by Lawton, John
‘I’ve seen enough,’ said Troy.
Dieter led the way back to the edge of the crowd.
‘He’s got these idiots eating out of the palm of his hand,’ said Troy.
‘What you must understand, Troy, is that this man is a hero.’
‘What?’
‘He is a hero to those people because they are so desperately in need of heroes.’
They stopped in front of a five-foot-high pile of blitzed red brick.
‘In 1945 we were a defeated nation – a people indoctrinated with the belief that we could not lose, but we had lost. It was essential – psychologically essential – to identify in some way with victory. I had not long been back in the city myself when Churchill chose to pay a visit. I heard this story from half a dozen people who saw it. He was being driven through the ruins, a landscape just like this one, when the car and his escort found themselves virtually surrounded by Germans – the Berliners came as close to the car as they could get, one or two even managed to press their faces up against the window. Then it dawned on Churchill’s guard that they were not hostile. The old man insisted on getting out. They had stopped by a heap of rubble just like this one.’
Dieter climbed the few steps to the top of the heap.
‘Churchill got out, and with the aid of his stick he scrambled up the little pile of Berlin’s remains. He lit up one of his Havanas, he made the V sign and waved at the crowd, he put his hat on the end of his stick and he held it aloft and blew a smoke ring at the sky, and they cheered and cheered and cheered.’
Dieter did the Churchillian V and threw in a few gratuitous grumbles about ‘Narzis’, and took a bow before his non-existent crowd.
‘In the end his bodyguard had to beg him to come down. And when he did the crowd fell over each other to be able to clap the old man on the back, just to be able to touch him. I tell you, Troy, the Pope doesn’t get such a reception as Churchill had. He was like a saint to them.’
‘A saint without honour in his own country. We threw him out of office,’ said Troy.
Dieter leapt to the ground.
‘An irrelevance if I may say so. Churchill is a citizen of the world. On that day he was a German. More precious to them as their conqueror than the memory of Charlemagne, Bismarck and Hitler put together. Today Baumgarner is German. Baumgarner is the symbol of victory. And this crowd is merely a fragment – Baumgarner is untouchable.’
‘You said not an hour ago that you’d drag him off the street in handcuffs if you could.’
‘I would if I could, but I can’t. If you and I can get him out of Berlin, then it is, as they say in the USA, a whole new ball game. Let us have no ideas that we can lay hands on him in this city. It’s his. He’s bought it lock, stock and Bierstein. The good guys – the harmless burghers you just saw – as well as the villains. I don’t know what we can do, but I do know it must be done outside this city.’
Clark drove them back to the police station. Troy’s mind turned over a tumult of ideas. Berlin flashed by unnoticed.
89
‘What do you mean by “code”?’ Troy asked.
Dieter leaned across the desk and ran his finger down one column of the dark, grainy photograph of Baumgarner’s diary.
‘See for yourself. Last Wednesday – JBP at 2200 the KG.’
‘I wouldn’t call that code,’ Troy said. ‘It’s simple abbreviation.’
‘But just as obscure. We do not know who JBP is and the KG could be any one of twenty locations. Look,’ Dieter flipped forward a page to the last week of December. ‘Home Run. 55K. Now who is Home Run and is 55K a weight or a sum of money or what?’
Troy’s attention was seized by 27 December. The first day after today, the 23rd, for which there was any entry. He let his finger stop under the date, and Dieter picked it up as his cue.
‘See. Again. Who is LH 133? Where will he be at 10.00 hours? What is Id 2200? Freud’s phone number? And there, the following day what is DC at 0145? And at last we have a full name, but George Town is a made-up name if ever I heard one!’
‘Dieter. You said you learnt your English in England?’
‘I was there from 1938 to 1941.’
‘Before the Americans arrived. And you’ve never been to America?’
‘Make your point, Troy. If I’ve been stupid I’d rather know at once.’
‘LH 133 looks very like the way airlines have taken to abbreviating flight numbers. Id is quite possibly Idlewild – the New York international airport. DC is surely Washington. And you’re reading far too much into George Town. Even to seeing a space where there isn’t one. Georgetown isn’t a person it’s a suburb of Washington. The bugger’s going home!’
‘Why would he fly on a civil airline? With his resources?’
‘I’d hate to cross the Atlantic with the US Air Force if I didn’t have to. I flew with the RAF to get here. Not the height of comfort. He’s flying home by the easiest means.’
Dieter snatched the diary from Troy’s hands and cursed aloud. He picked up the phone and spoke to the operator. Troy looked over his shoulder at Clark, wondering how much attention the man paid, but he had his nose in his book, his greatcoat open and his legs splayed around the stove. If he’d heard what was said his utter indifference added to his translator’s discretion to create a solidly impervious front.
A couple of minutes later Dieter put down the phone, looked straight at Troy and blew a silent whistle of appraisal.
‘I have an old friend in the airline’s office. There is a flight from Berlin to New York at 10 a.m. on the 27th. And Baumgarner is booked on it.’
‘Stopping where?’ asked Troy.
‘Hannover and Shannon.’
‘Shit,’ said Troy.
‘Shannon is in Ireland, is it not? Your writ does not run in Ireland?’
Troy paused momentarily, sighed deeply, and stated the inevitable. ‘We can’t let that plane land at Shannon,’ he said softly.
‘Troy – this is fantasy! How do you expect to divert a plane?’
Dieter pushed back his chair and stood up. He stood by the stove and warmed his hands at it. Clark looked up as the shadow passed across his gaze, but went back to his book without a second glance.
‘Troy – perhaps I have misled you about the way things can be done here. I obtained the copy of Baumgarner’s diary by subterfuge. My own action – my own responsibility. It’s deniable. If you have any thought that we can ask them to put down in London without the proper permissions, forget it. Right now Berlin is a city where you can buy a gun on a street corner but you cannot ask a bureaucrat to cut a corner. Do you see what I mean?’
‘Can your friend find out the name of the pilot?’
‘Troy, please!’
‘Can he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. I don’t propose to ask favours. I don’t propose to say a damn thing to any jobsworth bureaucrat. Just get me someone who can be bribed.’
90
Clark and Troy went back to the jeep.
‘Time to kill, eh, sir?’ said Clark. ‘Would you like to see a bit of the city?’
‘I’ve seen enough builder’s rubble to last a lifetime.’
‘Oh, there’s more to it than that. There’s the Brandenburg Gate, there’s the Reichstag – if this were the LCC there’d be a blue plaque saying “Marinus van der Lubbe” was here – as it is it’s only in chalk.’
They sat side by side in the jeep. Clark not even turning the key in the ignition without some indication from Troy.
‘I don’t want the tourist guide. Take me to a café – anywhere you like,’ said Troy.
‘There’s bound to be a mobile at the Tiergarten, I should think.’
‘Bit nippy for standing around outdoors, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Yes, but the Tiergarten might interest you as a policeman – the tram-conductors don’t call out Tiergarten any more, they just yell “Black market”.’
The coffee at the mobile canteen contr
asted pleasantly with that at the Uhlandstrasse – it was fresh and it was real. And it was probably stolen. Troy looked over the top of his cup at a mêlée of human scarecrows – stickmen with brown-paper parcels, stickwomen pushing prams without babies. It all looked too familiar – the pre-war newsreel footage of a nation in retreat. The universal refugee. Except that these people were going nowhere. They circled, they collided and they spun off each other like billiard balls.
Clark unwrapped into a surprising volubility.
‘The Inspector’s a bit of a philosopher wouldn’t you say, sir?’
‘I’ve despaired of ever getting the short answer – but I suppose he knows what he’s talking about.’
‘Oh yes. The re-respectablisation of Germany. Not a bad Ph.D. thesis or perhaps a paper for the Fabian Society.’
Troy looked sideways at Clark – wondering what he kept hidden beneath the wall of unwavering misery.
‘’Cept he’s wrong,’ Clark added.
‘How so?’
‘Well, sir – it comes down to one question. A dozen ways to frame it, but just the one question. Whose soul do you want to buy? Whose grandmother would you like to own? Whose babies would you want to see baked in an infant pie and washed down with virgin’s blood? In this city if it isn’t nailed down it’s for sale. I don’t blame the Inspector for putting it in the best possible light – it’s his country after all – but I think he’s wrong. If you don’t mind me askin’, sir, how much money did you bring?’
‘Two hundred and fifty – sterling.’
‘Well, sir – I reckon that could buy an archbishop and still leave a bob or two over for the odd gross of virgins. One airline pilot should be no trouble. In the Berlin Stalin has fashioned everyone is on the fiddle – and I mean everyone.’
‘Everyone?’ asked Troy.
Clark lowered his voice, added a hint of mock confidentiality, ‘Tell me, sir, are you a married man?’
‘Why do you ask?’
Clark whipped open his greatcoat – nylon stockings, silk knickers and frilly garters hung from a cat’s cradle of string and safety-pins.
‘’Cos if you are – I’m bound to have something in her size.’
Point made, he closed his greatcoat.
‘I sold this bloke the coffee as it happens. Best NAAFI dark roast. Not bad at all.’
91
Troy did a deal with Clark. He swapped his day-old Manchester Guardian for Clark’s Penguin New Writing and retreated to the meagre warmth of his room on the Kurfürstendamm. It was hard to concentrate. Jack’s ‘honest as the day is wotnot’ had been meant as a recommendation – but Troy found himself wondering if it might not become a liability. He did not wholly believe Clark’s theory of Berlin – it was a bit like the Berlinisation of everything. On the other hand Clark had pointed out that most police stations in the city were serving decent coffee.
It was dark when Dieter called him.
‘Troy, I have the name of the pilot of LH 133. Marius von Asche, and he’s right here in Berlin. He has two days off before the New York flight.’
‘Can we see him?’
‘I have talked to him. He will see me, but he won’t see you. Not yet.’
‘What?’
‘It was fine till he realised you were English. There are some of us who are unforgiving – I take it as a sign for the worst.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean only that I have certain misgivings.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Dieter, spit it out!’
‘I can’t, really I can’t.’
‘Then let me come with you.’
‘Troy, that really isn’t possible.’
‘Then you’ll have to do the deal.’
There was a silence – exactly as Troy had expected.
‘I . . . er can’t do that.’
‘Dieter, I have the money. I’m not about to let this slip through my fingers!’
‘Troy, please. You must leave this with me. Perhaps if he sees me and sees that I am above board he will agree to meet with you.’
He rang off. Dieter, Troy thought, was so far above board he was in the crow’s nest.
92
Troy was waiting when Dieter arrived at his office the next morning. He stared out of the window. The constant hum of planes overhead set the glass in the windows vibrating. In Berlin there scarcely seemed to be a moment when there wasn’t a plane overhead. London’s sound for so many years had been the mournful wail of the siren. With peace it struck Troy as being a constant human babble, louder than the traffic. The Berlin sound was the narcotic throb of piston engines and propellers. You went to sleep to it, you woke up to it, you lived to it. Clark was oblivious to it, and assumed his position draped around the stove, nose deep in Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train, having taken the precaution of bringing his own wood and his own coffee. By the time Dieter walked in the stove was throwing out enough heat to set the lid on the coffee-pot wobbling.
‘My that smells good!’
Clark glanced up from his book.
‘Help yourself, sir. A present from the NAAFI.’
Dieter did not question Clark’s use of the word ‘present’ – he poured himself a cup and sat behind his desk, savouring the aroma of the coffee like a man long deprived. As he tilted the cup to his lips, his eyes met Troy’s. Troy was not in the mood for the small pleasantries of the morning.
‘Well?’ he said.
Dieter set down the cup.
‘Tell me. What did you do in the war?’
‘Has this got anything at all to do with von Asche?’
Dieter took another sip of coffee.
‘Yes. Indulge me a moment.’
‘I was a policeman.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Because it’s what I did, it’s what I do, it’s what I believe in.’
Dieter was nodding in an understanding, utterly infuriating way.
‘Quite, quite. I spent the war in England and in Norway as a member of Special Operations. I arrived back in Berlin with the Americans in 1945.’
Troy had guessed as much.
‘It was, as you put it, what I did. What I believed in. Von Asche was in the Luftwaffe.’
‘So?’
‘He flew some of the last ever sorties over London. He boasts that he was bombing London right up until D-Day. It was what he did. It was what he . . .’
‘What he believed in? What the hell has that got to do with anything? Nobody can believe in that now!’
‘Exactly,’ said Dieter with a note of finality that caused even Clark to look up and betray his eavesdropping.
‘So the man’s a Nazi! And since that’s impossible as an ideology he believes in what? Money?’
‘I would guess that he believes in money, money and more money. He means to give us a very hard time. His exact words were – “I hope your friend has enough”. How much do you have by the way?’
Troy told him. He whistled softly.
‘That’s three months or more’s income, Dieter.’
‘I know. I hope it’s enough to satisfy the hopeless. He has agreed to meet. Two o’clock in the lobby of the Wilhelm I Hotel.’
Clark looked up from his book again.
‘Do you know it?’ Troy asked.
‘Posh it is, sir. In so far as Berlin has any posh left. A little bit of gilt and velvet among the ruins, you might say. From a copper’s point of view I’d say the important thing is that it’s got more exits than a rabbit warren, and it seats upwards of a hundred and fifty. Whatever happens happens in public. I’d say your bloke’s watching his back. Coffee’s good too, if you catch my drift.’
He held the book up and winked hammily at Troy. It seemed to give him a curious pleasure to be able to hint at his alternative income in the presence of two policemen. Troy wondered if he’d ever get a cup of coffee in Berlin that hadn’t first been part of a shady Clark deal.
93
Young waiters in moth-eaten maroon bum-starver ja
ckets darted hither and thither distributing one-inch portions of strudel and fruit cake sliced as thin as bacon. Every so often one of them appeared with a long-handled dust-pan and a broom and endeavoured to keep up a losing battle with the flaking plaster that fell like a lazy snowstorm all around the customers for afternoon tea. Posh and gilt was not a bad description. The gold leaf was peeling, the ceilings and walls were cracked and the carpet threadbare – but the Imperial crest manifested itself at cornice height wherever a yard or more of plasterwork remained intact, and the Prussian eagles peeped out of an interlocking pattern around the holes in the carpet. A shabby elegance also characterised most of the clientèle. Too cold to give up topcoats, most of them sat fully wrapped, a forest of stale wet wool and astrakhan, taking a lush, loud pleasure in the pretence of a world into which the twenties and thirties had never intruded. They gossiped and clattered crockery fit to drive the frost from their bones and relished a convivial Christmas Eve, rendered all the more convivial by common hardship. Morality restored, Troy thought, the Germans reminded him of those English for whom the siege of London by the Luftwaffe assumed the tinge of a golden era of bonhomie and comradeship in the face of deadly adversity. For a moment he felt quite at home.
Von Asche was not what might have been expected. He was pale, ascetic, a little camp and delicately scented. A pinch-thin face, an aquiline nose and delicate, long-fingered hands, with finely manicured nails. The backs of his hands, his cheekbones and his forehead shone tightly – the polished tones of plastic surgery for burns. He seemed oblivious to the lack of heat in the hotel. An old black coat with a worn fur collar hung over the chairback as he defied goose-pimples in his black double-breasted suit. It was, Troy decided, showing off. His narrow, boy’s waist would have been lost in the overcoat, and burdened with the weight of thick sleeves he would not have gestured so freely with his long fingers and their overlong almond-shaped nails.
