‘Want to tell me what they are?’
‘Some other time.’ Frederika nodded to where Henderson watched from a doorway. He looked grim as he headed for their table. So grim, Tom imagined he’d lost whatever argument he’d been having.
‘We’ll be making a complaint,’ he said.
‘About what?’ Frederika asked. ‘About the GDR putting your man up in a five-star hotel, picking up the bill, paying for his meals and having official guides take him round Berlin, if that’s what he wants? This is a big decision. Sir Cecil needs time to consider things carefully.’
‘You offered us full cooperation,’ Henderson said crossly.
‘You have our full cooperation,’ Frederika said. She pointed at the reservation for the Palasthotel. ‘How could we possibly cooperate more?’
‘You realize she’s Stasi?’
‘I’m not,’ Frederika said sharply.
Tom pushed back his chair. ‘You mentioned Sir Cecil needing time to consider things carefully. Is he getting cold feet?’
‘About England? Absolutely not.’ Pushing back her own chair, Frederika smiled. A slightly strange smile. ‘He knows he’s going to be tried. He’s looking forward to it. He’s taken to calling it The Show.’
16
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ Charlie said.
‘Nor should you.’
‘Mummy and Grandpa sent me. After you know what … I don’t think they knew what else to do.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Becca said.
Charlie shrugged. ‘What’s it like?’
‘What’s what like?’
‘Being dead.’
‘Boring. I’m not sure I’m properly dead yet.’
‘They buried you.’ Charlie scowled at the memory. ‘Mummy wouldn’t let me go. She said the funeral would upset me.’
‘What did Dad say?’
‘Daddy didn’t say anything. He was being odd … He’s getting better,’ Charlie added quickly. ‘Mummy likes him now.’
‘That’s a start. You should be asleep.’
‘I’m not tired. Do you want to come for a walk with me?’
‘Better not. It’s time I went.’
‘Why?’ Charlie asked crossly.
‘Because you’re crying.’
‘That’s not you.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Becca said. ‘It always is. I’m sorry.’
She raised her hand slightly, a half-goodbye. The way she used to when friends were round and she had to be too cool to say goodbye to her little brother but didn’t really just want to walk away. She looked exactly how he remembered. That was good. The first time she visited, before she turned round, he hadn’t known what to expect. He’d been afraid she might look broken.
17
‘You are now leaving the American Sector …’
The sign was so famous that you could buy postcards of it in the newsagent behind Café Adler.
Between the end of the Second World War and 1961, 3.5 million people left East Germany. That was 20 per cent of their population; the majority of them professionals. Barbed wire along the internal border helped slow the flow. But in the eighteen months before the Wall went up, nearly half a million East Germans left, many crossing from East to West in Berlin.
The Wall put an end to that.
‘Look at that man,’ Frederika said scornfully.
A clean-cut American soldier marched smartly to a hut. A bigger guardhouse beyond, with a concrete watchtower, was where East Germany began. Vanishing inside, the sergeant reappeared seconds later, his message delivered. His eyes flicked to Frederika, missed Tom altogether and he was gone, climbing into a jeep to drive away. Frederika sucked her teeth.
‘You dislike Americans?’
‘Also the British and the French. How would you feel if we occupied New York and London and Paris?’
‘You did occupy Paris.’
‘I wasn’t even born then,’ she said sharply.
A taxi, half a dozen Beetles, a VW campervan and a lonely looking Trabant waited to enter East Berlin; the road in the opposite direction being now almost empty. Pedestrians waited to cross no man’s land.
‘Declare any currency,’ Frederika said.
Tom glanced across.
‘And you must change fifty Deutschmarks. You have fifty Deutschmarks, don’t you?’ She waited for Tom to nod. ‘Good. Also, no books, no newspapers, no religious pamphlets …’
Reaching into her jacket, she unfolded a letter purposefully. It was signed with a huge squiggle and stamped in red with the GDR emblem of a hammer and compass enclosed in a fat circle of rye.
‘You have your passport?’
‘Yes,’ Tom said.
‘And it looks like you?’
‘A bit younger, a bit thinner.’
‘If it doesn’t look like you they’ll turn you back.’
‘It does,’ Tom reassured her.
It took less than a minute for Tom to be waved through by a US sergeant. Frederika took longer, with the sergeant sending for an officer who studied her papers, studied her, made a quick telephone call and sent her through. By then Tom had been summoned by an East German guard, who’d grown nervous about Tom loitering between the West and East and letting others go ahead.
The man looked at Tom’s passport carefully. Russia, Cuba, Bahamas, United States … He was reaching for a phone when Frederika appeared and he hesitated, returning her smile without even realizing.
‘He’s with me,’ Frederika said.
At least that’s what Tom thought she said.
Her German was too fast and too guttural for Tom to get more than a sense of it. And, by then, Frederika had moved on, producing her stamped piece of paper, which the man took almost reverently. He glanced at Tom, looked at Frederika and called for his officer. But only so his officer could read the letter.
‘What was that about?’ Tom asked, when they were through.
‘We’re not allowed to pass through that checkpoint. Our rule not yours. That order made an exception and granted me passage. It says we’re travelling together on state business and you’re a friend of the GDR.’
‘Who signed it?’
She smiled. ‘Erich Honecker.’
The East German premier himself had signed an order allowing Frederika to take Tom through a checkpoint forbidden to East Berliners? It could be a diplomatic nicety. A display of glasnost, the new openness. Then again, it might indicate that they wanted Cecil Blackburn out of their country. And Tom was sans papiers, without diplomatic status. He wondered if he should be worried.
More worried …
18
The cottage the young man needed was first on the left, and only a cottage in the sense that a six-bedroom Victorian house in Wiltshire, with three acres, stables and a derelict tennis court, was a cottage if it said so on the gate. Its drive was brick, the turning circle recently swept. A lawn to one side had rusting croquet hoops. A mallet was abandoned to dampening grass.
The young man rapped twice.
‘Who is it?’
‘Delivery,’ he said.
‘I didn’t hear a van.’
‘It’s parked in the road.’
There was the click of a key and the clang of bolts. When the door finally opened it was still secured with a brass chain. The old man peering through adjusted his bifocals to get a better look. He was wearing cords, a twill shirt and a knitted tie. The young man could hear Radio 4 in the background, the government’s Chief Scientific Advisor talking soothingly about Chernobyl.
‘Let me turn that down,’ the old man said.
When he got back, his visitor held up a bottle of whisky. The label made it look ordinary but from the way the old man stared it obviously wasn’t.
‘This is for you,’ the young man said. ‘And I’m to give you these.’ He held up a large box of chocolates.
The old man looked puzzled.
Undoing the chain, he took the Talisker and put it on a table inside the door. Then he reached for
the Milk Tray. Somewhere between reaching for it and feeling its weight, his face changed. Opening the box, he looked at the small silver revolver inside.
‘Do I know you?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ the young man said.
‘Did they tell you why I’ve been sent this?’
His visitor hesitated. The man who sent him had said nothing about how he should answer if asked that or any other question. He’d simply told him to put the bottle and chocolates into the colonel’s hands.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘You’d better come in then.’
An elephant foot umbrella stand stood in the hall. An inlaid brass tray on a carved table held the keys for a Rover. An oil painting next to an ornate gilt mirror showed an attack on an Arab town. Armoured vehicles had gathered before the walls. Helicopters hung like birds over the distant hills.
‘Helen liked it,’ the old man said.
‘Helen?’
‘Didn’t they tell you about my wife?’
‘No, sir. I’m afraid not.’
The man looked at him sharply. ‘Not just a delivery boy, then?’
‘I’m not here to do the job. If that’s your question.’
‘But you would, if ordered?’
‘Of course. You sold out men who trusted you to the communists. People died because of you. Good people. You’re a traitor.’
‘Ah. Is that what I am?’
Picking up the bottle, the old man walked into his dining room without waiting to see if his visitor would follow. He was taking two Waterford tumblers from an oak corner cabinet when the young man came in.
‘I won’t, sir.’
‘You will. But don’t worry. I’ll wash up your glass, dry it and put it away before I do the decent thing …’ He hesitated. ‘There was a lot of it about, you know.’
‘I’m sorry, sir?’
‘This treachery of mine. Is that what they’re going to say? I was a traitor? A man who killed himself when faced with arrest?’
‘No, sir. I believe they’ll announce you’ve been battling ill health.’
‘Unsound mind?’
‘Temporarily disturbed.’
‘How simple you make it sound.’
Disappearing into another room, the old man returned with a photograph of a very young, very beautiful teenage girl in ATS uniform. ‘Spring 1940,’ he said. ‘We hadn’t even met then. We had an arrangement, you know. Later. Lots of war marriages didn’t last. Ours did.’
‘It’s a beautiful photograph, sir.’
‘She didn’t know, you know. She didn’t know any of it. We were more private about stuff in those days. I don’t want anyone thinking she knew.’
‘I don’t imagine they do, sir.’
‘Am I allowed to ask who sent you?’
‘Best not.’
‘I thought they’d forgotten me, you know. Either that, or decided I wasn’t important enough.’ Picking up the little revolver, he looked at the Milk Tray box. ‘A bit insulting, don’t you think? It’s hardly Charbonnel et Walker.’
His visitor wasn’t sure if he was joking.
Flipping out the cylinder, the old man extracted a round. ‘French-made, extinct calibre, old-issue ammunition. Exactly the kind of weapon an old fool like me might have kept as a memento.’ He put the bullet on the dining-room table, flipped the cylinder, and looked for a maker’s mark.
‘Pre-war,’ he said. He smiled. ‘This is the point you should go.’
The young man looked at him.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll lock the door behind you.’ Picking up the photograph of his wife when young, the old man peered at it and shrugged. ‘Tell your people there’ll be no note. No plea for understanding. No request for forgiveness.’
Ushering his visitor into the hall, he nodded politely before shutting the door firmly behind him.
The report in The Times was brief and respectful.
Colonel James Foley, ex-REME, later Foreign Office, had killed himself while suffering depression following the death of his beloved wife. He’d been found by his gardener, who, unable to raise him, had walked round to a window and realized what had happened. There was no suggestion of foul play. Indeed, the front door had been so securely bolted the constabulary had to gain entry through a window at the back.
The coroner made much of a bullet left on the table, suggesting that Colonel Foley, being uncertain of his actions, had perhaps spun the cylinder to see if God would spare him the fate he wished on himself.
A Colonel FitzSymonds, described in court as a family friend, confirmed that this would be entirely consistent with what he knew of the man’s temperament and faith. The verdict given was suicide while of unsound mind.
Lacking family, his son having died in the service of his country, the colonel was cremated and his ashes interred beside the body of his wife.
19
From the bridge, Nikolaiviertel – with its pretty little houses lining the riverfront – looked old and quaint. An unlikely survivor in a city mostly destroyed by bombs. A closer look by Tom revealed half-built steel frames in the shapes of houses, and lorries delivering pre-fabricated façades. Forty years after they were destroyed, East Berlin was putting its medieval buildings back.
After a fashion.
Workmen laid cobbles on to sand in front of taverns that looked hundreds of years old but were not yet finished. A photographer, in black roll neck and leather jacket, was getting in everyone’s way.
A poster showed the area as it had been before Allied bombers reduced it to ruins. Another showed how it would look by the year’s end. The smiling, strolling couples, with their laughing children and fashionable clothes, bore no resemblance to anybody Tom had seen so far.
East Berliners smiled, true enough. Like everyone else, they smiled at each other, at their children and dogs, and sometimes at nothing at all. And they certainly strolled … There was little of West Berlin’s heads-down frenzy, and it seemed to Tom that this half of the city moved at an altogether slower pace. It was just that none of the cars he’d seen were this big and shiny. None of the people that well dressed. East Berlin had a drab conformity that reminded him of growing up in the 1950s.
Frederika gestured. ‘Our brand-new historical district.’
‘You disapprove?’
She shrugged. ‘You have Disneyland,’ she said. ‘We have this.’
Tom was expecting her to walk with him to the door. Instead, she gave him Sir Cecil’s address and told him, ‘You can’t miss it.’
‘You’re going somewhere?’
‘I have to meet a friend.’
Tom watched her go, and when she turned back at the corner, it was to give him a wave that said she knew he’d understand. In her hand was the packet of fresh coffee she’d bought before leaving West Berlin.
What Tom sensed as he walked towards Nikolaiviertel was not the buildings being put up, but those missing. The squares and scruffy parks he’d passed through to reach here existed because constructing them was easier than replacing the buildings that once kept the edges of the gaps apart.
The city felt stunned and stunted.
This half of it anyway.
The other half felt desperate in its glitter; dancing to keep the darkness at bay. Tom wondered what would happen if the two halves ever joined. If the city would regain its soul, history and composure. Or if the rips in its psyche were too savage and its ghosts too unforgiving.
20
Sir Cecil’s minder met Tom outside one of the few buildings in Nikolaiviertel to have survived the bombing. He nodded to Tom’s shadow, a pimply young man who was half-heartedly lighting a cigarette against railings overlooking the water’s edge. The boy had been waiting beyond Checkpoint Charlie, cigarette butts littering the pavement at his feet. His street skills were so bad Tom assumed he’d been chosen to make sure the Englishman knew he was being followed.
‘I’ll get rid of him in a moment,’ the minder said.
‘You k
new I was on my way?’ Tom asked.
‘Frederika just telephoned.’
He saw Tom’s expression and his lips twisted.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We have call boxes …’
Whatever he said to Tom’s shadow was effective because the young man shrugged, flipped up the collar of his jacket and sauntered away, obviously happy to have the afternoon to himself. Returning, the man said, ‘So, what do you think of this beautiful city?’
For a second, Tom was tempted by the truth.
Soberly dressed men in cheap suits. Drab women in badly fitting dresses. Small boys in sandals with pudding-bowl haircuts. Teenagers doing their best to look different. It was the England of his childhood.
The man pushed out his hand. ‘I’m Evgeny.’
‘From Leningrad?’
The man’s eyes widened. ‘You speak Russian?’
‘Enough to recognize your accent. Certainly enough to get by. And much better than I speak German. Although that’s not hard.’
‘Better than I speak English then.’
‘You need it with Sir Cecil?’
‘His Russian is non-existent. His German …’ Evgeny wobbled his hand. ‘His hearing is bad. His temper worse. We’d better go up. He’s waiting. Although who knows exactly for what …’
Evgeny didn’t seem the most contented of employees.
‘Ex-army?’ Tom asked. ‘Paratroops?’
The man nodded slowly.
‘What happened?’
‘Shit happened.’
Since he was fit, had both his eyes, all his limbs and didn’t limp, the shit had to be the other kind. ‘Know the feeling,’ Tom said.
Heavy glass doors led through to a high-ceilinged entrance hall with alternating black and white tiles and a staircase that spoke of old money. Each landing had a tall window overlooking the river, heavy gilt mirrors, paintings of forests and obligatory busts of Marx. This was where important people lived. It made Tom wonder about Sir Cecil’s neighbours. Mostly, it made him wonder why they didn’t object to the music blasting from the top flat. Shostakovich, from the sound of it. ‘Let me turn that down,’ Evgeny said.
Nightfall Berlin Page 7
