The Hidden War

by David Fiddimore

‘What else have you won?’

  ‘A nice girly with nice pins with an even nicer little flat in the Charlottenburg. I don’t really think I ever want to go home again.’

  ‘I think I understand you, but I don’t understand why. How can a city as shitty as this one grab you the way it always does? I look forward to coming back here for God’s sake.’

  ‘For God’s sake is probably the reason in your case, boss. Your Irish priest has called asking for you a couple of times.’

  Bugger it! I’d forgotten him again. I’d forgotten Him as well.

  It was OK. Fergal had called to say Thank you. He had flour, milk powder and sugar enough for a couple of months, and a mysterious Australian dropped by every week to top up their paraffin storage tank. He said that he believed in miracles. I told him, ‘It’s not me, you know. Old Man Halton must have arranged it.’

  ‘He arranged it because of you. God is very pleased with you, Charlie: he told me so last night . . . you must be part of His great plan.’

  ‘Tell Him I’m pleased He’s pleased.’

  ‘Why don’t you do it yourself, Charlie? All you have to do is get down on your knees.’ When I didn’t respond to that he asked me, ‘When are you coming round to meet my children?’

  ‘In a few days, Fergal: after I have a few things sorted out. OK?’

  ‘No trouble. They’ll sing some songs for you, and break your heart.’

  That reminded me of something. ‘I saw Marty the other day.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘He was standing at the end of my bed and shouting at me, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He had blood on his head.’

  ‘That would be right. He was in a hard landing on the training squadron and the aircraft stopped before he did. He went out through the Perspex and broke his neck. Did he look troubled?’

  ‘No he was grinning all over his ugly mug.’

  ‘That’s all right then.’

  ‘No it isn’t, Fergal: I still don’t know what he wanted.’

  ‘You’ll find out, Charlie, won’t you? All in good time.’ Why do we say good time, when nearly everything about it is bad?

  Spartacus was on that pair of old ovies that Borland had left for him. He had rolled over on his back, exposed himself the way dogs do, and gone to sleep. He farted when I replaced the telephone receiver. Dogs do that sort of thing as well. I hadn’t the heart to shift him, so I left him with Bozey when I went out. My new head of station didn’t look exactly ecstatic about that.

  The barman at the Klapperschlange was polishing glasses. Alice lifted her head an inch and had a little squint at me. There was already another small cloth bag inside her box. It was smeared with what looked suspiciously like rattlesnake shit. I told the man that Tommo had asked me to deposit his sugar bag in the Bank of Alice. I didn’t say anything about diamonds.

  ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Some kind of chemical that keeps her calm,’ I lied to him. ‘She needs a lot of it at this time of year.’

  He opened the lid of her clear box and I carefully dropped the bag in. Not carefully enough, actually. I dropped it on her rattle. Alice struck savagely. I hadn’t realized that she could strike almost vertically: she came up at me like a V-2. Her pink gaping mouth must have come a clear nine inches out of the box before she dropped back. Then she went into a tight coil around the new bag, and rattled her bony tail like an epileptic mambo band. I was just quick enough: I reckon she got within an inch of me.

  ‘Cow! I thought she liked me,’ I complained to the barkeep, as we dropped the lid back on.

  ‘I think she does: it’s just the way she shows her affection.’

  He didn’t know the half of it. In that micro-second of blurred action I had seen the drops of venom flicking away from her fangs. She’d bloody tried to kill me. Maybe she was going stir-crazy after all these years: the sooner she was back on a hillside in the States the better. When I looked at her kill markings on the box I realized that there was a new little matchstick man since my last visit.

  ‘Who got unlucky?’

  ‘The Kraut.’ The Kraut was the bouncer who used to stand behind the curtain. He was from Southside New York, but had a German name. ‘He said your bag of chemicals in there with Alice must be valuable, so he tried to get it out when she was sleeping. She got him on the cheek – right through to the eye socket. Both his eyes swelled up like baseballs, and bled before he died. You shoulda heard him scream.’

  ‘Bloody Alice. We should have got rid of her years ago.’

  ‘Who’d take her, bud? Anyway . . . I kinda like her.’

  After a pause I said, ‘I probably like her too; when she’s not biting people.’

  ‘You wanna drink?’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Bourbon?’

  ‘That would do: thanks.’

  He gave me three fingers of bourbon in a heavy glass and said, ‘I got the key to the boss’s office behind the bar. He said to tell you to use it whenever you wanted.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, thank Tommo. Us poor mortals jest do as we’re told.’

  I looked at Alice. Her head was resting back on her coils; her black tongue flickered in and out. Then she did the trick again: she winked. Snakes aren’t supposed to be able to wink. Whenever she winked it was just like Tommo was looking at you out of her eyes.

  I went back out and got in our new jeep. It was untouched. Five months earlier if I’d left it unattended the vehicle wouldn’t have been there when I returned. But Bozey had been right: now anything associable directly with the Airlift flyers was more or less immune. The Berliners realized that we were all that was going to stand between them and starvation, and they weren’t going to bugger it up. I could live with that. When I drove up to what we were beginning to call Nobs Row the cops at the end of the road just leaned into the jeep, shone a torch in my eyes and then waved me on. As I climbed the steps to Halton’s place the only thought I had in my head was, Lord, I’m tired! Fergal would have been pleased. I was talking to the Old Fellah at last, wasn’t I?

  The apartment was dark and cold: it didn’t occur to me that there was anyone at home. Hanna greeted me with a homely peck on the cheek, gave me a candle and let me in to the Halton flat. She was wearing that vast grey greatcoat over her nightclothes, and had her hair tied up in a dozen bunches with bits of rag. She looked like the ogress from a Grimm’s fairy story. I found my way to the room I had originally slept in, stripped off and lay down wrapped in one of those huge German eiderdowns that smell of scent and herbs. Five minutes later Frieda dragged it from me, and climbed on board like an Arab mounting a camel.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  ‘What are we going to do?’ We were cuddled up in bed, swaddled in that eiderdown which had been useful after all. I could never cope with questions that imply joint responsibility with a woman for a shared future, even a future measured in hours or days. Play dumb; she may just mean breakfast.

  ‘About what?’ I replied.

  ‘About finding out if any of my people are over on the other side.’

  ‘You know that. My nice small Russian is going to help us. I’m going to be invited to a little party in Red Berlin, and you’re going to come with me as my secretary. When I’m at the party you will be given a tour of the new East German People’s archive: it contains the lists you wanted to see.’

  ‘Not sure I like that, Charlie. We’re almost at war with the Reds. The English newspapers are already calling it the Cold War. It feels just like that Phony War in 1940 to me.’

  ‘Were you already in England by then?’

  ‘No: that’s when I reached there.’

  Dunkirk? I wondered.

  ‘A lot of people whose opinions I respect tell me it won’t come to that this time: we’re exhausted, and the Russians are exhausted. The Airlift is just like two bullies shouting at each other across the school playground, but never coming to blows.’

  ‘You believe that, Char
lie?’

  ‘I want to believe it. If enough Reds want to believe it as well we could be all right.’

  ‘How are you sure they’d let us back, if we crossed over there?’

  ‘That Russian officer you went to see will stand our guarantee. I have to trust him.’

  ‘But he doesn’t like me.’

  ‘He likes you well enough: he just didn’t like you jerking him around, that’s all.’

  ‘I thought all you men liked a bit of jerkin’ aroun’. ’ She tended to drop the last letters of words in English when she was being funny.

  ‘Stop it, Frieda. Now you’re just being arch.’

  ‘Oh. I can do that as well. I can do the arch.’

  . . . and you can learn something new every day; because she showed me what the arch was . . . and I don’t want you to think for a moment that she was a Freemason. When Frieda was in a bad mood she was impossible, but that wasn’t the end of it, because when she was in a good mood she was absolutely bloody impossible.

  There was damn all food in the place of course, so I took her to the Leihhaus. No reason to keep her away from it any more. The only two people in the joint were Marthe and Otto. They looked shagged out. I suppose that’s not a bad way for a newly reunited married couple to look. Otto mopped with more authority: if anything his happy smile was happier. Marthe ruffled my hair when she brought us two large mugs of coffee and a couple of slices of rough bread with PX jam. Both the mugs had a USAF stamp on them.

  ‘You doing all right, Charlie?’

  ‘I’m doing all right, Marthe. How about you?’

  ‘We’re doing fine. We have food and work, and Lottie is at school. Otto found his mother and father yesterday: we didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Is this your German girl who Greg told us about?’

  How did I answer that? ‘Maybe: she’s German, but she isn’t mine. She’s my employer’s ward. That’s what he told me anyway.’

  Marthe suddenly launched into German that was so fast I couldn’t follow it, except to know that it was about me. Frieda came back at her as fluently. They both laughed and giggled a lot . . . and five minutes later finished the conversation by shaking hands. I sipped my coffee.

  After Marthe had left us I asked Frieda, ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘You. Couldn’t you tell?’

  ‘If that was secrets about me, what did you say?’

  ‘I said Thank you to her, Charlie.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘That was the secrets.’

  Cow. When I put the mug down empty I asked her something that had been rattling around my brain for a week or more. I couldn’t make my mind up. I grinned. She smiled. It was a good morning for truth and reconciliation.

  ‘You are Halton’s mistress, aren’t you?’ I tried to make it sound everyday and conversational. She looked down at the table, put down her coffee, looked up at me – the old eye lock – and replied, ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ I had to think a while before I knew how to go on, ‘. . . but you’re not his ward either, are you?’

  ‘Are you; aren’t you?’ She waved the questions away, and then quietly said, ‘No.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I am just the social partner when he needs one, Charlie. I go to dinners and dances with him – the theatre sometimes. I jive and flirt with his business contacts . . . because his wife can’t.’

  ‘I didn’t even know he was married.’

  ‘No: it never comes up in the press – but his wife never goes out, and he needs to.’

  ‘Why doesn’t she go out?’

  ‘Ask him yourself. My mother became their housekeeper in 1941: I was seventeen. It was a brave step then, taking two German refugees into your house.’

  ‘Yes. It must have been. I . . .’

  She held up a hand, palm facing me.

  ‘No more questions today, Charlie.’ She wore a sad smile, but it was still a smile.

  ‘No more questions,’ I agreed. ‘You ask me some, and get your own back . . .’

  Her eyes gleamed like Alice’s, and like every other woman I’ve known, she went straight for the jugular.

  ‘OK. You will have loved one woman in your life better than any other. Tell me about her now, Charlie. I want to know . . .’

  I suppose I asked for that, didn’t I? I was uncomfortable, but I told her about Grace and I told her about Dolly. Talking about Grace embarrassed me because she’s always outplayed me. I was on surer ground with Dolly: she went out with visiting servicemen in need of partners so she and Frieda had something in common. I didn’t tell her about the others, but she asked anyway.

  ‘I don’t talk about anyone else,’ I told her.

  ‘So they will be married women,’ she smiled wickedly. ‘Charlie takes his ease with married ladies because that way he doesn’t have to take responsibility. I should have guessed.’

  ‘I’m not saying any more; you’ll only twist my words . . .’

  She reached over and laid her hand on mine. ‘I’m making fun of you, Charlie. This is Berlin. A man can have sex with a different beautiful woman every day of the week just by handing over a bottle of milk. It means nothing.’

  ‘It’s easier than that, but no one seems to have noticed.’

  ‘You mean?’

  ‘These last few weeks it’s easier to find a woman than a pint of milk. You live off Old Man Halton so you wouldn’t notice: everyone else around you is beginning to starve.’

  ‘You’re making fun about me now?’

  ‘No.’ Suddenly I wanted to get out of there: do something. Anything. ‘I think I’ll go to work.’ I didn’t want to fall out with her again, so I picked up her hand and kissed the back of it when I stood up. ‘Au revoir, chérie.’

  ‘Will you be back tonight?’

  ‘Maybe not. I ought to go to Lübeck and see how our people there are holding up. Don’t worry: I’ll keep in touch.’

  I took the jeep and drove out to the cemetery and Ed’s grave. He had a stout temporary wooden cross. It occurred to me that we’d better get him a proper stone fast: in a city running out of fuel his wooden marker wasn’t going to last long. His details had been punched out on a strip of metal nailed to the cross arm. They read, ‘An airman known only unto God as Crazy Eddy’. It made me smile: Dave Scroton must have had the last say.

  It was cold, although the morning frost on the grass had turned to moisture which seeped through my boots. I stood at Ed’s feet, looked down and talked to him. Small still banks of vapour standing like sentries in the air almost made it seem private. I said, ‘Sorry, Ed. Everyone seems to think the Lift is going OK, and that I’m doing all right . . . but I feel as if I’ve made a mess of things again: I don’t know why.’ I felt as if I was being watched, so I looked up and looked around. There was no one there; any patches of mist weren’t thick enough to hide anyone. I went on, ‘I don’t think Old Man Halton really gives a toss about you, or even the Berliners; he’s just raking money in . . . and whatever’s going on between the nobs in Russia and the nobs in the West is not worth anyone dying for, but nobody seems to realize that . . . and my latest girlfriend is a cracker, but I don’t think she thinks about anyone but herself.’

  I paused there, because it was almost as if I could hear Ed’s voice in my head asking, ‘OK, Charlie. What about you? Who do you think about other than yourself?’ That was the sort of question that my mother could have asked, or Maggs, and I didn’t have much of an answer.

  Time to go. I whispered, ‘I’ll come back and visit you again, Ed. I’ll find your name from that woman in London, and bring it back for you.’

  I had that feeling again. That prickling of the hairs on my neck. So I looked up and found myself staring at Marty standing at the head of Ed’s grave, six feet away. He mouthed some silent words, and then shook his head and smiled, as if he was amused. Then he held his right hand out, thumb up, and faded away. Just like that. I imagined him of course. It was suddenly chill. I shivered, tu
rned, and walked back to the road and the jeep. Some ungrateful bastard had nicked the jerry can off the back: I’d have to tell Bozey about that.

  Bozey told me that it was because Berlin’s third stage of desperation had set in. In the first stage of desperation the Berliners stole just about anything from just about anyone. He said that there was some dispute about whether that was because of the war, or because that was what Berliners were like anyway. The second, short stage was when they started to run out of food and looked upon us as their only salvation . . . so they stopped stealing from us as a sort of quid pro quo: because they wanted to keep us flying. Everyone seemed to agree that the third stage had started yesterday, he told me. Once the Berliners realized that a total blockade was on they began to grab anything that wasn’t nailed down. They wouldn’t steal the jeep because they couldn’t afford to run it, but they would drain it dry of petrol given half a chance. He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a petrol cap with a couple of keys on a key ring in the middle of it.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Locking cap for the petrol pipe. I got one for your Merc as well.’

  I started with, ‘Where . . . ?’ and then asked, ‘You won them in a game, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, boss; and a new tail wheel spare for one of the Oxfords. Randall will be very pleased.’

  ‘Are you serious that things are getting worse?’

  ‘Very. Did you hear about the Dak crash over in the American sector last night?’

  ‘No. What happened?’

  ‘Ploughed into the bottom of a block of flats in the suburbs. When the rescue teams got there the locals had stripped out the cargo already, and were busy cutting up and hauling away all the trees it had knocked down on the way in. They were stepping over the bodies of the crew where they’d fallen just as if they weren’t there. Didn’t give a damn.’

  ‘Maybe they did give a damn, but had bigger things on their minds.’ Oddly enough, as soon as I said that I began to think about Frieda, and wonder if I was too hard on her.

  ‘I’m going to choose to believe they don’t give a damn about us, boss.’

  ‘Why, Bozey?’