by Noel Hynd
“The goon seated against the wall is the Russian bastard who runs this place,” she said. “Ex-Soviet military. Bloodthirsty savage. There are very few people in this place who aren’t terrified of him.”
“The one in civvies? Gray suit?”
“Yes.”
“What’s his name?” Cochrane asked.
She did not look up as she spoke. “I’m not going to tell you,” she said.
“And he’s ex-military?”
“His body is but his influence is not. Follow that?”
“Sure,” Cochrane said. “Except men in uniform still salute him. Why would they do that if he’s ‘ex’?”
“Good question. Two possible explanations. One,” she said as she smoked, “old habits die hard. Two, he’s less ‘ex’ than anyone is admitting. It’s not as if every bit of corruption news appears on the front pages of the newspapers here or is blasted out nightly by the sound trucks.”
“Point taken,” Cochrane said.
A pregnant pause, then. “The brutish man with him is the police commissioner,” she said.
“Which commissioner?” he asked. “Stumm or Markgraf?”
He could see that his response registered with her and changed the tone of things. “You do know too much already, don’t you?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“I should take you to my place and finally re-educate you.”
“I’ll pass on that,” Cochrane said. “Much as it flatters me.”
“Still have a wife back home?”
“Yes, and I’m anxious to keep her.”
“Pity,” she said, still working receipts and paper. The water-instead-of-booze had caught up with her. She was sobering. Whether it was because he was there or because she had to keep the numbers straight was something he couldn’t tell. Maybe both.
She started another smoke as two waiters came by and delivered a further stack of invoices to her. She glanced at them, recorded them swiftly, and then folded them under the ledger before her. Meanwhile, his eyes wandered back to the power table. There were several sturdy bulls vying for the favored attention of the Russian.
“Which one is the police commissioner? Markgraf?” he asked.
“Take a guess.”
“The one with the narrow face and close-cut hair. He looks German. The other one is a Slav or a Tarter.”
She never turned.
He managed another look at Roth. Things were still in equilibrium.
“Ever think that your luck could run out if you pushed it too far?” she asked.
“All the time.”
“Recently?”
“About a minute ago when I was looking down at that table of goons,” he said. “That’s recent to me.”
She sighed dismally. “So I can assume if you know all about the police, you’re not a tourist,” Bettina said. “And this visit is professional?”
“Again, I’m here largely due to the airlift,” he said. “And I’m here to do an old friend a favor.”
“Who?”
“You.”
“Hell. Not sure I want it,” she said. “But since you’ve come so far, I’ll hear you out. How’s that?”
“That’s perfect. Thanks,” he said, inclining forward again. “My friends in certain corridors of American power tell me that a promise was made to you a few years ago. You’d have the opportunity to leave Germany after the war if you assisted Frieda’s escape.”
“I remember that agreement.”
“We occasionally have a sense of honor over there on the other side of the ocean,” Cochrane said. “I’m here to make good on the promise. My instructions are to escort you to London.”
She set down her pen and gave him her steeliest of steely-eyed looks. “Bully for you,” she said. “England’s broke as a taxi driver in Venice,” she said. “I might as well stay here. I have work.”
“England’s a free country,” Cochrane said. “Don’t know how long that will last in the Soviet Zone.”
“I don’t know how long I’ll last either,” she said.
Surprised at her reticence, he pushed back from the table.
“Bettina, listen to me,” he said in a low voice. “Who knows what’s going to happen to Berlin and in the Soviet Zone? Stalin hasn’t backed up one inch since the war and every move he makes pushes a little further west. I can hang around Berlin for another week,” he said. “After that, I send word back that you didn’t want to leave. It will then be out of my hands.”
“Who cares?” she asked.
Bill Cochrane finished his second beer and reached to his hat on the table. Unexpectedly, relief washed over him. He had done what he could and she had declined his help. If this was the situation, he was free to leave Germany. The prospect of getting out of postwar Berlin and returning to his family appealed to him. He was preparing to stand and leave when her gnarled hand settled on his arm. “Hear me out, William,” she said. “I mentioned a man named Horst,” she said. “The other love of my life. My second and only love after my late husband.”
“I recall,” he said, settling in again.
“He was the Nazi gauleiter on our block. We had a romance from the thirties till 1946. During the war, Hitler was in power. Horst protected me. He knew I listened to seditious music, had leftish friends, Jewish friends, foreign friends. Our romance trumped his politics.”
“Did Horst have a last name?” Cochrane asked gently.
“Horst Schmid,” she said.
“Did he have an address?”
“He did once,” she said. “Seventeen Lugeckstrasse. Right in my neighborhood. Don’t bother to look. What was left standing after American and British air raids was obliterated by Soviet artillery.” She paused. Her eyes went far away and came back. Down below a fistfight was breaking out between two Russians over one of the bargirls. The thug against the wall who ran the place clapped his big hands and made a quick motion. Four massive security gorillas came up out of nowhere and had the offending soldiers frog-marching toward the door in a matter of seconds. There was nothing subtle about Russian bouncers: they would punch or knee their victims in the testicles with the first shot, then march them out while they were still howling in agony.
“Do man carry weapons in here?” he asked.
“Fists,” she said. “They carry fists. And clubs. The security hoodlums have pistols. No one else has one. Except you, maybe.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Don’t get caught,” she said. “I won’t be able to help you.”
Bettina gave a distracted smile and moved toward her conclusion.
“Horst was arrested after the war. He might have been shot but he knew how to manage factories and tractors. They sent him east to a labor camp, instead. I believe he is still alive.” Her eyes misted.
“Do you know which camp?” he asked. “Do you know where?”
“Somewhere in the east.”
“Russia?”
“Probably not that far. The first abductees were sent farther. By the time Horst disappeared, they were removing factories from Berlin and putting them in the northeast. That’s all I know. “Don’t ask me more.”
“Okay,” he said. Her smoke died. Cochrane lit another cigarette for her.
“How many loves do you have in a lifetime. One? Two if you’re really lucky?”
“I’ve had two,” he said. “My first wife died young.”
“I’d rather stay here and die clinging to the hope that Horst will return,” she said. “I’m an old woman. Why leave and abandon that hope? What if he returned and I was gone?”
Cochrane nodded.
“So you see,” she said. “I don’t wish to leave Berlin. I will stay and wait.”
Cochrane pondered it all very quickly.
“Is there any way,” he asked, “that the Soviet administration will at least acknowledge where Horst is and perhaps how we could barter his release?”
“Those things don’t happen,” Bettina said. “All paths are b
locked. Just like the Russians blocked the land and sea in and out of Berlin.”
“But they’ve been unable to block the air,” he said.
“That’s the Soviet government,” she said. “The criminals are worse. They block everything. Imagine when you’re up against both.”
He was about to speak again when Bettina rediscovered her tongue.
“The comrade down there is the most powerful man in the Soviet underworld,” she said. “And he will be of no help. As a lesson to others, he would have Horst killed if we even inquired. Please! Leave it alone. You’re playing with hopes and lives.”
Cochrane heaved a breath and stood. “Thank you for being honest with me, Bettina,” he said. “I’ll see what my instructions are and see if there’s anything that we haven’t thought of. Is that acceptable?”
“Sure,” she said.
He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. When he was about to lean back and head for Roth and the exit, Bettina’s tenuous hands gripped his clothing. She held him and brought her lips close to his right ear.
“The Russian. His name is Sergei Kovalyov,” she said. “Exercise extreme caution, my dear American friend. He’s already a mass murderer. To a monster like this, one more murder means nothing.”
Chapter 57
Berlin – July 1948
Out on the street minutes later, Cochrane and Roth made an easy rendezvous with Otto Kern who had parked down the block ten minutes earlier with his headlights off. Kern, as instructed, had kept the Jeep idling when on the block where Club Weimar was located, despite the shortage of gasoline. This made faster movement possible in case a sudden departure was required. Better to burn an extra gallon than fall into Soviet hands.
Kern, Cochrane noted immediately, had parked wisely. He was in the shadow of a ruined church, close to a mangled tree. Anyone surveying the block would have found it difficult to access the vehicle and discern a driver, much less recognize him at night.
Kern flashed his lights when he saw Cochrane and Roth emerge from the club. They piled quickly into the Jeep, Cochrane riding shotgun and Roth in the back. If the unmarked Jeep had been an airplane, Roth would have been the tail gunner.
“It went okay, sir?” Kern asked, exiting the block quickly and driving carefully through the uneven streets. Like the other two men in the car, he had an eye out for police or Soviet army patrols. It was past one AM. Who knew what was to be encountered on the Berlin streets?
“I think it went well,” Cochrane said. “There will be a return trip or two. I’m sure of that. Don’t know when. We’ll see.”
From the attic of his memory, Cochrane recalled a phrase often invoked by his late father, a family man. “Anyone out after one AM is usually up to no good,” he had often said.
The phrase, the memory, brought a smile to Cochrane as Kern navigated the somber streets filled with their silent army of oddly shaped rubble and indistinguishable dangers.
In the car there was silence, except for the grind of the motor and the changing of gears when Kern slapped the stick shift. Cochrane sought to break both the silence and the mood.
“How about you, Heinrich?” he asked in German. “I kept an eye on you. You seemed to do okay. Hear anything interesting?”
“The big Russian swinging the girl on his shoulders,” he said. “Tank commander.”
“Really? One of the units based out in the Northeast? Out toward Bernau?”
“No. South of here. Rehfelde. The district Märkisch-Oderland.”
“Do you know that area?” Cochrane asked Kern, the quiet driver.
“Yes. It’s in Brandenburg. Southeast of Berlin.”
“His unit recently arrived,” Roth said. “The tanks.”
“A reinforcement?”
“Maybe. Newly arrived, that’s all I know.”
“Interesting,” Cochrane said. “Thank you.”
Kern drove steadily, easing through intersections, an eye out for the usual hazards: vehicles without lights and armed hold-up men on bicycles.
They entered the Western Zone. They stopped at an American checkpoint with four military police, two with automatic rifles and two with massive sidearms. Kern produced a vehicle ID and Cochrane held aloft his ID. The lead MP checked each carefully and waved them through. After a few minutes, they were halfway back to Tempelhof and only occasionally encountered other motor vehicles, mostly British and American military, all heavily armed.
The Jeep continued.
“Lots of nice-looking women in the club,” Cochrane offered, trying to put a pleasant cap on the outing.
Roth laughed. “Many,” he said.
“Too true,” Cochrane answered. “Either of you see a girl who stood out?”
“No. I have my wife at home,” Kern said.
“Good for you. Treasure and take care of her,” Cochrane said.
There was a thoughtful silence from the tail gunner. Then Roth added, “The blonde.”
Coming more alert, “There must have been fifty blondes in there, Heinrich,” Cochrane replied. “Some via their Germanic bloodlines, some through chemicals. Which one in particular?”
Cochrane guessed it was a female Roth had encountered at the bar. There had been no shortage of them. But he was wrong. “She was on stage for a dance. Then she went over and talked to the Russian hoodlum,” Roth answered.
“Anna?”
“If that’s her name,” said Roth. A pause. “She walked by where you were sitting, too. Before the show. You and the older lady who looked like a madame.”
“That was her, the girl who came by,” Cochrane said. “Yes. Her name is Anna.”
“You know her?
“Not very well.”
“I liked her.”
Cochrane suppressed a sigh. “I think she’s a decent woman,” Cochrane said. “Very troubled history, though. I wish I could help her, but I can’t.”
“All of Germany has a troubled history,” said Kern unsolicited as they arrived at Tempelhof. “Help is not so easy when the Russians send tanks from the east. Who knows? Americans and English leave and we’re prisoners again.”
“No Churchill anymore. No Roosevelt,” said Roth, who, along with Kern and millions of other Germans, had been at war with both forty months earlier.
“I understand,” Cochrane said.
Bill Cochrane could have said more, much more, but declined to. It was very late. Or very early, depending on how one measured a day.
Cochrane’s gaze slid sideways. There was a flashing red caution light that marked the driving path for Kern to take to return the vehicle. For a moment the red glow made a hollow out of half of Kern’s face and gave him a menacing smile. It was as if for a split second it allowed a view deeper into Kern’s soul and intentions than Cochrane normally might have had. For just a flash, Cochrane saw, or sensed he saw, something he didn’t like or something he hadn’t noticed before.
It was a fatigue-juiced moment that was alive with a kaleidoscope of wild thoughts pinwheeling in more directions than Cochrane cared to count: prime among them, unassociated with Kern, he wondered how Laura and Caroline were, if they were safe, and if he would live to see them again. When he was younger, such ruminations would never have confronted him.
As the vehicle moved forward past the red flashers, the illusion, or the illumination, whatever it had been, was gone. An uneasy normal prevailed again. In the end, they were three tired warriors returning from an intense evening.
Kern parked the Jeep in Sgt. Pearson’s hangar.
The men wished each other a good night and the late evening assignment concluded.
Chapter 58
Berlin – July 27
Shortly after midnight, as July 26 turned into July 27, a C-47 flown by First Lieutenant Charles King of Aberdeen, South Dakota and First Lieutenant Robert Stuber of Arlington, California approached Tempelhof in light rain. Both men had long flying experience. They put down their landing gear, locked it, and went into their one thousand meters o
f flight descent onto the airfield.
Then something happened. For those listening from the control tower, their cockpit went silent. But an explosion was heard throughout Berlin. The C-47 flown by King and Stuber had come in too low: miscalculation or a lethal downdraft, no one would ever know. It whammed directly into one of the abandoned apartment buildings that littered the city under the landing pattern.
German fire crews, paid and volunteer, fought the ensuing blaze into the dawn hours. American disaster crews were on the scene as soon as the fire was under control. The crews removed the wreckage of the dead Gooney Bird and the remains of the two volunteer pilots. No civilians were killed. The plane had only carried a crew of two, plus flour and coal.
As dawn broke and the clouds cleared and the rain ceased, Berliners and Americans passed by and left flowers. By noon, as the assemblage continued to grow, the row of flowers had become a small hill.
Someone posted a hand-lettered sign in English. It read,
Two American fliers became victims of the Berlin Blockade on this site.
You gave our lives for us!
The Berliners of the West Sectors will never forget you.
There was an official memorial service at 11 AM the following morning, led by a Lutheran minister from the Berlin diocese and an American-born U.S. Army chaplain named Bryan. The service was in English and German and held near the crash site two blocks from the Tempelhof landing strip that the ill-fated, final flight of King and Stuber had missed.
Bill Cochrane attended, head respectfully bowed, standing quietly by himself, with an unshakable feeling of sorrow upon him. He couldn’t erase from his mind the sacrifice these young fliers – a pair of fine young Americans — had made for the freedom of people they didn’t know, the people of Berlin who had been “the enemy” not so long ago. He exchanged sorrowful glances with Tommy Olson and Glenn Taylor, who were between flights but skipped their lunch to attend. Vic Marino had come by earlier and had laid a bouquet of flowers. Cochrane had spotted him and commiserated with him. Vic was now in the air to Rhein-Main and was still working on a way to get his wife to come to Germany and join him.
