A Blind Man's War

by David Fiddimore

  Bozey said, ‘Turn your collar up, boss, and hunch down in the seat. Close your eyes. You’re a bad-tempered French diplomat who’s had a long and nasty flight.’

  ‘OK. You’re the boss.’

  ‘I’m not, actually. You are.’

  Before I could get in a riposte Randall said, ‘This bloody dog has just pissed all over my trousers.’

  Bozey never went anywhere without his incontinent three-legged dog, Spartacus – although I don’t think the choice was his: the dog knew a soft touch when he saw one, and stuck to Bozey like glue. When we reached the gate, with a battered tin sentry box in which a copper was picking his nose, Bozey wound down his car door window, muttered, ‘Diplomatique!’ and scowled.

  The cop sprang to attention. His right arm twitched for the old Jawohl Mein Fuehrer salute, but somehow he managed to hold it down. Then he raised the single pole barrier for us . . . and we were in Berlin. Just like that.

  A hundred yards down the road I sat up, and asked Borland, ‘Is that a real word, that diplomatique?’

  ‘Dunno, boss. It always seems to work. Welcome back to Berlin.’

  ‘Thanks, Bozey. I’m glad to be here.’ I was too; that was a first. ‘Where did you get the diplomatic plates for the car?’

  ‘Won ’em in a card game.’ I don’t know why I’d bothered to bleeding ask.

  If home is truly where the heart is then my heart is still partly in Berlin – which is odd when you consider that I’d spent a decent chunk of my twentieth year bombing the shit out of it. More specifically, my heart was in a little bar called the Leihhaus – a cross between a nightclub and a brothel. It had been started by a couple of my old friends. For those of you who don’t speak the language of oppression, Leihhaus means pawnshop. I owned a quarter of it now, so did Bozey. Halton Air owned another quarter – although the old man tried to overlook that – and I was never quite sure who owned the rest. I think Bozey had parcelled the remainder out in small packets for sleeping investors. Sleeping investors in a brothel: that’s not bad.

  I had a room on the first floor, and Bozey lived in a rather palatial flat round the corner, with his girl Irma. Irma owned a bar across town called the Klapperschlange, which she’d inherited from my mate Tommo after he got his in an air crash in 1949. Irma had been Tommo’s last girlfriend – what goes around, comes around. In the forties we learned to pass men and women around like parcels at a party game, but I wouldn’t let it worry you. I ate a bowl of the stew the Leihhaus was famous for, in the kitchen with Marthe and Otto who ran the place for us, then I went upstairs, and crashed.

  When I woke up mid-evening Pete was sitting on the end of my bed, smoking a cheroot.

  That was very difficult for me, because Pete was dead.

  In fact he’d been dead a few times. The first time he died was when he was blown out of the rear turret of our Lancaster by our own dozy Anti-Aircraft gunners in 1944. Then he turned up in Holland in 1945 with a tale of a miracle escape. Then Tommo told me he had been killed in a shoot-out with a black-marketeer in a small town in Austria in 1947.

  There had been others, but those are the two deaths which stick out in my mind.

  Now he was sitting on the end of my bed, and he didn’t smell like a corpse. I hadn’t heard him come in but that wasn’t surprising, because Pete always moved like a ghost anyway. I had seen dead people before, particularly when I was drunk – at big parties my brain often brings back the dead guys I’ve flown and fought with. My immediate task was to work out if Pete was one of my private spectres, or was back in the flesh so’s to speak. I swallowed hard and said, ‘You’re dead.’

  ‘No. I am Polish. You’ll never understand the Poles, Charlie.’

  ‘Go away, Pete. Tommo told me you were dead. We got drunk, and I cried.’

  ‘I’m flattered, but don’t do it again. Put your clothes on, and we’ll go out and have a party for Tommo.’ Pete was always wizard at drumming up a party.

  ‘You know that he’s gone, don’t you?’

  ‘Are you telling me, or am I telling you?’

  ‘We don’t actually know, do we? I climbed a bloody mountain to the place his aircraft crashed. They gave me his lighter and his watch, and showed me the rock his body had been buried under.’

  ‘Did you lift it, and look?’

  ‘No, I didn’t; it was too big.’

  ‘There you are then. Get a move on. I’ll wait for you downstairs.’ He stood up and walked to the door. The bed moved and creaked, relieved of his weight. He did not walk through the wall the way a ghost is supposed to: he opened the door, stepped into the corridor and closed the door behind him. After he had gone the smell of his cigar smoke hung in the air. That clinched it for the time being; old Pete was probably back.

  We called Piotr Paluchowski the Pink Pole. Do you remember those words? They made the first sentence I wrote when I sat down a couple of years ago to tell you my story, and if you haven’t read them already you’ve missed something, haven’t you? Pete had been one of the best rear gunners in the squadron, although he had one serious failing – he was so keen on killing the bad guy, that he sometimes let the Jerry night fighter get too close to our Lancaster before he pressed the tit. He wanted to be sure of a good shot. I remember that our big Canadian pilot had to sort him out after he’d done that once too often, and scared the shit out of us. It’s what I was remembering as I caught up with him at a table in the bar downstairs.

  ‘The last time I saw you was near the end of the war, Pete. That was eleven bloody years ago. You were a service policeman in a new Polish Army which had materialized from nowhere.’

  ‘And you were still chasing after that skinny bird – what was her name?’

  ‘Grace.’

  ‘Yes, Grace. Catch her?’

  ‘Several times. She drops in and out of my life like a travelling salesman – I’m the legal guardian of her boy.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘Three years ago. She was running with an Israeli assassination team, and put a bullet in me.’

  ‘You shoot back?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Get her?’

  ‘I think so. Leastways she hasn’t reappeared.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to – I just shot back at her without thinking about it. Now I miss her more than I’ve ever missed anyone.’

  ‘You always were a bloddy fool about women, Charlie.’ Bloddy. I suddenly recalled how he always used to say bloddy, and smiled.

  I leaned back in my chair. ‘You were a colonel in the Polish Army, right?’

  ‘Yes, Charlie, I was . . . but I gave it up. No future in being a colonel in Poland: the Russians came back and shot them all again, just like they did at Katyn.’

  ‘Tommo once told me that he and the Cutter had seen you shot in some small place in Austria, and he’d had difficulty getting the right coffin for you – one made of lime wood.’

  ‘It was a set-up, a Tommo special. I needed to convince the Reds I was already dead, so that they didn’t send someone after me.’

  ‘But you’re in the clear now?’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘Where are you living?’

  ‘Here, Charlie. I got the room next door to yours. Are we gonna talk all night, or start some drinking?’

  I waved Otto over from the bar. He brought us a bowl of pickled peppers to peck at, bottles of beer, and a bottle of schnapps with a couple of shot glasses. Just like old times. Later in the evening, before we were crawling drunk, I asked him, ‘Why didn’t Bozey tell me you were here?’

  ‘We didn’t want to scare you, Charlie. It’s what friends are for.’

  Bozey and Spartacus joined us later. Then Randall turned up. I made the bridge between Pete and Randall without telling them what the connections were. Randall was as big as a bear, and Pete small and ratty, like me – although he was probably in his forties by then, and his black hair was thinning. He still had a straight
pencil-thin moustache like the Thin Man. They shook hands across the table; Randall’s big paw wrapped around Pete’s small hand. Randall squinted through the tobacco smoke and asked him, ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘I don’t believe so,’ Pete told him. ‘I would have remembered. Do I know you?’

  ‘I don’t believe so either. I would have remembered you too.’ Randall was grinning. That settled it. They’d already met each other before – I just hoped they’d been on the same side when it happened.

  ‘Can I stay here tonight?’ Randall asked Bozey.

  ‘If you can afford it. A bed and an A1 broad will cost you thirty DMs. We throw the breakfast in for free.’

  I’ve seen Randall look resigned before, if he thought he was being ripped off.

  ‘That’s a lot of dough.’

  Pete leaned over and smiled at him. ‘I think you’ll find that the woman is a lot of woman. Just pretend that you owe her to yourself, lie back and think of England.’

  Randall was American, which made it kind of an odd thing to say.

  I asked, ‘Isn’t that what the girl is supposed to do?’

  Bozey shook his head, and poured me another drink. ‘You been away too long, boss.’

  The evening finished with the latest entertainment Bozey had come up with – a wheelbarrow race on which he ran a book. The difference was that the four wheelbarrows were all good-looking girls, and they appeared to have left their clothes somewhere else. The men wheeling the wheelbarrows were strapping fellows. It took a few minutes to get the couples connected up, but after that the race went off quite well. Irma had come in to sit on Bozey’s lap. Spartacus, under the table, set up a jealous howl as she did so.

  The wheelbarrow who finished last earned the largest round of applause. Irma regarded her seriously, sighed and muttered, ‘She faked it.’

  ‘But it’s made me feel quite peckish,’ Bozey told her. ‘I think we’ll have to go home.’

  Irma leaned over, and touched my face.

  ‘Peckish,’ she said to me. ‘You English use the oddest words. OK, Charlie?’

  ‘Yes, love; top hole. I’ve just begun to get undrunk again. I hate it when that happens.’

  ‘You want someone? That French girl you like is around somewhere. You want her later?’

  ‘Maybe, Irma. Rather it was you.’

  ‘All the men say that, but only my Bozey ever means it.’

  She’d got us taped, hadn’t she?

  I was smoking the last pipe of the night when the French girl, Reimey, walked in. I put the pipe down, crossed the room and kissed her. She pushed my hair from my forehead, and asked, ‘Tired, lover?’ Fatigué, amoureux?

  ‘Rather – and a bit drunk.’

  ‘Am I working tonight, or getting a night off?’

  ‘Tonight you’re sleeping; so am I.’

  We did what we always did. What I’d done since I’d first started spending Berlin nights with her: we slept the sleep of the chaste, cuddled into each other like an old married couple. It was a slick deal: she got a night’s uninterrupted sleep out of it, and I went down to breakfast in the morning with my bad reputation intact. It was like being married without the squishy bits.

  She slept before I did, and made little snorting noises, like a piglet. I thought about Pete’s vanishing and reappearing tricks. Was it only a week or so earlier that I had lamented that Halton Air was running itself, and that my life was uneventful? Bloody Pete would soon put a stop to that, I guessed.

  As usual Pete was down before me, and was shovelling his way through an enormous American-style breakfast. Most of the Leihhaus food stock came out of the back door of the PX. As usual I stuck to black coffee, black coffee and black coffee: no one in Germany can brew tea. Pete mopped the egg stains from his plate with a doorstop of greyish bread, and asked, ‘She any good, the French girl?’

  ‘A woman’s as good as the man she’s with. You taught me that, Pete.’

  ‘Then I guess she weren’t much good. Pity.’

  ‘You’re a bastard, Pete.’

  ‘No, I’m a Pole. I already tol’ you.’

  ‘How long are you staying?’

  ‘Few days. I have a business deal over in the East.’

  ‘You’ll be careful this time?’

  ‘I always am, Charlie. You know that.’ Lie. Not only lie, but big lie. Pete was one of the biggest risk takers I’d ever met.

  ‘And stay in touch this time. The next time I hear that you’re dead I want it to be true.’ Those words didn’t come out in exactly the order I expected them to, but Pete understood. He grinned his shark’s grin.

  ‘You gonna help that nice couple I took to Bozey for you?’

  ‘What young couple?’

  ‘The two Americans – looking for her brother, I think. They paid me a finder’s fee to introduce them to Bozey, an’ for him to hand them on to you.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Pete paused to discharge his breakfast gases with a soft belch. I remembered that he’d always been unselfconscious about things like that.

  ‘Bozey will tell you. They’re good business – loaded with dosh, like Rockefeller.’

  ‘How do they know me?’

  ‘Maybe you been in the paper.’

  ‘Nearly ten years ago now.’

  ‘You never know, maybe they keep their old papers.’ Then he switched tracks on me and said, ‘This American couple – the woman’s a real looker, Charlie. Small as you, long, dark brown hair halfway down her shoulders. Face of an angel, legs like the devil. I stretched out my hands as soon as I saw her, and got slapped down pretty damned quickly.’

  I leaned forward in my chair. I was interested in spite of myself – I could not remember Pete getting a refusal before.

  ‘Tell me about them.’

  Afterwards – after he’d gone – I realized that although we hadn’t seen each other for eleven years, we’d offered no explanations. He didn’t tell me what he’d been doing; neither did I tell him . . . and that’s exactly what doing a tour with a Lancaster crew in 1944 meant. Some soft bugger used the phrase on a film poster twenty-five years later. The truth is that having flown with men like Pete really did mean never having to say you were sorry.

  Bozey suggested a walk in a park. A large statue of a large German in the Imperial Roman toga style dominated a circular gravelled area with a few seats. An old man in a tattered grey Wehrmacht greatcoat sold miniature kites from a makeshift wooden tray. He had neither hair nor teeth. The statue was worse. It had lost its head in the forties – a lot of Jerries lost their heads in the thirties and forties. So did we. We sat on a bench in the pale sun. Spartacus circled the kite seller at a distance, growling.

  ‘Some Americans were looking for you last week,’ Bozey told me.

  I pretended that I hadn’t already heard. ‘What for?’

  ‘They want to employ you, apparently. I knew you’d have a quiet couple of months, and thought you might be interested.’

  First the buggers at the Foreign Office; now Bozey. How come everyone was so keen to find me something to do all of a sudden?

  ‘Pete mentioned them,’ I admitted. ‘Why didn’t you just give them the bum’s rush?’

  ‘I couldn’t get my mind off the woman for a couple of days, and wanted another reason to see her.’

  ‘What did Irma think of that?’

  ‘I didn’t tell her. She’d kill me if I laid a paw on another woman . . . But when you see what this dame puts in the field, you sort of forget about what’s in the stable at home.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Doris. Like one of the Waters sisters. She’s married to the other one. He never lets her out of his sight, and I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Any idea what they want?’

  ‘They want you to take them to Scotland.’

  ‘Can’t they find it on their own? It’s big enough.’

  ‘You’ve climbed up a mountain to an American aircraft cr
ash, they said – someone in the consulate in London told them that. They want you to climb up to another one, and take them with you.’ There was just a chance this was on the level. I had climbed up to the site of Tommo’s air crash in the Scottish Highlands. Call it a personal pilgrimage if you like. One of the locals had given me Tommo’s Swiss wristwatch, and like a sentimental fool I had handed it in at the US Consulate in London later, and asked them to pass it back to his parents. There had been a problem because the US Army didn’t know for certain that he’d been on the plane anyway – but let’s not go into that.

  ‘Why? What do they want to go up there for?’ I asked. ‘All they’ll see is an aircraft reduced to its component parts.’

  ‘Her brother was flying the kite. They want to lay flowers where he died.’

  ‘That’s got to be crap, Bozey.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. I knew you’d be interested . . . and it pays well.’

  Ten yards away the kite seller stood very still whilst Spartacus tried to piss on his feet – not easy for a three-legged dog which instinctively lifted his back leg. He fell over. Then he set up an angry yapping, chased his tail in circles and sprayed urine over anything within a yard of him. The kite seller got it over his feet. That’s when I noticed his shoes: they were very expensive and highly polished.

  ‘Is he one of yours, Bozey?’ I asked.

  ‘No. He must be one of theirs.’

  ‘When do you want me to see them?’

  ‘In a few minutes. They’re waiting at that little bar alongside the bandstand.’

  I looked fifty yards, and there, sure enough, was a pre-war bandstand and a small bar with several tables in the sun. One of them even had a couple at it.

  I suppose it took us little more than a minute to stroll over. Don’t ask me my first impressions of the bloke, because I can’t remember. What I can remember is that he stood as we approached. The dame looked up, crossed her legs and smiled . . . and somewhere in my head the Mormon Tabernacle Choir began to sing ‘The Hallelujah Chorus’. The guy stuck out his hand to me, smiled a wide smile, and said, ‘Hi, I’m George Handel.’ It could only happen to me.