The Hidden War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘You’ll tell me if you want to.’

  ‘Don’t you care? Can I have a cigarette?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I just didn’t want to make it worse.’

  Russian Greg tossed her a packet of American cigarettes, and then leaned forward to light one for her with his Zippo. Her breasts moved beneath the gown, and his eyes followed them. That was interesting. She surprised me by smiling at me – the sun came out.

  ‘Thank you, Charlie. I was being a bitch, and you were the closest man to hand.’

  ‘I know. I didn’t know what to ask.’

  ‘You were right. Best ask nothing. There were several men, and it was bad, but not as bad as the weeks just after the Ivans arrived. I’ll live, OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I won’t be able to work for a week. That’s a problem.’

  Russian Greg butted in, ‘I take over your coffee wagon at Gatow until you’re better. I put one of my countesses in it. You don’t lose your licence . . . get you job in the kitchen, when you’re up and about.’

  She added, ‘They say I’ll be here for a week. I need to make arrangements for Lottie until I get out . . .’ She stopped mid-sentence, as if it had just struck her that she and Lottie had already been adrift for a couple of days, and the five-year-old had managed without her.

  ‘All fixed,’ Tommo said as he walked in. ‘She stays here with you.’

  We all turned on him. I asked, ‘When did you get in?’

  ‘An hour or so ago: I’m shagged out. When they told me that a Russki had dumped a girl here, and used my name for it, I thought I’d better find out what was going on. Mighta guessed it was one of yourn, Charlie.’ He turned to Marthe, removed the odd little khaki cap he wore, and gave her either a small bow or a big nod. I remembered that Pete used to do that. ‘David Thomsett, ma’am. Charlie’s pal.’

  Marthe actually looked coy. She looked down.

  ‘You saved me.’

  It was Tommo’s turn to look abashed. Then he said, ‘No. I invested in you. I shouldn’t like us to be getting off on the wrong foot.’

  ‘I don’t understand that.’

  ‘He doesn’t want you to misunderstand him,’ I explained gently.

  Marthe put down a high card. ‘Charlie; I’ve never misunderstood a man since my sixteenth birthday.’

  It broke the spell: we all laughed.

  The American Red Cross had taken over a huge old house on Trautenaustrasse. It was part administrative HQ, part accommodation block, and part short-stay hospital. They employed German labour, and half the population of free Berlin visited it looking for jobs. There were often vacancies because the personnel were combed through for Nazis in hiding periodically, and they always carted a few away. It was surrounded by a large garden tended by three denazified gardeners. I guessed that its rose beds and lawns would be vegetable plots before long: you could just sense the trouble brewing up around the city.

  Tommo and Greg took Lottie for a run in the garden, leaving me with Marthe. She asked me, ‘Why is everyone being so kind to me, Charlie? I am only a German whore in a defeated city, and now everyone is being kind to me. I don’t understand it.’

  ‘It’s the club; I think you joined the club.’

  ‘What club?’

  ‘I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s one I’m in, if that helps. It sort of happens to you by accident. Your life is difficult; dangerous – impossible, sometimes – and then suddenly you’re in the club, and people just like you are helping you out.’

  ‘Your friend Tommo is in the club?’

  ‘I think he was a founder member . . .’

  ‘. . . And Greg?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘. . . And lots of other people?’

  ‘Hundreds, I’d imagine. Maybe thousands.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Good people who like to pretend to themselves that they’re bad . . . that’s as much as I’ve figured out.’

  She stared out of the window of the small ward, as if she was deliberately distancing me.

  ‘You will come to see us when you get back?’

  ‘Of course I will. I’ll be back within two weeks: I’ll bring something for Lottie. What would she like?’

  ‘Could you bring her a doll, a girl doll?’

  ‘I’ll try. You’ll be up and bouncing by then. You’ll drive out to meet me at the plane.’

  ‘I’ll bring you the best cup of coffee you ever drank in your life.’

  ‘I know you will, Marthe. I’m betting on it.’

  I suddenly saw it then: an expression on her face. She looked tired, hungry, hollow and beaten . . . and yet at the same time stubborn, and determined. It was a survivor’s face. Within six months it was all around us: and when we called it the Berlin look everyone knew what you were talking about.

  That night Tommo took us to a smashed-up bar in an alley in the US sector. It was being renovated, and they were just hoisting its new name, in a red neon snake, above its small door. It was called the Klapperschlange Bar. Scroton was with us. He asked me, ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Rattlesnake,’ I told him. ‘The Rattlesnake Bar,’ and shuddered. I might have bloody guessed.

  It was Tommo’s new outlet. Inside it was being rebuilt by moonlighting US Pioneers, but work had more or less finished for the day, and a party was warming up. On one end of the long bar was a large Plexiglas box: it contained Alice. Alice was the most reliable woman in my life so far. Unfortunately she was also a diamondback rattlesnake. Alice had followed me all around Europe, and now she’d made it to Berlin. These days we’d call her a stalker. She rattled gently when she spotted me.

  ‘Hello, Alice,’ I said. ‘Long time no see.’

  Chapter Three

  Have you ever played one of those blindfold hide and seek games, where people are chanting warm, warmer, cold or red hot in your ear? The agreed air corridors in and out of old Berlin were a bit like that in ’48 and 9. What’s more, they were almost as busy as a modern autobahn. We were supposed to fly on one side of them, but nobody liked doing that because all a pilot needed to do was sneeze, and he was in the Soviet Zone. Then you had MiGs all over you. So everyone flew down the centre of the corridor, and it got a bit crowded up there. We were caught by a couple of American jets before we got into the happier side of Germany. They must have come whistling up behind us at our height, and just hopped over us, and down in front. They scared us shitless, and had us bouncing about in their slipstreams for a minute. Crazy Eddie, who never strapped in, fell out of his seat. He looked a bit comical on his knees peering forward through the front screens.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ he snarled.

  ‘Yanks. A couple of Shooting Stars showing off, I think. Nippy little beggars aren’t they?’ Scroton was good at aircraft recognition. It was probably why he had lived so long. I looked out to our port: a silver glint in the sun had caught my attention. I poked my head through the curtain and told Dave, ‘There’s something about a mile out to port. I think he’s pacing us.’

  ‘One of them, or one of us?’

  ‘If it’s one of us he’s asking for trouble: he’s well outside the corridor. It must be one of them.’

  ‘Let’s piss him off then . . .’ and Scroton turned us towards the outlander in a fat wide arc that didn’t lose us too much height. That was good because we’d been plugging along at less than two thou anyway.

  Sometimes I hate pilots. Especially the mad ones. I asked, ‘What are you doing, Dave?’

  The gleaming dot in the sky seemed to be standing still – that was because we were flying towards it. ‘If we fly out of the corridor he can shoot us down . . .’

  ‘Stop worrying, Charlie: you’re an old woman sometimes, you know that?’ Scroton did a ninety-degree turn back to starboard this time. We were still in the safe corridor, but only just, and that much closer to the little bastard out there. ‘Now watch this . . .’ Then he said to Crazy Eddie, ‘OK, Ed. Switch the pl
onker box on . . .’

  Crazy Eddie leaned down to his left, and reached out for a khaki-colour metal box under Scroton’s seat. It had two small toggle switches that he flipped down, and a bigger blue ridged knob, like a tuner on my radios. The box gave out a low persistent squeal as he turned the knob, increasing in pitch and volume. The screech suddenly ceased, and moderated to a loud hum.

  ‘Got ’im,’ Crazy Eddie said.

  ‘Now watch Whisky bite,’ Scroton told me.

  I was watching the Russian. He was almost close enough for me to make out the shape of an aircraft. Then something odd began to happen to him. The gleaming dot began to rise and fall, like one of those roller-coaster rides at Blackpool. Each rise and each fall became progressively larger. After less than a minute he did a wing over and fell away from us, and as he did so appeared to regain control. Eddie shut the box down. It whirred down like an engine shutting off. Like a gyro, I thought. I asked, ‘What was that?’

  Eddie sniffed. He looked pleased with himself. ‘Neat. That’s very neat. They call it Xylophone. It buggers up their electrics, Charlie. It interferes with their radar and other instruments – principally the ASI, the altimeter and his artificial horizon. It really spoils their day.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not ours. Someone fancy in the War Office dreamed it up. The Old Man is just doing them a favour by trying it out for them. We’ve got a couple of them.’

  ‘We’re civilians,’ I protested. ‘I was demobbed.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I don’t want to fight anyone any more.’

  ‘You’re not fighting anyone. You’re scaring them away: much better.’

  ‘If the Russians catch us trying out military stuff on them they’ll probably shoot us for spying.’

  ‘We won’t get caught, Charlie. There’s a plastic explosive charge in the box. If we get it, it gets it. No evidence.’

  ‘So Dave is sitting on a bomb?’

  ‘Never looked at it that way before.’ Scroton turned to face me. ‘Bit of a laugh, what?’ I looked at the box. It had a ring attached to a pin that ended inside it. I guessed that last one out pulled the pin – just like a hand grenade. When I looked up Scroton was still watching my face. I told him, ‘Pay attention to where you’re going, Dave, there’s a bit of a mountain over there.’

  ‘Free Germany in about three minutes, Skip.’ That was Crazy Eddie.

  ‘Thanks, Eddie; well done.’ Then he said, ‘Well done, Whisky.’

  I never liked it when pilots talked to their aircraft: it meant that they were losing touch.

  ‘What’s it like over there?’ the Major asked me. Friday night, and the pub was full of yachties up from London for the weekend. I thought that it was still too early in the year for leisure sailing, and anyway the Engineers still hadn’t cleared all the beaches of mines – you could still get blown up out there.

  ‘A bit like Blind Man’s Buff at times,’ I told him. ‘Hide and seek. Now you see the Russian; now you don’t . . . and I’m in the corridor hoping that Ivan doesn’t see me, and come nosing over for a butcher’s. The trouble is that I’m flying with maniacs who don’t seem to care that much.’

  ‘More dangerous than flying for the RAF?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like out of the frying pan and into the fire.’

  ‘The Russians respect the neutral corridors, though?’ He was talking about the air corridors we had agreed with the Russians: they had been pretty strict about what routes we could fly between our airfields in West Germany, across the areas they controlled, and into Berlin, and they watched us all the time.

  ‘So far. Although there are a couple of stories going about . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘About aircraft being buzzed by the Reds inside the corridor. It is warming up.’

  ‘War?’

  ‘Who knows?’ It was the question that everyone asked me. The Major had done his bit for six years, but if the Reds had a go at us he’d have another bit to do. ‘Sometimes I think that the politicians just let it all get out of control, and when they do people start getting killed.’

  ‘Time to dust my uniform down, and polish the old brasses?’

  ‘No. Not just yet; and you never polished your brasses anyway, James. You always looked a sight. Just like me. Shall I get us another?’ I liked the beer James kept.

  We were sitting in his small private snug. A door, curtained off with heavy velvet, led directly behind the bar. I took our glasses through. Maggs was serving the yachties, and flirting at the same time. A local guy who worked as a part-time barman was picking up the difference. The place was packed, and heavy with cigarette smoke and noise. As soon as I appeared something which was almost a man leaned across the bar and pushed two whisky glasses at me, sneered and said, ‘Two of the same, please, Junior. As fast as you like.’

  It took me a second or two to realize that he was talking to me. I said, ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me, sonny. Two of the same again. Chop-chop.’

  It happened before I had time to think. The next moment I had hooked my left hand into the collar of his expensive submariner’s jersey – one that had never seen the inside of a submarine – and dragged him over the bar towards me. I pulled my right fist back for the punch. It was Maggs who turned and hung on to that, calling out, ‘Major . . .’ Maggs never spoke loudly, but when she said Major instead of James she always got action.

  James was through the curtain like a ferret down a rabbit hole. He had always moved quickly and quietly. And he was about a yard taller than me. He grabbed my other wrist, warning, ‘Charlie!’

  You either do it without thinking about it, or you don’t do it at all. I let go of the man’s jumper by opening my hand very wide, so that everyone could see it was over. Maggs let go of the fist I’d made. The man slid back across the bar away from me, and the colour started to flood back into his face. He even had a short-cropped pointy black beard like the jolly Jack Tar on Player’s Navy Cut cigarette packets. He ran his hand over it in a nervous gesture. That was interesting. He ignored me, and spoke to James.

  ‘Your man’s a bit touchy isn’t he?’

  ‘My man?’ mused James. Then, ‘Yes; I suppose you could say that he’s my man.’ He turned to me and said, ‘This is Captain Valentine, Charlie. Captain Valentine is the Deputy Vice Commodore of one of the yacht clubs – the Arundel.’

  I carefully began to pull myself a pint.

  ‘Captain of what? Small craft or a deep-sea job?’

  Thinking back to it I suppose that most of the people in the bar had been looking forward for weeks to what happened next: even months maybe. The buzz that had started again, after the little confrontation, suddenly died. They waited for the reply. James said very clearly, ‘Actually I believe it was in the Pay Corps, old man,’ and then he began to laugh. James had a horrible, cruel, slow laugh. That wasn’t very fair to some particularly good blokes in the Pay Corps I’ve known.

  There was a frozen moment, and then someone else laughed – a rather pretty, black-haired woman a few feet from us – and then nearly everyone else joined in. It was one of those daft occasions when you begin to laugh because someone else has. This time Captain Haddock really coloured up. Then he pushed away from us, and out of the bar. About five others trailed uncomfortably after him. I think that James had just lost the patronage of the Arundel: I hoped that it wasn’t crucial for the profits.

  My language had moderated the further away from active service I got, but this time I couldn’t hold it back. ‘What a cunt!’ I said to James. Then I looked around, and realized that the rather pretty woman had been pressed forward by the crowd, to fill Valentine’s space at the bar. She was the nearest other person to me. I said, ‘I’m sorry: you weren’t meant to hear that.’

  James grinned widely. He always did that when I was in the shit, and not getting out in a hurry. He said, ‘Say hello to Evelyn, Charlie.’

  ‘Hello, Ev
elyn; pleased to meet you.’ I was too: she was quite a looker up close.

  ‘Pleased to meet you too, Charlie.’ This definitely wasn’t a rebuff. She had a wild gypsyish look about her. She wore a black shirt with a couple of buttons popped, a black pleated skirt, and a wide red leather belt between them. Her lipstick matched it – a great blood-red gash. If I let my eyes follow her shirt buttons I could see just the lace edging of a black bra. Party time.

  James knew exactly when to come in with the punch line: he always did.

  ‘Evelyn is married to the man with the beard. I think we’ve made him very unhappy . . .’ Bollocks!

  Then James started out with his slow, hollow laugh again, and Evelyn copied him. So that was all right then.

  I had her in the dark: standing up against the back of the pub alongside the outside bog. Several men came out, and relieved themselves in the covered stone trough without knowing we were there. She gasped when I came, and let herself go immediately. I liked that. Her voice was muffled by my neck when she said, ‘Lovely,’ and then, after a heartbeat, ‘Gorgeous.’

  ‘You’re wonderful. Do you know that?’ She didn’t reply, just shook her head. ‘Can you come back to my room?’ She didn’t pull away from me. I could still feel her belly pressed against mine. She shook her head again.

  ‘No. I have to go back to the boat or there’ll be a scene.’

  ‘I’ve got to see you again.’

  ‘I know.’ She pulled away one of the arms she had looped around my neck, and ran a hand through her hair. She said, ‘Christ: this is fast, isn’t it?’

  I just nuzzled her neck where the hairline met it. I asked her, ‘What’s the name of the boat you’ll sleep on tonight? I want to wander down to the pool, look at it, and imagine you sleeping there.’