’d been in Tripoli too. And London. This persistently engaging little debutante was to be watched. God! First Rotopkin. Now her. With an omen like this, fat Copperfield was probably steering the bloody boat.

  “Are you slumming or something?” she asked.

  “Pardon?”

  Caroline pointed at the baggy trousers and the heavy shoes. “Oh?” said Eberlin with a smile. “Oh yes. In a way.”

  “Look, I must introduce you to Susan. You’ll like her. She’s awfully sweet and horsey. Daddy’s a big thing in the City and an MFH. Pots of money. Just a minute, I’ll call her.”

  She stood up and moved to turn away when Eberlin grabbed her arm and pulled her down to him.

  “Look, Caroline, don’t ask questions but my name is George Dancer and I work in an oil company. All right?”

  She pulled back slightly and stared wide-eyed at Eberlin’s face. He could see flickers of indecision and puzzlement in her eyes and then she bit her lip. The other girl was approaching now. Eberlin released Caroline’s arm and with a smile nodded to her. Then the bewildered expression vani
shed and Caroline straightened up with a laugh and plonked the sunglasses back on her nose.

  “Fancy, and fancy,” she said, and then, taking hold of the other girl’s hand, added, “Susan, I want to you to meet an old friend. He looks awfully stuffy and square but he’s not like that at all. In fact I’ve been nursing a secret crush on him for months,” and she laughed again and touched Eberlin’s shoulder. “George, I want you to meet Susan. Susan, this is George Dancer. He’s in oil.”

  * * *

  The beach at Nikolasse was crowded, as was to be expected. It was a hot Sunday and this was the only sensible stretch of sand in the city. Looking around him and seeing the colored basket chairs and the hundreds or so stripped-down sun worshippers in varying costumes lying on the sand or swimming in the warm water of the lake, little children losing parents, stubbing toes, standing ankle deep in the unnatural swell of the no-tide, tugging at father’s hand, and bronze girls in briefest bikinis flirting with heavyset young men, Eberlin felt much too overdressed in his heavy trousers and shirt and so buried himself deeper in the obscurity of the basket chair. Near him lay half a dozen American soldiers drinking beer, listening to AFN and whistling at girls running by. Caroline and Susan were in the water, out of sight, somewhere near the diving pier. They had left the boat together, the three of them, and had driven around to the beach in Caroline’s MGB, Eberlin suffering the overweight of Susan’s fat rump on his lap and the mischievous glances of Caroline as she smiled at him over the girl’s shoulder.

  Now he had been sitting on the beach for an hour drinking a bottle of wine bought on the way over and getting quietly plastered. He raised the bottle in a dumb toast to himself and said, “Bon voyage.” Then he put the wine to his mouth and swallowed nothing. The bottle was empty.