Berlin Blind

by Alan Scholefield

  Bruno swung round to face him. ‘You’re lying!’

  ‘They showed it to me in London.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A Chief Superintendent’

  What was his name?’

  ‘Hoest.’

  Bruno began fiddling with his watch. Now, as the name was spoken, he made a sound like a sigh, a slight explosive exhalation.

  He looked at the time again, then said, ‘I must get some cigarettes. I will be back in a minute.’

  He hurried through the glass doors. It was odd, Spencer thought, he had never smoked before. He had often criticized Lange for his excessive use of cigarettes; so he had finally succumbed himself. Spencer glanced at the skaters. There was only one couple now, the older of the two. The man had his right arm behind the woman, gripping her right arm at the elbow. Their left hands were clasped. They danced as though they were the only two people in the world.

  He looked up at the gallery. Lilo was standing there looking at him. His first reaction was one of shock then outrage then, when he saw the gun gleaming in her hand, fear. He sprang behind the pillar then swung from side to side like a hunted animal. He could see through the glass doors into the leather-ware shop beyond. Bruno was standing in the shop. He was behind a rack of handbags but for one brief instant Spencer saw his face. He was staring back through the glass doors as though waiting for something. The loudspeakers were playing Waldteufel. The old couple were gliding around the ice. Spencer saw everything as though in slow motion. He knew he had to get out of there. His legs began to churn slowly as though he were running in deep sand. He had not gone more than a few steps when the bomb in the patisserie box exploded.

  He felt the shock wave hit him, lift him and fling him across the corridor. He saw glass windows and doors buckle and disintegrate. He seemed to hear a continuous screeching noise and then he crashed into the far wall and fell.

  The screeching continued, refining itself, until he could separate it into its components. They were individual human screams. He got to his knees and then his feet. Glass was everywhere. It crunched under his shoes.

  The patisserie box had been placed next to the pillar and it had been Spencer’s movement, after he had seen Bruno, that had saved him. The pillar had shielded him, but great lumps of concrete had been blown out of it.

  People seemed to be running towards him across the ice and around the corridor; some were trying to escape, others were running towards something on the ice he could not see. He tottered to the low wall and what he saw brought the bile up into his throat. The old skating couple must have been exactly opposite the bomb when it went off. The ice was drenched with blood. What looked like parts of a human arm lay some metres away. The bodies were intertwined as they had been in life but now they made up a mangled heap of flesh. Some people were trying to separate them; a woman was crying; half a dozen onlookers stood staring down in morbid fascination.

  Spencer’s terror was replaced by a violent anger. He turned to where he had last seen Bruno. The glass doors between the ice-rink and the shopping precinct were smashed to pieces; so were several shops, including the one that sold leatherware. The rack of handbags lay on the floor. A woman was dabbing at a red rivulet on her forehead. Bruno was nowhere to be seen. He glanced up at the gallery; Lilo too was gone.

  He ran out of the ice-rink into the shopping precinct. The place was in uproar. Shops along one alley had been damaged. There was glass everywhere. People had been cut. Others, like himself, were running towards the exits. He joined a throng and within seconds found himself out in Budapesterstrasse. He heard the sound of police sirens from the direction of the Kurfursten-damm. He ran a few metres to his right and then began to walk. Soon he was enveloped by the mist and within several minutes was entering the door of his hotel.

  He went up to his room and was sick into the lavatory. He rinsed his mouth then poured himself a stiff whisky. He sat on the bed. All his limbs were trembling and when he raised the glass to his mouth he had to hold it with both hands. He could not erase the picture of the two old people dead on the ice; their blood mixing with the slush. And he knew it was his fault, just as Sue’s death had been his fault. Perhaps there was little he could have done about Sue, but if he had gone to the police about Bruno as he should have done they might have caught him now, or even if they hadn’t he would have been on the run and the two old people would still be waltzing round and round to the music of Waldteufel. But he had been stopped by the thought of what the revelation would do to his life; it was not the way of a survivor.

  For most of his adult life he had rationalized the act of joining the British Free Corps by telling himself that he had been only sixteen, that he hardly knew what being a traitor was, and that in any case he had been a totally different person, a stranger almost. Now came the terrible thought that the child really was the father of the man, that the flaw in his psyche that had made itself evident then had never been repaired; that, if anything, the lesion might have grown worse.

  He came back to the red stain on the ice and the heaps of flesh. He saw again the bodies of Tellier and Susan by the front door of his Hampstead house, the body of Frau Mentzel, half buried in the rubble of the cellar, her head stove in by the lump of concrete. And all killed by Bruno. What was it Hoest had said in London? Five dead in a store in Cologne, three dead in Hanover, two dead in bank robberies. He was like some primitive barbarian, a Visigoth or a Hun, leaving a trail of blood wherever he went.

  Spencer knew that if he did not do something now he never would. He picked up the telephone and asked to be put through to the police. He spoke to the central switchboard and asked for Hoest in a mixture of German and English. The officer could speak a litde English and he said he would put him through to the Kriminalpolizei. But then he was connected with a man who had no English at all and in his distress Spencer’s own German deserted him. He was speaking too fast and stumbling over his words; thinking in English and trying to translate directly into German. The man hardly understood a word. Finally he asked Spencer to hold on. The shake in Spencer’s hands became worse under the stress of telephoning. The man’s voice returned. He spoke slowly in German and explained that Hoest was not available. What was it that the Herr wanted? Spencer opened his mouth, but closed it again, daunted by the overwhelming task of trying to explain. Instead he simply replaced the receiver. He sat there with the sweat drying on him, still shaking with reaction. Then he got to his feet and took his gun from his suitcase and checked the magazine. It was ironic that now he wanted to hand over his responsibility Hoest was not there to take it; he was forced to go on by himself. And he had to act quickly or Bruno would be lost again in a world of safe-houses. He must get the address from Willi even if he had to beat it out of him.

  There were no taxis to be seen in Kurfurstenstrasse and so he began to hurry in the direction of Willi’s house. He could not shake off the pictures in his mind of the dead ice skaters. And again he saw Lilo standing in the gallery above, the gun in her hand. Why hadn’t she killed him earlier, she had had plenty of opportunity? How did a woman with a son like Peter live such a Jekyll and Hyde existence? That’s what he couldn’t grasp. He was right to have been suspicious of her from the beginning. What had she been doing there? Was she Bruno’s bodyguard? His mistress? Was Bruno the father of the child? That hardly seemed likely. And he’d been drawn to her. That’s what made him feel sick. After what had happened to Sue, he had gone to bed with her. Lilo, a terrorist, a criminal, someone who used sex simply as part of her business.

  He hurried on through the misty streets, filled with anger and self-disgust. But he could atone. That was one thing he held oir to.

  The house, when he reached it in the wilderness of brown grass and dirty snow, was curtained against the day. He went down the basement steps and rang the bell. He heard it ringing inside. No one came. He rang again. Then he banged on the door with his hand. It swung slowly open. The room was in darkness and he closed the door behind him and s
witched on the light. The first thing he saw was the old woman asleep in her wheel-chair and then, as he moved farther into the room, he noticed the papers strewn on the floor. It looked as though someone had deliberately flung them there. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. She didn’t move. ‘Excuse me,’ he said again, and shook her shoulder gently. The pressure caused the chair to move. The floor itself must have been sloping, probably from the bombing, because the chair ran slowly backwards the width of the room until it came to rest under the shelves where she kept her press-cutting books. The shelves were empty now. As the chair bumped to a stop her head lolled forward and she slipped gently on to the carpet. Horrified, Spencer went forward to lift her back again, and saw the mark on her neck. She was as cold to touch and someone had strangled her. The pressure had been so great that blood had risen to the surface where the fingertips had been. He started back and looked wildly round the room. He was on the point of leaving when he remembered his pistol, and took it from the jacket pocket. It gave him comfort.

  Had Willi done this, he wondered? Had he finally decided to end the association with his grandmother? He opened the living-room door and went into a passage beyond. From it he could look into what appeared to be a bedroom. The light was on and he could see a pair of feet extending beyond the bottom of the bed. Cautiously he looked around the door. It was Willi. He was tied to the bed. Spencer saw his right hand first, blackened with sulphurous yellow lines on the fingers and knew what he would find on the floor. It was there: the toaster. Willi, too, had been strangled; he, too, was cold. It didn’t take Spencer long to work out what must have happened. Willi had tried to play an adult game. He must have found Bruno’s trail, starting with the press cuttings and going on from there. He had probably tried to squeeze him for money in his role of middle man. He had sold Spencer the information about Bruno’s wife; it didn’t take much stretch of the imagination to see him trying to sell Bruno the information that someone called John Spencer was looking for him.

  They had come here — probably the big, bearded man called Muller and the woman, Inge — and they had used the same persuasion on Willi as they had on Riemeck. So instead of Willi coming to the Europa Centre it had been Bruno with his patisserie box. He had set the timing adjustment to the bomb just before he had approached Spencer at the ice rink. That was why he had looked at his watch so often.

  As these thoughts were crowding into Spencer’s mind others were pressing him to do something. To get out. Anything, as long as it was action, movement. There was nothing he could do here for either Willi or his grandmother. He went from the bedroom and through the living-room and let himself out of the house.

  He went up the basement steps and saw the little blue Beetle at the end of the road. His heart gave a sudden lurch until he realized that the man and woman in front were the lunch-time lovers he had seen when he and Lilo had come to the house.

  It had begun to snow and he bent his head into the small flakes and hurried back to the hotel. The reaction, the shaking and the trembling, the feeling of nausea which had come after the bomb blast in the Europa Centre did not return now. He felt calm, almost icily cold. He knew what he had to do, but the question was how? After what had happened in the Europa Centre Bruno would go to ground and Spencer would have no hope of finding him.

  At the hotel he stopped at the telephonist’s little cubby hole but she wasn’t there. One of the porters was on duty while she had her lunch.

  ‘I have a telephone number,’ he said. ‘Can you get me the address from it?’

  ‘I do not think that is possible. For an address you must have the name.’

  ‘Would you try? I’ll make it worth your while.’

  He shrugged. ‘If you wish.’ He dialled and talked rapidly in German and then put his hand over the harness mouthpiece. Tt is as I said. For an address you must have a name.’

  He was looking up at Spencer expectandy and the lights on the board were flicking on and off, indicating that other people were wanting his attention.

  A feeling of hopelessness swept over Spencer. ‘You could try...’ He was about to say Riesenfeld, for it was the only other name he knew, when his subconscious produced another. Bruno had used it the very first day Spencer had come to Berlin from Bremerhaven. In those first few hours, when he had been excited about Spencer’s arrival, he had told him how his father had been a member of the British Union of Fascists. Spencer could hear the echo of his voice in his mind. He could even see him pointing to the picture of his father in the upstairs bedroom, the father whose name was Lionel Boyse. ‘Boyse,’ Bruno had said. ‘That’s my real name.’

  ‘Try the name Boyse,’ Spencer said feeling a cold flash of excitement. ‘B-o-y-s-e.’

  The porter spoke again and then he took up a pencil and began to write on a pad. Spencer felt his heart racing. The porter tore off the page and handed it to him. He had difficulty in making out the spiky German writing. He could understand the words ‘Rattenburg Haus’ but that was all. He turned back to the porter for amplification but he was already caught up with the next caller.

  He took the tearsheet to the receptionist. ‘That is out of town,’ she said. ‘Near Wannsee.’

  ‘I don’t know Berlin.’

  She picked up a folding map from the counter and opened it. ‘Here. This is the area.’ She pointed to a large body of water. ‘It is here, on this shore.’

  ‘How do I get there?’

  ‘You can either go by car, park it and then walk through the forest, or you can drive to Wannsee and take a ferry to Moor-lake and walk back along the shore a little. It would not be too far. If you do not have a car there is a Number 66 bus that leaves from the Zoo Station.’

  ‘What about a taxi?’

  ‘It will be expensive.’

  He took a taxi.

  Wannsee was a lakeside resort less than half an hour’s drive westward from the centre. It was, he discovered, an arm of a much larger body of water called the Havel, which in turn was fed by the River Havel. In spite of yacht clubs and marinas and bathing areas, it had preserved a rural aspect. Much of the Havel’s eastern shore was bordered by a thick forest of hardwoods, the Berlin Forest, which appeared to be an ideal place for naturalists and walkers. Spencer reached Wannsee well before noon. The lake was dead calm and mist hung over the shoreline. He paid off the taxi at the little harbour where the ferries tied up and took out the address and his map. The receptionist had marked an area of the lake-shore west of Wannsee near the tip of Peacock Island.

  He went down to the harbour and bought a ticket for a boat leaving in ten minutes. It reminded him of the ones that took summer tourists up and down the Thames. There were rows of seats on the deck and more in a main cabin. He went into the warmth of the cabin. There were no tourists and few other passengers. They stopped first at the village of Kladow then swung south-west and sailed along the channel formed by Peacock Island and the shore of the lake. The shore was heavily bushed with massive trees coming down to the water’s edge. Tall brown reeds, thick in places, rose to meet them. Everything was very still.

  Dotted sparsely amid the dense growth he saw an occasional Isolated house. They were huge country villas built probably at the turn of the century in every architectural style, some like small French chateaux, some in Black Forest Gothic, some Scottish baronial. All were large, exclusively set in their own patches of forest and cut off from their neighbours by wide belts of trees.

  On the starboard side he could see the Berlin Wall. It swept down to the opposite shore at right angles and then turned and followed the water’s edge. Made of grey concrete slabs with watch towers rising at intervals, it looked more out of place in this rural setting than it had among the dismal buildings of Checkpoint Charlie. As they came down the narrow body of water that was all that separated West from East, he could see the East German guard in the tower watching the boat through his binoculars.

  They were going slowly as they came towards their final stop. On the West side of the lake s
igns in red and black had been placed at the water’s edge. One read: ENDE DES AMERI-KANISCHEN SEKTORS, then there was an arrow, and the words, NACH RE 70 METERN. Other signs warned visitors that the American sector extended only fifty or sixty metres into the centre of the channel. Beyond that was East Germany. On their side a West German police launch, the Bibery was cruising slowly up and down. Near the far bank a grey launch with grey-uniformed East German border guards was keeping station with her.

  The ferry approached a small wooden jetty. Beyond it he saw a notice which said in three languages: ‘Restricted area. Do not pass beyond this point. Reverse your course.’

  He was the only passenger to disembark. There was no one on the jetty, no building in sight; he might have been a hundred miles from anywhere. As instructed, the boat reversed its course and turned again into the channel. The West German police launch suddenly opened its throttles and raced away towards Wannsee throwing up a creamy bow wave. The East German boat turned and went down the lake. He felt deserted.

  He looked at the map again, took a path to the left and was immediately swallowed up by the forest. He walked for ten or twelve minutes parallel with the shore-line, then the path turned away towards the heart of the forest. He was under a canopy of bare branches and there was a smell of leaf-mould in the air. He came to another path branching away to the left. He stopped and considered. The only houses he had seen were by the water. That was the way the new path led. He turned down it.

  This was much narrower. In about two hundred metres he came to a high barbed-wire fence. The path ran along it past a big, spiked wrought-iron gate of the sort that usually opens on to a carriage drive. But here it opened on to nothing at all. It was heavily padlocked with an old, discoloured chain. Leaves had blown against the bottom and lay in piles on either side. Spencer thought it had not been opened for years. Worked into the wrought-iron, so that it was part of the gate itself, were the words ‘Rattenburg Haus.’ He shivered in the cold. This was a setting for nightmares: a gate that did not open, a path that led nowhere. He could feel his heart thumping in his chest and he began to wonder whether he was not being a fool. But he thought of Sue’s body lying by the front door of their house, and he thought of Bruno in the cellar of the bombed house, of the couple on the ice, of Willi on the bed, of the old woman. Thinking helped because it made him angry again and anger masked his fear. He touched the gun in his pocket and that, too, helped.