How could Eve – Ava? – look out on this scruffy evidence of humanity and plot to bring it all down? I didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it. I turned back to them.
“Is she alive?”
Cassells hesitated. “We think so.”
“Do you know where she is?”
He shook his head.
“Were you the ones following her?”
“No. We didn’t need to.”
I raised my eyebrows. “We knew where she was, knew what she was up to,” he explained.
“Why didn’t you pick her up after the war?”
He shrugged. “It was a mess. Europe was in chaos. Still is. We had agents all over the place that we needed to bring back. Frankly, old boy, we had more important things to do than pick up a minor agent of a defeated enemy.”
It all sounded rehearsed.
“Any idea who was following her?”
Wilson shifted his stance. “We thought you might have a better idea, old boy.
You and your gangland pals.”
I wished I had a golf club handy; a mashie niblick would do, with plenty of follow-through. He was still taller than me, but he’d lost a hundredweight or two. I reckon I could take him now. I spoke to Cassells.
“She upset people. Bad people. It goes with the job. The reporter job, that is.
But I guess her disappearance had nothing to do with East End villains.” I pointed at the transmitter. “What have you found?”
“That she was still using it up till a month ago. We picked up her signal. Part of our routine sweep.”
I was stunned. “She was still operating? Who with?”
“We don’t know. But there was an answering signal. All in code. But look here, Daniel…” He looked down at the toecaps of his brown brogues; they gleamed like polished brass. Old soldiers might fade away, but not their shoes. “Miss Kaplan… was sighted two weeks ago. She caught the ferry from Dover to Ostend. A woman matching her description – but not her passport – got on a train going east. To Antwerp.”
I found I wasn’t breathing. I inhaled and waited.
He went on. “Any idea where she was going, Daniel?”
I knew. I knew exactly where she was going. Her notebook left me in no doubt.
There’s a connecting train at Antwerp. One a day. Started running again in January. It was all in her notebook. I’d read the entries as journalist’s notes for some article. Not as travel plans.
“I think she’s gone to Berlin.” I sat down again and took out a fag. I played with it while I waited for my brain to catch up. Cassells exchanged glances with Wilson.
“That’s our guess too, Daniel. How did you know?”
“Just some things she said. And now this.” I pointed at the transmitter.
“Any idea why?” Cassells probed.
“She was being followed. Maybe she panicked,” I suggested.
“Maybe she went home, McRae. Back to her master.” Wilson held my gaze for an age, watching me digest this.
I counted to ten. Then twenty. “So, what now?”
They looked at each other. “Are you still… interested in her?” Cassells asked.
Was a bird interested in flying? I kept my face smooth. “Depends.”
Cassells took a deep breath. “We’re curious about who she was in contact with.
And why. Things are pretty fluid over there. What with the Russians and all that.”
All that was a considerable understatement. Why couldn’t the bloody English ever say what they really felt? From what I could gather, Berlin was a wild west town with four competing sheriffs – Russians, Americans, British and French – lording it over a starving populace of ex-Nazis and current criminals. What the hell was Eve doing there? If it had been her on that ferry, and if she had been heading to Berlin.
“Why don’t you ask your agents there?” My collar was beginning to feel tight.
“You know her. And she’s more likely to be persuaded to return with you.”
I looked at him.
“You’re an old SOE hand. We’d like you to go to Berlin and bring back Ava Kaplan.”
That night I lay on my bed thinking about Cassells’ request. I’d promised to give him my answer the next day. I felt rushed, pressured. The disclosures about Eve were so totally unexpected that I couldn’t marshal my thoughts. What I couldn’t puzzle out was Cassells’ interest. Why did the British Secret Service want her back if she was the ‘minor agent of a defeated enemy’? He said they didn’t want to punish her; the war was over, she was doing her duty as a German citizen no matter how misplaced her loyalty. But they wanted to know why she was still transmitting to Berlin. And who was on the receiving end. Why did she flee to Berlin? To get away from her pursuers or to join up with her old network? If so, what were they up to? Was this some last-gasp Nazi group that wouldn’t surrender? Cornered SS trying to flee the country?
Cassells had appealed to my sense of duty, without realising that I’d worn my allegiance down to the stub. I was sick of the lot of them. Tired of rationing and restrictions, fed up to the back teeth with secretive bureaucrats meddling in people’s lives. Sickened by wars and their aftermath: refugees and orphans, innocents raped and killed. God help us, we were already talking of the new threat; our former allies had opportunistically stolen half of Europe while we were otherwise engaged. Uncle Joe was beginning to look as bad as Adolf when it came to grabbing land that wasn’t his.
I hated my job: the petty crimes and jealousies, the rages and brutality, the infidelities and lies that made up my daily diet. They didn’t pay me enough to absorb all their frailties and transgressions.
And it seemed I was pretty useless at picking women. Falling for a ghost six months ago, carrying a torch for a snooty accomplice to murder, and now fixating over a German spy. Eve had lied to me; had she been using me too? Had she been faking what I saw in her eyes and the way her body responded? Had I been on the receiving end of the artifices of a consummate Mata Hari? Why pick me? I had nothing to tell her, no secrets to be revealed on her pillow.
A few weeks ago I had found an old map of Scotland sticking out of a pile of rubbish left out for the dustbin men. I dusted it down and bought a cheap glass frame for it. It now hung on my office wall to remind me of my roots. I walked over to it and scoured the empty spaces of the Highlands and the Outer Hebrides.
Maybe I should buy a one-way ticket to the Shetlands and take up poteen-making?
Wrapped in a tartan plaid, striding the glens with my faithful collie bounding over the heather, rounding up my sheep. A hard pure life, living off mutton and tatties, washed down by my own hooch. Bliss.
Who was I kidding? I’d go mad within a fortnight. And what about Eve? Could I forget her that easily? How would I live without knowing what happened to her?
Whether she was dead or alive. Whether she was a spy – and why. And of course, finally and selfishly, whether she loved me. That’s all that really counted. I couldn’t give a toss whose side she was on, as long as it was mine. And I had to find out.
Next day I phoned Cassells and told him I’d do it. He seemed less enthusiastic than I expected. But he agreed to put the wheels in motion to get me into that divided city, to pick among the ruins for my lover, the German spy.
FOURTEEN
Cassells offered me a choice. I could follow Eve by ferry and overnight military train into Charlottenburg station, the rail terminal in the British Sector. But it was faster by air, if they had a spare seat. They were running a shuttle service out of RAF Northolt to Berlin. A brace of Avro Yorks was plying the route. The York was a fairly new passenger plane using the trusty Lancaster’s wings, engines, tail and wheel assembly wrapped round a wider fuselage. There were no nose or tail gun blisters on this craft, just a line of portholes running the length of the plane under each wing. The planes ferried forces mail and senior officers into Germany’s heart.
I spoke to the pilot before we took off. His RAF tunic was plastered with med
al ribbons from bombing trips that had stopped only eighteen months ago. He said he still tensed his buttocks as he flew over cities, waiting for flak to erupt through the thin skin of the Lancaster and mess up his bowels. He’d only recently stopped putting an upturned tin hat under his seat. But it was nicer doing the trip in daylight under your own steam, instead of trying to hold position in an armada of two hundred bombers. Nice too, to land and get a cuppa at the other end instead of dropping your stick of incendiaries into the inferno below and going straight back.
The only problem was the Russians, he explained. “The Reds won’t let us fly over their turf. The route we take is an air tunnel. Everything outside the city and for about seventy miles to the west of us is under Russian jurisdiction. Pain in the arse. You wouldn’t think we’d fought on the same side. Thank god the Americans got the south west. At least we have Templehof.”
Besides the pilot, navigator and radio man, there were eight Army brass and two big sacks of mail for our garrison. The racket from the four Merlin engines at take-off was deafening, but dropped to a steady comforting drone after we were airborne. The Army types had documents to read, or kip to catch up on, and left me to it. I had a front seat just behind and below the raised deck where the pilot sat.
As the plane rumbled through the air, I thought of the landfall ahead. My dream back in ’42 – and that of most of the blokes I’d fought with – was to march into Berlin after giving the Germans a bloody good hiding. But weeks before D-Day, my war had been rudely interrupted. As a reluctant guest of the Gestapo I had indeed ended up in Germany, far to the south, the soft south, among the rolling hills of Bavaria. Not that I saw much of the pretty countryside, or rosy-cheeked frauleins and thigh-slapping men in lederhosen. I was tucked away on the outskirts of a dozing village outside Munich, a village that had survived eight hundred years without anything more important happening than a failed cabbage harvest. Until the Nazi master bakers arrived with barbed wire and an unusually large set of ovens.
I was finally going to see Berlin, the pre-war capital of louche, but it left me curiously flat. I’d seen pictures of the city in Pathй News at the Odeon. The streets full of flag-waving loonies saluting a funny-looking bloke with a bad shave. The buildings built to last: heavy stone, four and five storeys high, with balconies sprouting haphazardly. Lots of trees down wide boulevards sprinkled with outdoor cafйs, and an overhead railway. A solid respectable place that just happened to be home to the world’s biggest megalomaniac.
Hitler knew his Berliners. He knew that underneath the stuffy demeanour lay suppressed passions. I’d read Isherwood of course. He’d made Berlin sound racy and degenerate beneath the decorous surface. All those private bars and streets lined with smiling prostitutes, female and male. I wondered how much of it was left after the Russians arrived with vengeance in their heart and lust in their loins.
I whiled away the three hours with a German dictionary and notepad and pencil, trying to fill the many gaps in my language. From time to time I broke off to do further translations of Eve’s notebook – I still couldn’t think of her as Ava – using a teach-yourself guide to Gabelsberger’s shorthand. One phrase cropped up twice in her most recent stuff. She mentioned Berlin and something called a hellish door. Code words? The entrance to somewhere fearful? Or just my bad translation.
The captain announced we were beginning our descent. I peered out of the Perspex window just as we broke through the last of the summer clouds. The city sprawled out below and we could see the destruction on all sides. The RAF had done us proud. It made the Blitz look half-hearted. For a second I almost felt sorry for the poor bastards, then I remembered that it was the same poor bastards who’d set up a thousand concentration camps across Europe. This wasn’t a handful of psychopaths in black uniforms keeping a peaceful citizenry in their thrall; this whole nation had got right behind their Fuehrer with unbounded enthusiasm for getting rid of the untermensch. And their unter women and kids. Still…
I couldn’t see a complete block of buildings intact. There were odd patches of green where the city parks had been, but they were pockmarked and treeless. Only stumps and felled trunks remained to remind Berliners of their shady walks. The roads seemed clear though. The rubble had been bulldozed into neat piles ready for rebuilding. It would keep a few brickies in work for the foreseeable.
We made a last bank over the city and straightened up. Ahead was Templehof airport, a great semi-circle of Doric columns and portals. Very Albert Speer.
Just the thing for those torchlight parades. In front of it, embraced by the arms of the airport buildings, was the runway itself, with parked planes littering the central area.
Templehof was right in the heart of the city. It seemed too small to take our plane. As if we would run out of runway and plough into the streets all round it. I could see some tanks and ack-ack guns along the southern perimeter. What were we defending against – a German insurrection or a Russian take-over? We dropped lower and I felt the wheels shudder and drop. Our speed fell and we bounced once, twice, then bumped to a halt. We eased ourselves out of our seats and climbed down on to the tarmac. It was hot. The air shimmered and trembled.
A bus came scurrying out from a long flat building with more than a hint of the Parthenon about it. An American flag fluttered on top of the colonnades. The bus picked up the Army blokes, the crew and the mail. I stood like a lemon for a while. Then a jeep headed my way from one of the caverns under the terminal. As it drew up I could see it was driven by a corporal wearing signaller’s badges.
“Captain McRae, sir?” he called out.
Captain again. Is that how Cassells had set it up? I walked over to the jeep and the soldier leapt out, saluted smartly and threw my battered case in the back.
He was a good looking lad – lad! I must have been all of five years older than him. Smartly turned out in battledress with his black beret at a rakish angle. I imagined he had no trouble pulling the frauleins. I got in beside him.
“You can drop the Captain stuff, Corp. And the saluting. Civvy Street now. The name’s Danny.”
He looked at me to make sure I wasn’t taking the piss. “Fine by me, Danny. I’m Vic.” He tossed his beret under the dashboard, slammed the jeep in gear and we shot off. Now I could see that the dozen or so planes stacked off the runway were American B-47s.
“Where are we going, Vic?”
“Don’t you know, sir? Danny?”
“This was all arranged in a bit of a hurry.”
“I’m to take you to Colonel Toby. Toby Anstruther. Mil Int.”
Military Intelligence. Seemed a good place to start.
“It’s not far. We’re on Kurfurstenstrasse. In the Brit sector.”
Despite the warmth of the day, I felt a curious chill. The German street names were bringing it all back to me. There is a harshness about the language which makes it peculiarly suited to giving orders. I found my hard-won vocabulary rushing through my head like water in a mill-wheel.
“You all right, Danny?”
I shook my head. “Fine. Just a bit queasy. Bumpy ride. How long have you been here, Vic?”
“Six months. I’m on a two-year stretch.”
“What’s it like?”
A smile lit his face. “Did you bring any fags?”
“A carton. Why?”
“That makes you a millionaire. You can buy anything with a pack of fags. Booze.
Women. Anything. I’ve got my own gaff, here. A two-bed flat just round the corner from the office. In Kantstrasse. That’s Kant, not…”
“I get the picture,” I laughed.
“But it might as well be. The women drop their drawers for a cup of real coffee.
If you want anything while you’re here, just say the word.” He rubbed his nose with his finger and gave me a wink.
Spivs in uniform. Human nature will out in any conditions. “Your own flat? Is there anywhere still standing?”
“Sure. Take a close look.”
We drove through the barbed wire gate at the airport perimeter and out on to the Templehoffer Damm that seemed to run towards the city centre. If there was a centre any more. Rudimentary street signs had been set up at junctions: poles bearing bashed original plates retrieved from the shattered buildings, or wooden signs with white writing. They seemed more like markers for an archaeological dig.
But my view of the city from the air had been too fatalistic. Sure, whole buildings had been razed or turned into black stumps, and there were more piles of bricks than habitable structures; but there were functioning parts. Kids played at soldiers on the bomb sites, clambering on burnt-out tanks and trucks.
Here and there little groups of women in headscarves tugged at the mounds of stones.
“What are they doing?”
Vic laughed. “That’s the Trummerfrauen, the rubble-women. They’re reclaiming the bricks. Paid by the number. It’s either that or whoring.”
Some of the women had hammers and were chipping away at the mortar. Others stacked the cleaned bricks in neat piles by the roadside. Riding in the livery of the victor, I felt embarrassed at witnessing their puny efforts. I shouldn’t have; here was a spark of hope that hadn’t been extinguished. One or two straightened their stiff backs and looked at us as we swept past. I turned my face away.
Maybe it was the heat of the day that made me conscious of the smell: a pong of drains and brick dust, especially when we rolled to a halt at intersections to let a convoy go by.
Vic laughed. “You’ll get used to it.” He must have seen my nose twitch.
“Hardly surprising. Do the sewers work?”
“Everything works. Sort of. We’ve got the street lamps on again, the underground, some trams and of course the bars. They all work. All rationed, mind. Unless you know where to get it.” His nose got another rub.
“See over there.” Vic pointed to his right. A big, bashed building stood adrift in a sea of flattened rubble. I could make out giant columns supporting the faзade. I’d seen it on a hundred newsreels.
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