Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  §111

  Later that night, in the Marrokkaner.

  “You said what?”

  “A hundred pounds of coffee.”

  “Jesus wept,” Pie Face said. “You silly sod.”

  “All the same, my character not withstanding . . . you can get a hundred pounds?”

  “Possible. Risky. Someone might notice.”

  “What’s the most you’ve ever got out at one time?”

  “Sixty. Week before last.”

  “So you’ll try?”

  “Yeah. I’ll try.”

  It was Eddie’s habit to hear everyone out before speaking. He spoke now.

  “How are we going to shift it? I can’t manage twenty pounds under me greatcoat, let alone a hundred, and we’re almost out of greatcoat weather. Any minute now the MPs’ll be able to nick the black-marketeers by pulling in anyone daft enough to be wearing an army greatcoat in the sunshine.”

  Wilderness said, “We motorise. We have three staff jeeps at our disposal. Mine, Eddie’s, and Spud’s. And once we cross the line we’re free of our blokes—they’ve always been the real threat, not the Russians. We’ve always had more to fear from our own lot just selling by the bag on the street.”

  “Vehicles get pulled just like blokes on foot,” Spud said. “An’ that’s a fact.”

  “We won’t have it on display.”

  “MPs know the hiding places. And they got mirrors to look under the car.”

  “Jerry cans,” Wilderness said. “How many jerry cans does a staff jeep carry?”

  “Four,” said Spud. “But there’s fixings for six.”

  “Capacity?”

  “Twenty litres each.”

  “Can we pack a hundred pounds of coffee into that space?”

  “Just. Only just. But it would mean no spare petrol.”

  “And when have you ever run out of petrol driving around Berlin?”

  Spud smiled the smile of acceptance.

  “Brilliant, Joe. Bloody brilliant.”

  Wilderness nodded and waited. Watched Spud improvise.

  “I slices the bottoms off the cans in me workshop, bit o’ spot welding, fit ’em back with an inner sleeve, and bob’s yer uncle—six giant coffee cans undetectable to the nosy copper.”

  Eddie was smiling too.

  “Might work,” he said. “You never know.”

  Walking back to Fasanenstraße, Eddie said, “And the money? You never mentioned it and they never ask. They’re like a pair of schoolboys. They care more about the lark than the profit.”

  “He’ll pay over the odds, and I insisted on Western marks. No minus money. For all I know he prints his own.”

  “How can coffee, how can anything be worth more in East Berlin than it is in the West? We’re getting four hundred reichsmarks a pound as it is.”

  “’Cos it don’t stay in East Berlin. Leastways that’s my feeling. Yuri is big time. Party apparatchik. Commissar during the early part of the war. I reckon anything we sell him will go to the arselickers and the comrades back in Moscow.”

  “Ruins yer faith in humanity, doesn’t it?”

  “Yep. I’ll never vote Commie again.”

  “Big time? This Yuri is . . . big time?”

  “Like I said.”

  “Are we big time now, Joe? Bulk orders? A hundred pounds at a time?”

  “There’s sod all profit and sod all pleasure in selling half a dozen bags at a time to the stick insects.”

  “Or do we just not know what we’re getting into?”

  “Y’know I’d go right off you if you ever turned into an optimist, Ed.”

  §112

  The first time, they met in Das Eierkühlhaus—the egg-cooling house—in Osthafen. This part of the city, on the north bank of the Spree, had been Wehrmacht property. A prime target, with one of Berlin’s largest goods stations—the Ost-Güterbahnhof—smack in the middle of it. The RAF had pasted it, and somehow managed to miss a warehouse with 75,000,000 eggs and the opportunity to create the biggest omelette in history.

  Yuri delighted in telling him this.

  It surprised Wilderness not half as much as the fact that the Russians—having shipped anything that wasn’t nailed down, to say nothing of much of what was nailed down, back to the Soviet Union—were once again using the egg house for its intended purpose and storing eggs.

  Two silent Slavs unloaded one hundred pounds of coffee, looking slightly baffled by the whole process of concealment.

  Yuri counted out fifty thousand reichsmarks.

  Wilderness flipped through them looking for plus signs.

  “You don’t trust me? That’s OK. I wouldn’t trust me either. Here, a present for Nell.”

  He handed Wilderness a dozen eggs.

  “Two hundred and fifty marks in the Tiergarten. Now, perhaps you will trust me a little?”

  “Two hundred and seventy five. And we’ll take trust one day at a time, shall we? Like giving up fags or booze.”

  Yuri laughed out loud at this.

  “Da, da. The Alkononics Anonomy. We are a pair of junkies! Addicted to the deal.”

  Yuri slapped him on the back. A lot of force for such a little man.

  Wilderness said, “We could speed things up a bit, you know.”

  “How?”

  “Get hold of six more jerry cans—they’re everywhere in Germany, it’s why they’re called jerry cans after all—and fix them up the same as mine. Then, instead of waiting while your blokes empty them out, we just swap cans. Dammit, we could park side by side on Unter den Linden and be away in thirty seconds.”

  “Risky. I prefer some cover.”

  “Just a figure of speech.”

  “And I would have to trust you about what was really in the cans.”

  “You’d be free to open any one of them at any time.”

  “Okeydokey. Good good. I get one of my ‘blokes,’ as you call them, to do the job. Next time, eh? One day at a time.”

  Wilderness drove back across the Brommy Bridge, into the American Sector. Fifty thousand reichsmarks was a small fortune if exchangeable into dollars or sterling, but it wasn’t. The trick, if such, was not be caught holding the parcel when the music stopped. And it would surely stop one day?

  §113

  Wilderness did the next run himself too. It took Pie Face a fortnight to get one hundred pounds of coffee.

  He grumbled endlessly.

  Yuri grumbled endlessly. So much so, Wilderness bought time by insisting Yuri meet the team at the Marrokkaner.

  The rough and wrinkled peasant had all the diplomatic skills of a candidate for the US presidency. If there had been babies he would have kissed them.

  Wilderness was well aware that few people Spud and Pie Face had ever met could represent the “unknown” as fully as Yuri. Leaving the square mile of their birth had been a major step, going overseas a life milestone, setting foot in a French brothel a total violation of their upbringing . . . something to be remembered, relished, and never spoken of again.

  Eddie was different. Eddie was an imaginative man in a dull exterior. It was a brilliant defence. Who would ever suspect the little fat bloke who exuded dullness and misery? He had always reminded Wilderness of a bumblebee—unlikely, one of nature’s freaks . . . but when the creature chose to fly . . . ?

  Besides, Eddie had been through the same course of Cambridge indoctrination that he had himself—and he spoke better Russian. Spud might be charmed as Yuri bought him beer after beer and they compared notes on childhoods spent on farms in East Anglia and rural Russia, Pie Face might be bemused by it all, but little would dent Eddie’s cynicism.

  As ever, he saved his critique until they were alone.

  “You think he’s dodgy, don’t you?” Wilderness said.

  “Dodgy? More like downright bloody dangerous.”

  “He’s in the same game we are, Ed—that’s all.”

  “Before I was in this ‘game’ I was a driver and interpreter and you flogged china on
a market stall in Whitechapel. Spud’s a farmboy-cum-mechanic, as happy chewing straw as smuggling coffee. Pie Face is part of the great East End diaspora, living on the Thames estuary, living off memories of Limehouse or Wapping and less than happy with anything else. Wogs begin in Kent as far he’s concerned. But what about our new pal? What did Yuri do in the war? For that matter what did Yuri do before the war? He’s twenty years older than us. He’s an apparatchik, an NKVD officer, a former military commissar for fuck’s sake. He doesn’t deal in coffee he deals in death. In either capacity, commissar or NKVD . . . how many deaths is he responsible for? You don’t know and neither do I.”

  “Yet, he took care of Nell and her mother in ’45.”

  “Doesn’t make him St. Francis.”

  So, Wilderness made Eddie do the run with him. Just to set his mind at ease.

  The venue was another industrial relic, the Eisfabrik on Köpenicker Straße, again just spitting distance from the American line. It reminded Wilderness of nothing quite so much as the illustrated pages of his School Cert history book—Chapter 7, the Industrial Revolution. It was like the interior of a Lancashire cotton mill—although the pages of his history book were the closest he’d ever been to one—an iron jungle of boilers and flywheels and overhead cams. Pleasing, it its way. Languishing, under a few years of dust. It probably hadn’t turned out a block of ice since the war turned against the Reich in 1943. One day it might make ice again—until then it seemed to be Yuri’s warehouse. One of many.

  Yuri’s bloke—Yuri offered no introduction, and the man never spoke—set six jerry cans in front of them. Identical to the ones they’d brought in with them, even down to the British Army stencilling on the side and the little red and green flashes, copied from memory without comprehension.

  “Good good,” said Yuri.

  Wilderness handed him a tin of Ogden’s Walnut Plug.

  “On the house,” he said, and as Yuri looked both pleased and baffled by phrase and gesture, added, “A present, from us to you.”

  “Good good. So . . . kind. New tin. So pretty. Mine is so worn. So pretty pretty. And I . . . have present for Eddie.”

  Yuri summoned one of the silent men, and with a bold hint of ceremony a bottle of “Pugachev перцовка” vodka was handed from him to Yuri to Eddie.

  It was bright red, a fact readily explained by the sketch of a cluster of red peppers on the label. But not as red as Eddie. Eddie was blushing, as though he’d blundered into the Olympic arena after a casual stroll in the park only to break the tape ahead of the marathon winner. An unexpected honour.

  “Bottled in 1932,” said Yuri.

  “Thank you.”

  “One hundred twenty proof.”

  “I’m touched.”

  “Made from capitalists’ blood.”

  The slap on the back that followed almost made Eddie drop the bottle.

  Wilderness laughed, which brought a nervous smile to Eddie’s lips, but Yuri was roaring hysterically at his own joke. He drew breath long enough to translate for his blokes and then half a dozen of them were laughing together.

  “Next time?” Wilderness said to bring them back to earth.

  “Next time, zoap.”

  “What kind of soap?”

  “Lady zoap. Pink and smelly. As much as you can get.”

  Driving home, clutching the bottle between his knees, Eddie said, “He’s a bundle of bloody laughs isn’t he?”

  “I rather think that was the price you paid for your all-too-obvious suspicion.”

  “So now we need a mountain of soddin’ zoap?”

  “We can get a mountain of zoap. Might not be pink but it’ll be smelly. Whatever the NAAFI has in stock. In fact from now on it’s open orders . . . we sell him whatever we can. And we split the driving. You, me, and Spud. Different faces, different jeeps, different locations . . . all lowers the risk.”

  “And our regulars?”

  “Regulars?”

  “The blokes at the back doors of all the caffs we supply, the blokes in the Tiergarten.”

  “Small change, Ed.”

  “They’re still our regulars.”

  “There’ll be enough to go round, trust me, there’ll be enough.”

  “You’re driving Pie Face potty, you know that don’t you?”

  “Then maybe we need another source.”

  §114

  Eddie got home to Fasanenstraße after a day of chauffeuring, interpreting, and dealing to find Wilderness in shirt and underpants. Wilderness was pressing his Welsh Guards outfit. Adding a second pip to the shoulders.

  “High time I got promoted.”

  “Oh bugger. You’re going out in it.”

  “Damn right I am.”

  “Joe this isn’t London. This place is crawling with MPs.”

  “So?”

  “If you go down the Marlborough Club . . . suppose someone recognises you? It’s officers only. You’d be had up for impersonation. You want a night out, what’s wrong with the Winston Club. It’s only two streets away. We could both go.”

  “Eddie, you’re worrying about nothing. I just want to see how the other half lives. I’m not going down the Winston—all those pompous NCOs would make my blood boil.”

  “Mine too but . . .”

  “And I’m not going down the Marlborough. The other half I want to see is American. I’m off to Harnack-Haus.”

  Harnack-Haus was out in the suburb of Dahlem, at the southern end of the American Sector. It had been commandeered as a social club for US forces in 1945. At some point during the war, according to Peter-Jürgen von Hesse in one of his interminably rambling confessions, Germany’s nuclear physicists had met here with a view to building an atomic bomb. They had been indecisive. Now, the most lethal thing mixed here was a green St. Patrick’s Day cocktail, relying heavily on chartreuse and lager.

  Wilderness paid off the cab opposite Harnack-Haus—remembering that officers tipped. Patted the pocket, where Erno’s fake ID nestled. It was immaculate. The work of a master craftsman. He just might be Lt Rupert Tatten-Brown.

  Harnack-Haus was a monstrosity, worse by far than the Victory Club in Hamburg—a Prussian bludgeon of a building—but on the same vast ocean-liner scale. A bar the size of a ballroom—and packed, Friday night revellers, in spick-and-span uniforms, on pleasure bent. It was not, and this surprised him, “Officers Only”—America being a democracy, by the people for the people of the people, its distinction was not between classes but colours.

  He wasn’t at all sure why he’d come. He stood at the bar, ordered a Krombacher Pils and began to think he’d made a mistake. He’d not been sure what he wanted—a taste of the high life, a sense of being at the centre rather than the edge. But that was the British condition post-war—to be on the periphery. Groups of Americans, mostly airmen out of Tempelhof, looked like closed societies, sealed units. It would have been quite impossible to intrude with a “hello chaps” and a handshake, impossible to penetrate that level of laughter and inclusive fellow-feeling. His childhood had set him up. He wanted to mingle with Americans for no better reason than that they were the people who’d appeared on-screen at the Troxy cinema in the Commercial Road. He was looking at servicemen in olive green, when really what he wanted was Carole Lombard or Melvyn Douglas—better still, he wanted a glimpse of Myrna Loy and William Powell, seated at a round table swirling cocktails, swapping gags, the dog at their feet just waiting to nip your ankles.

  He’d have another beer and call it quits.

  He’d just raised a hand to signal the barman, when a voice on his right said, “Let me get this.”

  This was a big one. An American army captain as tall as he was himself, but bulking up at twice his size, barrel chest, a jaw like Desperate Dan.

  “Krombacher, right?”

  “Thanks, old man. Awfully good of you.”

  Even as he spoke them the words sounded fake. The whole venture sounded fake. He could kick himself. Having opened his mouth as a toff he�
�d have no choice now but to keep it up.

  With two glasses of Pils set in front of them, the American hoisted his with, “Mud in your eye.”

  Wilderness could think of nothing more English than “Cheers.”

  “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

  Oh shit.

  “Don’t think so, old man. Tatten-Brown. Welsh Guards.”

  “Sure. At the . . . oh hell . . . my German is complete crap . . . Kult . . . Kult . . . Kulturkammer . . . nah, Kulturbund, that was it . . . what a mouthful . . . the place on Schlüterstraße. The DeNaz place. Where the Krauts come to get their Persilscheins.”

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Wilderness looked back at the greeny-brown eyes. The half-wry smile on his lips. He didn’t look hostile. Perhaps he wasn’t hostile.

  “Just a game, mate,” he said. “Just a bit of fun. Seeing how the other half lives. A dressing-up game. No harm in it.”

  “Sure. I mean. Why not? Tell you what. Let’s see if we can find a quiet table to ourselves.”

  Wilderness decided that if this bloke was going to shop him, he’d have done it by now, and most certainly would not have said, “Run a tab” as they picked their beers and made their way to the far corner of the room.

  As they drew back chairs, a huge, soft hand shook his.

  “Frank Spoleto, Captain, US Army Intelligence. Been here since ’45. Came in with the 82nd Airborne.”

  “Joe Holderness, Corporal, Royal Air Force Intelligence. Came here on the Silk Stocking express this winter.”

  “Yeah, I guess you are just a kid at that. Ever see combat?”

  “No. I got drafted . . . after.”

  “Tough. But . . . but . . . just a kid is as maybe. I hear you’re the man.”

  The man?

  “Why not just spit it out, Captain?”

  “Nah, it’s tale to be told not a fleck of phlegm to be coughed up. I got here with the first American troops in July ’45, when the Russkis drew back to the line. You think Berlin’s badly off now, but that’s nothing compared to ’45.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Stick with me, kid. In ’45 everything was up for grabs. Everything was up for sale. Stuff we took for granted back home was priceless here.