by John Lawton
“You could have warned me.”
“Joe, how was I to know you’d do something so stupid?”
A cough behind them. The discreet seizure of their attention.
Arkady Vasilievich said, “I gave him a small shot of morphine. Just enough. He’s calmed down. Geoffrey weighs so little, it was easy to have Pavel sit on him while I put a needle in his arm.”
“In England we’d have just given him a cup of sweet tea and a chocolate biscuit.”
Arkady Vasilievich smiled.
Yuri waved the whole situation away with the palm of his hand above his head and sat down with a bump.
“Joe, Joe, Joe, I am weary of all this. I am too old for this racket. Give me men who know when to shut up.”
And to Arkady Vasilievich, “Bring him in in five minutes. I think we both need to talk to Geoffrey.”
Wilderness sat down too. For a while all he could hear was Yuri sighing.
Then Yuri said, “Tell me. Have you seen Liubimov?”
“Of course.”
“And he is how?”
“He is . . . he is more English than I’ll ever be.”
He’d seen Yuri get the giggles before. Now he watched him slowly erupt like a long dormant volcano into a croaking laugh that set his jowls shaking.
“Joe, Joe, Joe . . . what are we doing to the poor bastard? Liubimov is going to hate Russia!”
A knock at the door. Arkady Vasilievich came in. Masefield stood passively between him and another outsize, shirt-sleeved, gun-toting Russian whom Wilderness took to be Pavel.
“Geoffrey, please sit. There are one or two things we should discuss.”
Masefield sat down without a word. Yuri waved his men away.
As soon as he heard the door close behind them Masefield lunged forward and before Wilderness could so much as flinch he had his hands around Yuri’s throat.
“Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!”
As the door burst open Wilderness had Masefield by the back of his collar. For a man who weighed next to nothing he felt like a pig of lead and seemed to have the tenacity of a tiger.
He swung him off Yuri and in one joint-wrenching motion spun him around to face Arkady and Pavel.
But the guns were already out.
He dropped Masefield to the floor, and opened his jacket to show the Browning neatly tucked into its holster.
“Put the guns away! We don’t need guns. Do I have my gun out? Do I? Put the guns away!”
Nothing.
He stepped over Masefield, put himself between him and the guns.
“Shoot him and you have nothing to trade.”
Pavel waved his gun slowly, tracking between Wilderness and the prone figure of Masefield on the floor behind him.
A groan from the sofa. Yuri had turned very red and was wheezing.
“Oh, fuck this,” Arkady Vasilievich said, stuck his gun back in his shoulder holster and stepped past all of them to pick up a small silver tin from the side table.
“Open your mouth, Comrade General. Steady. Steady. There.”
The pill slipped under Yuri’s tongue. In seconds he seemed to be breathing more easily. In a minute or so his colour began to return to its normal, pasty, sun-starved Soviet grey.
“Geoffrey. You fucker,” was all he said.
Wilderness hauled Masefield to his feet. Now weightless as feathers.
“It wasn’t him. Understand? It wasn’t him. He had nothing to do with Tanya’s death.”
Masefield was on the verge of tears. Wilderness had no sympathy and no wish to see his tears. He shoved him back towards Pavel and said, “Give him another shot. Make it bigger this time.”
And Pavel led a passive, tearful Masefield back to his room. A hand upon his arm, showing a more gentle touch than Wilderness would have offered.
As he passed Wilderness, Arkady Vasilievich whispered, “This happens. Be warned, this happens.”
§114
Yuri was on his feet now.
“Let us get some air. A stroll outside. Perhaps when we get back Mr. Masefield will have recovered his composure.”
The Yuri Wilderness had met just after the war would not have known “metaphor” or “composure” in either language.
They rode down together in the lift, Wilderness looking at the top of Yuri’s balding head, neither speaking.
Out in Pariser Platz Wilderness tried to remember when he’d last set foot there. Probably 1948. He’d looked through the first incarnation of the wall in 1961 when it was nothing more than coils of barbed wire, and he’d crossed Unter den Linden a few times in 1963 without ever turning into the square.
It was shocking.
They strolled at Yuri’s pace out into the empty plain behind the Brandenburg Gate. The Russians had cleared away the rubble and the wiry saplings of the post-war years, but that was it. Pariser Platz had been smoothed out and abandoned. The phrase “sweeping it all under the carpet” came to mind, as though he might lift a stone slab and find all the dust and rubble brushed away. It resembled a very neat bomb-site. Clean lines of utter nothingness.
They’d reached roughly the centre, the arches of the pockmarked Brandenburg Gate off to the west, the jagged lines of bomb-blasted buildings no one had yet seen fit to demolish off to the east. Wilderness had watched newsreel footage in the cinemas of his thirties childhood, the sleekly massed ranks of the Wehrmacht goose-stepping down Unter den Linden. And in 1947 he’d stood here as the ragged remnants of Germany’s final army—the hopeless and hapless Volkssturm—had dragged themselves in from Russia and Poland to collapse on the spot—Nell Burkhardt’s father one of them—something else Yuri had arranged behind the scenes.
“Yuri. I’m appalled. You lot have had this place to yourselves for twenty years. Maybe it’s cleaner, but apart from that it looks just the same as it did in 1948.”
“So?”
“You’ve built nothing. Bugger all.”
“We held a competition. Did you not hear? Architects from all over Europe, vying to redesign the centre of Berlin. Everyone except poor old Albert Speer. Locked up in Spandau and so ineligible. A pity. We could have got his plans for nothing.”
“I heard the competition was all a fake. You had no intention to build anything.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps we have our reasons.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Perhaps we are saying to the Germans, ‘you mess with us twice and this is what we do to you. Mess with us a third time, and all Germany will look like this.’”
Wilderness looked up at Viktoria and still wondered which way she should be facing. As it was she gazed down upon nothing. A void.
“A punishment?”
“Of course it’s a punishment.”
“You don’t think that Germany’s been punished enough?”
“I don’t know. Nor do I care. They’re just fucking Germans.”
“What do you care about apart from money, Yuri?”
“I say again, if it’s the money that bothers you, you should be dealing with Frank.”
There was a large stone. The height and size of a posh family tomb in an English churchyard. Wilderness had no idea whether it was an obelisk or just another chunk of wartime detritus. Yuri perched his backside on it, breathing deeply. Wilderness waited for him to speak again, turned over a fragment of rubble with the toe of his shoe. Cream tile, with streaks of red and yellow glaze, something that looked like a cherub’s arse—a piece of an Adlon bathroom or lavatory, lying where it had fallen more than twenty years ago.
“But since we are talking of deals.”
“We are?”
“We are. There is more to our deal.”
“Strings?”
“No. Not strings. A . . . a condition.”
Wilderness said nothing. Waited for t
he string to jerk.
“You get Masefield. I get . . . Liubimov.”
So far so good, but Wilderness wasn’t going to fill in any blanks however slowly Yuri spoke.
“I get Liubimov . . . and the ten thousand bottles of claret you stole in 1947.”
Oh shit. How the fuck did he know about that?
V
Lawton Frères
The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is
don’t do it unless you’re willing to give your whole
life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.
—Jim Harrison
§115
45 Schlüterstraße, West Berlin: October 1947
“Where the bloody hell have you been?”
“Does it matter? I’m here now.”
“Here, but twenty minutes late. And may I point out, Corporal Holderness, that as this is your first appearance in the last ten days, to show up on time might be considered a courtesy.”
Wilderness liked Rose Blair. An upper-class English beauty who had seen fit to serve her country in this bum-freezing Berlin winter. But there were limits.
“I don’t answer to you, Rose.”
“It’s Miss Blair to you, you cocky little prick. And we both answer to Burne-Jones. I’m getting fed up covering your arse all the time.”
“Then don’t.”
“You’re here to denazify Nazis. You can’t do that if you don’t meet any, and I’ve had one of the bastards stuck in my office for the last fifteen minutes trying to chat me up in two languages. Now, get the slimy bugger in here, give him his Persilschein and get rid of him!”
She slapped the usual buff file on the desk in front of Wilderness.
He looked down at the cover.
Wölk, Rüdiger Ludwig. b. Potsdam 27.9.09
Below the name was a box grid applied with a rubber stamp, red ink faded to pink, and the comments and initials of his two predecessors in the assessment process whereby Berliners were judged and given or denied their right to rejoin society, to have their ration status revised, to return to their pre-war job and in many cases to have their membership of the Nazi Party if not expunged then rendered harmless to them with a certificate of absolution—hence the derisory and accurate nickname for the scrap of paper, Persilschein . . . it washed whiter than white.
Box one read in spidery scrawl:
Party member. Declined 1.3.46. JBD.
Box two read, more legibly:
Hold over. Reassess in 12 mon. 19.12.46. PW.
“Hold over for what? New evidence? The twelve months aren’t up yet. And who was PW?”
“I’ve no idea about any evidence new or old, Holderness. I just type. PW is Squadron Leader Wallis. I will say this for him. He made you look good. Just read the file, will you. I’ll give you five minutes. Two if the bugger tries the verbal equivalent of a feel-up one more time.”
Rüdiger Wölk was a Nazi and had never sought to deny it. Wilderness had met idiots who did, oblivious to the fact that the Allies possessed complete records of party membership. The only issues in dealing with Nazis were: youthful error, which allowed that the young could be virtually brainwashed; compulsory membership, which had applied to any city, state, and civil service occupation from town planners right down to kindergarten teachers; and, so difficult as to be absurd, the opinion of the assessor that the former Nazi might now be “worthy.” Wilderness, a lowly RAF corporal, had the power to grant or deny a Persilschein to anyone.
He was on the last paragraph when the door was thrust open and Rose Blair barked out Wölk’s name. Wilderness looked at his watch. Three minutes. Clearly he hadn’t kept his words to himself.
If there was a stereotypical Nazi, Wilderness hadn’t met him. It would help his job enormously if they fell into two simple categories . . .
Fat Bastard—e.g. the Göring type.
Skinny Bastard—e.g. the Heydrich type, or the one that had vanished after the war, what was it . . . Eichmann, or something very like that.
Wölk was neither. Five minutes after this one left Wilderness would be hard-pressed to describe him.
Rose Blair had not given him enough time. He had a gloss on the man now standing in front of him. He’d not studied the dossier. He’d not interpreted the simplicity of facts into a structure of understanding.
Wilderness glanced up at Herr Wölk, waved him into the chair and raced though the final half page.
When he’d finished he saw a man in his late-thirties, looking much the worse for wear . . . pasty, vitamin-deficient skin, bloodshot brown eyes, thinning, prematurely grey hair. The clothes said more than his features. Threadbare. Like so many other Berliners. His jacket shiny at the elbows and shot at the cuffs. So, what else was new? Another importuning middle-class German, who’d probably supported Hitler, been disappointed in defeat, who’d struggled to make his living ever since, and resentful to find the Allies unforgiving.
And the man saw him.
“You’re just a boy.”
“Good start, Herr Wölk. Get right up my nose, why don’t you?”
“I’m sorry, it’s just that I was expecting . . .”
“What?”
“Someone in authority.”
“I am authority. Don’t let the two stripes on my arm fool you. I work for British Intelligence and I have the same authority over you as a man with three pips or a crown on his shoulder.”
“I’m sorry.”
Wilderness doubted this.
“Herr Wölk, if you want your Persilschein why not just tell me what this folder doesn’t? Tell me about yourself. Give me a reason to give you what you want.”
“I have told all this to you people before.”
“And you will tell it again, and, if I say so, again and again.”
Wölk did not sigh or shrug. He looked straight back at Wilderness, not giving an inch.
“The file records my party membership. You will know that. You will also know that as an employee of the city of Berlin, membership was compulsory. Not joining would have put me out of work as surely as the British have put me out of work these last two years.”
“But you do work.”
“As a labourer. My wife too . . . she is what we call a Trümmerfrau. Before the . . . before . . .”
Quite, thought Wilderness. Before what? Everyone used the phrase “before the war,” but Wölk had just stopped himself saying “before the peace” in the same nostalgic tone.
“My wife taught classics at a Gymnasium. I was a railway technician, an engineer. I rose to run the railway yards in the south and east of Berlin, the passenger stations, the freight yards and . . . the marshalling yards.”
At last something that wasn’t in the dossier. All Wilderness had read was the word “engineer.” Wölk was trading with him. He was trading detail for hope. It was the first thing he’d given away. Wilderness wondered why there’d be an all but immeasurable hesitation before “marshalling yards.”
§116
He called on Erno Schreiber on his way home. One floor below the flat he shared with Nell Burkhardt on Grünetümmlerstraße.
If the teapot was stuck on the landing and the door slightly ajar it meant he was “at ’ome,” as the toffs back in England would put it, and certainly at home to anyone who, as Wilderness usually did, brought his own tea.
Erno didn’t look up from whatever he was doing with a magnifying glass and a spotlight.
“Anything new, my boy? I do hope so. I’ve had enough of the Lady Londonderry Mixture to last a while.”
“Of course. Lapsang souchong. A smoky little number all the way from China.”
“And stolen from the PX?”
“Tastes just the same as if it weren’t stolen, Erno.”
“I’ll put the kettle on.”
“Although I will
say this for Nell . . . she can pull a face that says ‘this tea or this coffee tastes stolen.’”
Over tea, Wilderness asked, “Do you recall a Rüdiger Wölk?”
“Recall in what context?”
“City railways. Says he ran the railways in Berlin. East of the Lichtenberg Bahnhof, south of the Anhalter Bahnhof.”
“And he wants his Persilschein?”
“Yep.”
“And you haven’t given it to him for what reason.”
“He’s an arrogant gobshite. He exudes Nazi arrogance.”
“And you are trained in distinguishing Nazi arrogance from all the other forms of arrogance?”
“OK. You made your point. But I am trained to trust my instinctive reactions.”
“If it smells wrong, it is wrong?”
“Something like that.”
“No . . . the name rings no bells . . . but I have ever been a stay-at-home. Riding in trains gives me no pleasure and never did. But Nell might know. Her father was almost certain to have known him; they were both city engineers after all. Sewers, railways, all the same really.”
§117
“Did you meet many of your father’s colleagues?”
Wilderness had eggs. Yuri was as unreliable as the next Schieber, except where eggs were concerned. You asked for eggs, you got eggs. As long as you didn’t ask where he got them. Wilderness also had a specimen of the ubiquitous German potato, a bulb of garlic, a couple of manky onions and half a pound of bland American cheese. Peas would have been nice, but fresh peas in October? In the city that had nothing? By the time Nell had got home he had the makings of a passable Spanish omelette.
“It’s good,” Nell said. “You’re becoming quite the cook, aren’t you?”
“Are you avoiding my question?”
“Yes. You’ve never asked about him before.”
“I’ve never needed to.”
“So I’m right.”
“Right about what?”
“That you wouldn’t ask about a man whose absence has torn at my heart every day for nearly three years unless you had an ulterior motive.”
