The Unfortunate Englishman

by John Lawton

  “I have a reason, not a motive. Will that do?”

  “Ask.”

  “Wölk.”

  “Rüdiger Wölk?”

  “Yes.”

  “So the bastard is still alive? And . . . let me guess . . . he has come to you for his Persilschein?”

  “Why ‘the bastard’?”

  “Do you know what he did for the city?”

  “I think so . . . he ran the railways . . . he had an office at the Anhalter Bahnhof, another at the Lichtenberg Bahnhof . . . and . . .”

  “And what?”

  “And what is it he’s not telling me?”

  She put down her fork, pushed her meal away, not half-eaten.

  “I imagine he portrays himself to you as some sort of benign stationmaster . . . and innocent facilitator of the movement of goods and commuters on their way across Berlin?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And what were the Jews bound for Auschwitz that he penned up in the marshalling yards in the east? Commuters or goods? People or chattels? Joe, he was a Nazi. Not the token party member my father was, but a believer. He was a Nazi who willingly sent thousands to their deaths.”

  “Was this known at the time?”

  “You know it wasn’t. We were a city wearing blinkers. Even now when all the secrets have unravelled you can still hear people . . . you’ve heard them yourself . . . in the bars, in the cafés . . . ‘the Führer was deceived’ . . . ‘it’s all propaganda . . . the Jews weren’t gassed they were resettled.’”

  Wilderness gently pushed the plate back towards her.

  “I didn’t mean to ruin your meal.”

  “It’s not your fault. I’ll be a hundred years old before these Nazi bastards stop cropping up in my life. They are ghosts, Joe. Living ghosts. Berlin is a city of ghosts and Germany is a haunted country.”

  He covered her hand with his.

  “I won’t let him go. We’ve got this ‘bastard.’”

  “I didn’t think you would.”

  §118

  When Wilderness got to Schlüterstraße the following morning, intending to log in with Rose Blair and find a quick way to dismiss anything she had to say and get back to the serious business of black-marketeering, she simply held up a brown envelope and said, “Arrived half an hour ago by dispatch rider. An American dispatch rider.”

  Wilderness opened and read it.

  Meet me at the Esplanade at 11. Urgent.

  And keep shtum about this. Frank.

  It was already 10:30.

  “I have to go out.”

  “You’ve only just got here. And what about this lot?”

  She held up a fistful of envelopes.

  “Did any of them come by dispatch rider?”

  She said nothing.

  “Well,” he said. “There you are.”

  §119

  “Why are we meeting here? We could just as easily have met at the club, it’s not fifty yards away.”

  Frank said, “I don’t want to be overheard by any Tom, Dick, and Harry. Or I should say, every Tom, Dick, and Yuri. And certainly not by that bitch Larissa Tosca. This is between you and me.”

  “What is?”

  “Rüdiger Wölk.”

  “How quickly word spreads.”

  “When are you due to meet him again?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “And what do you have it in mind to say to him.”

  “That he’s not getting his Persilschein and he’s damn lucky not to be on trial.”

  Frank was shaking his head.

  “No. Joe, just give him the paper and have done.”

  “He’s a Nazi. Not a run-of-mill, ‘I was only doing my job’ Nazi, a Nazi with blood on his hands.”

  “All the same, he walks. Kid, this isn’t your old pal Frank talking to ya, this isn’t even Captain Spoleto United States Army Intelligence, this comes straight from the top. The generals say he walks. The generals, capisce?”

  “Why?”

  “It looks like we need him. Need him back in his old job. Berlin’s railways are a pile of crap. We need to reinstate him, and it’s been decided at the top that that’s what’s gonna happen.”

  “So muggins here gets to whitewash him?”

  “You’re the right guy in the wrong place. Just so happened he registered in the British Sector in ’45. So he’s your pigeon. Just give him the paper and forget you ever saw him.”

  “I do a lot of crappy things, Frank. Teaming up with you being pretty high on my list of crimes, but I do not give Persilscheins to Nazis.”

  “Shit, kid. You’re gonna have to.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or my people talk to your people and Burne-Jones gets a phone call from General Robertson . . . do I need to say more?”

  “You do. Who has decided to put Nazis back in their jobs?”

  “Mostly us. An American decision. The British grumbled but accepted that a Germany that lets the talent fester is never gonna have schools, railways, or a civil service that works. The French? Sure, they were spitting feathers, but who cares what the French think? The Russians? We ain’t gonna tell the Russians. They’ll find out. I’ve no doubts about that. And they’ll try for the high moral ground, say they denazify and we don’t and blah blah blah. Joe, we’ve tried the pure version of Germany. It doesn’t work, so we’ll go with the grubby, shabby, guilty version.”

  “I had wondered why he came in ahead of his review. We didn’t send for him. You sent him, didn’t you?”

  “Yep, and if I’d realised you’d be playing it by the book I’d have warned you and told you not to bother. He says you put him through hoops, same questions over and over, trying to trip him up.”

  “But you didn’t warn me. You thought I’d just pass him.”

  “Yep.”

  “Fuck you, Frank.”

  Wilderness got up to leave. Frank put a hand on his arm.

  “This could kill the whole operation, kid.”

  Wilderness looked down at him. The bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Spoleto swagger was missing. He sat down again.

  “How do you mean? ‘Kill’?”

  “The team is you, me, Swift Eddie, and Yuri. Four of the finest hustlers Berlin has ever seen. We can agree the other guys don’t count for much. But if one of us drops out, the whole operation falls to pieces. Any one us of gets posted out of Berlin and it’s over. If you fuck this up, if you start playing your Persilscheins by the book, when we all know the goddamn book is made of India rubber . . . you’ll get shipped home . . . but since Yuri will only deal with you, the sweetest little black-market scam this side of the Mississippi is history. Give him the paper, Joe. If you don’t, the guy who replaces you will.”

  “If it’s a fait accompli . . . why not just reappoint Wölk and forget the Persilschein?”

  “It’s absolution. It has to look kosher. Not just now, but in ten or twenty years’ time. And who knows what Germany will be in ten or twenty years? He has to able to wave that scrap of paper and say he was absolved.”

  “And if I do this how many more Nazis will come to me with Uncle Sam’s seal of approval wanting my blessing?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I could tell you it would be zero. But I can’t. Now, can I tell him he can skip the meeting tomorrow, and you’ll just mail him his Persilschein?”

  Wilderness said nothing.

  §120

  He got in at ten, expecting Rose Blair to make a sarcastic comment, something about “three days in a row, my word.” Instead she was on the phone. She cupped the mouthpiece with one hand and whispered to him.

  “Spoleto for you. And Wölk is waiting in your office.”

  “Frank?”

  “Hiya, kid. I couldn’t get hold of Wölk last night. He may just show up anyway.”r />
  “It’s OK, Frank. He’s already here.”

  “So, we don’t have a problem?”

  He hadn’t told Nell. He was not sure how he could ever tell Nell.

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Good. I owe you one.”

  No, Frank, you owe me everything.

  “Miss Blair, pass me a blank Persilschein.”

  Wilderness signed, dated, and stamped it.

  “Now type in Wölk’s name.”

  “He’s clean? I had him down for a right bastard.”

  “No, he’s not clean at all, but he’s free.”

  Wölk was standing by Wilderness’s desk, hands clasped behind his back like the Duke of Windsor on inspection.

  He unclasped his hands, put his right inside his overcoat and set a small brown package, bound in faded red twine, looking like foolscap pages folder over and over, on the desk between them.

  “Please, take this.”

  Wilderness made no move to pick it up.

  “Please, take this. Give me my papers, and no one will be any the wiser.”

  Wilderness sat down.

  “See Miss Blair in the other office. She will give you what you want. Good day to you, Herr Wölk.”

  “And good day to you, Corporal Holderness.”

  Wilderness stared at the package.

  Waited.

  Foolscap, red twine, and black sealing wax.

  Waited.

  About five minutes later Rose Blair came in.

  “He’s gone. Have we seen the last of him?”

  “I do hope so. The thing about absolution is it ought to be absolute.”

  As the door closed behind her, Wilderness stood up and was about to sweep the package into the waste-paper bin when it occurred to him that Wölk was not expecting to be so readily accommodated, that he had not talked to Frank and that the bribe, if such it was, was his idea and his alone.

  Curious and curiouser.

  He opened it. Flecks of sealing wax fell to his desktop. It was in French, and whilst Wilderness’s French was passing good he had no idea what to make of the sheaf of papers in his hand.

  §121

  He met Eddie at the Marokkaner Club in Grolmanstraße.

  “Why are we back here? We haven’t been here in months.”

  “It’s a Frank-free zone. I don’t want Frank hearing any of this. Not now, possibly not ever.”

  He told Eddie of his encounters with Rüdiger Wölk and passed him the papers Wölk had given him.

  “A bribe?”

  “He thought it was a bribe. He’d no idea Frank had already told me to rubber-stamp him. He bribed me . . . after the act, shall we say.”

  Eddie leafed through the papers.

  “I know bugger all about wine.”

  “Me neither, but I can count. Ten thousand and eighty bottles of pre-war vintage claret.”

  “But you’re always lecturing Frank about wine.”

  “That’s because the ignorant slob knows even less than me. The bugger couldn’t tell champagne from Irn-Bru. If they don’t make it in Milwaukee . . .”

  “Ten thousand and eighty. Got to be worth something hasn’t it?”

  “Or not. Not all wine is the good stuff. Some of it’s got to be rubbish. I dunno, bad harvest, poor harvest . . . all sorts of things could make a difference.”

  “But they’re posh names, aren’t they? Margaux. Lafite Rothschild. I mean Rothschilds do everything, don’t they? They even have their own bank.”

  “Question is, Eddie, where did Wölk get this and what exactly is it?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person.”

  §122

  “Boys, boys. This is . . . amazing.”

  Wilderness had rarely seen Erno so animated. Pacing up and down in front of the wood stove.

  “All but one of these is first-growth claret, under the 1855 classification. Mouton Rothschild is second growth, but why be picky, they’re some of the finest wines on earth. Château Margaux 1934? It’s God’s own tipple! Mouton Rothschild ’29. Yiyiyi, boys, how did you come by this?”

  “Half the time, Erno. First, tell me what it is.”

  “It’s proof of ownership. Just like the deeds to a house. The man named here . . .”

  He looked down at the first page again.

  “Henri-Pierre Dukas . . . this man has eight hundred and forty cases stored with Lawton Frères in Bordeaux. Perhaps my analogy is wrong. Not the deeds to a house, but the bank book for a deposit account. Think of the wine brokers as a bank and the wine as money. Now, where did you get this?”

  “Wölk.”

  “Wölk?”

  “The bloke I was asking you about a couple of days ago. Director of Berlin’s railways, or some of them. I did ask Nell. He wasn’t one of those forced into the party just to keep his job; he was one of the faithful—a committed Nazi. And I am asking myself where he got these papers and I’m coming up with only one answer.”

  “Stolen?”

  “More likely offered as a bribe by someone, and let’s assume that was Monsieur Dukas, as he passed through the marshalling yards of Berlin to be herded into a cattle truck bound for Auschwitz or Treblinka or . . .”

  Erno sat down with a bump.

  “Of course, how could I be so stupid?”

  He let the sheaf of papers float down to the floor.

  “We’ll never be free of it, will we? Germany has cursed itself.”

  “Yep.”

  Eddie said, “Typical. We get our hands on a fortune and it turns out to be dirty money.”

  “The dirtiest,” said Erno.

  §123

  Wilderness drove out to the officers’ mess at Gatow. He was looking for a regular customer of his, an RAF pilot—Flight Lieutenant George “Foxy” Brush.

  A uniformed corporal would not normally be allowed into the mess, but there was scarcely anyone, the German waiters included, to whom he had not sold coffee, sugar, butter . . . and as long as he minded his p’s and q’s his rank was all but ignored.

  He’d never flown with Foxy, but if Foxy flew planes as inebriated as he drove cars, what Wilderness was about to ask had risks.

  “George. Are you still doing runs out to SHAPE HQ at Rocquencourt?”

  “Yep. Twice a week. Fridays and Wednesdays. Why, do you fancy a few nights on the razzle in Paris? Those French tarts’d eat a boy like you alive.”

  “No. I need to get to Bordeaux. I was hoping you might get me as far as Orly and I could play it by ear from there.”

  “Consider it done. The price’ll be twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-five what?”

  “Twenty-five pounds of your best PX java. I don’t know how you get away with it.”

  He twisted in his seat, yelled “Johnny!”

  A waiter came over.

  “Whisky soda. Zweimal, Johnny. Chop, chop.”

  Then to Wilderness.

  “Fair offer, Joe, take it or leave it. But I can throw in something useful as well.”

  “What?”

  “I’m meeting old Ginger Henshaw. Least I will if the bugger ever wakes up. Just got in from Blighty. Tells me he’s on the diplomatic run next Wednesday. Paris to Lisbon.”

  “Via Bordeaux?”

  “I doubt it, but while you savour the delicious single malt I just bought you, you work out what it’s worth to you if old Ginger can be persuaded to develop a little engine trouble somewhere near Mérignac.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “French airfield, just outside Bordeaux. Civil and military just like Orly. But a bit of a mess. I touched down there once or twice meself. You’d think the Krauts had been gone less than five minutes from the look of it.”

  “Diplomatic? Wouldn’t that mean some sort of gove
rnment official on board?”

  “King’s Messengers—the silver greyhound chappies. I’ve flown a few in my time. They don’t want anyone asking too many questions, so they tend not to ask any themselves. Look, here’s old Ginger now.”

  Squadron Leader Henshaw heard Wilderness out, stroked at a caricature waxed, ginger moustache and said, “I think we can manage that. But I can’t pull the same stunt twice. You’ll have to find your own way back to Orly. There’s a train service. Bit slow, but it’ll get you there. What are you offering?”

  “Twenty-five pounds of coffee.”

  Henshaw looked at Foxy. Foxy nodded.

  “Then we have a deal, Corporal Holderness.”

  “I won’t be a corporal on Wednesday.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ll be a lieutenant in the Welsh Guards.”

  Henshaw looked baffled. Wilderness hoped he hadn’t dropped a brick in front of a man who’d take “impersonating an officer” seriously.

  Foxy sniggered into his scotch. He’d seen Wilderness’s officer “act” before.

  “Keep promoting yourself, Joe, and you’ll soon outrank me.”

  §124

  There was a pip missing. First rule of a faker? You have to look right. No officer in a regiment as classy as the Welsh Guards would be seen dead with two pips on one shoulder and only one on the other.

  Where had he lost it?

  The uniform hung in the wardrobe at the “official” apartment he nominally shared with Eddie in Fasanenstraße. Eddie had gone out only minutes after Wilderness arrived, muttering about something of nothing.

  The pip wasn’t lying in the bottom of the wardrobe with the fluff and the mothballs. Only one thing for it. He’s have to go back to Grüne­tümmlerstraße and ask Erno to go through his collection of buttons and pips and studs until he found a match.

  §125

  At Grünetümmlerstraße he found a committee waiting for him.

  Erno, Eddie, and Nell.

  He put the duffel bag down on the floor, one sleeve of the uniform trailing conspicuously.

  “I’d no idea I was so popular.”

  “We would like to talk to you,” Nell said.

  Nell—hard as nails. Erno inscrutably blank. Eddie—sheepish, as though wanting nothing to do with this, and everything.