Nightfall Berlin

by Jack Grimwood

  ‘Frederika. I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘A Frenchman photographed you leaving. He worked for Le Monde. The police showed me the paper. It’s obvious that it was you.’

  She was shaking with fury, one of her students just standing there, when the door was thrown open and her other student and a security guard rushed in.

  ‘Shoot him,’ Frederika ordered.

  The man fumbled at his holster.

  Gripping Frederika’s wrists tight, Tom backed towards the fire escape and ducked down when the man tried to take aim. He only let go at the door, twisting his way down the iron steps and sprinting for the corner.

  No shots followed.

  In a yard behind the gym, he stopped, ready to take the guard if he came down the steps after him, but no one did. Someone had spray-painted a naked girl facing a naked boy on the gym’s back wall. Silhouettes faded as they blended to brick. No, not painted. Bleached out of the dirt …

  Tom listened for footsteps and heard sirens instead.

  Move, he told himself.

  A metal fence edged the yard and he ran at it, levering himself up and over, dropping to a crouch in a ruined playground. A young woman holding a small boy stared at him. Her hair was unwashed, her oversized jeans were cinched with a belt and rolled at the bottom. She wore a string vest with nothing beneath. A hand-rolled cigarette hung from her mouth.

  She examined Tom impassively.

  And that’s where the encounter might have ended had Tom not heard the sirens stop, as police cars screeched to a halt on the road in front of the gym. Reaching into his jacket, he found his wallet and extracted five $10 bills, fanning them out like cards and stepping back when she reached for them.

  ‘Komm mit uns,’ she said. She gestured that Tom should follow.

  They slipped through a door into a hallway where every window had been boarded up, the first dozen steps of the communal stairs had been ripped out and wires hung like snakes from the walls where they’d been disconnected and cut in two. The doors were missing too.

  ‘Kommen Sie.’

  Tom followed her through a doorway. He’d been hoping it led to a street but he found himself in a stairwell bolted to the back of the building, with concrete steps leading both up and down. As he waited to see which she would take, she pointed up, then edged around him and let herself out through a fire door, heading for a police car that was cutting under an arch to park on communal grass.

  How much should he trust her? Not at all seemed sensible.

  All the same, Tom waited at a broken window to see how things would unfold. He could go further up, he could go back down, and he could try to lose himself in the main building.

  He kept those in mind as he watched her approach the car.

  She turned away long enough to scoop up the boy, raise her singlet and let him clamp himself to her nipple. And that’s how she remained, with the boy at her hip, as the Volkspolizei climbed from their vehicle. One of them asked something and she shrugged, adjusting her breast and the boy.

  The policeman asked the boy.

  He shook his head without bothering to disengage.

  The policeman smiled and Tom couldn’t see, from where he watched at the edge of his broken window, if the woman returned it.

  ‘You up there?’ she asked, when she got back.

  Tom headed down and hit ground level just as a bearded man came up from the cellars clutching electrical wire, insulating tape and a pair of bolt cutters. He shot a question at the woman, whose reply was too fast for Tom to understand.

  ‘Do you understand Russian?’ Tom asked.

  The man’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘Or English,’ he added hastily.

  ‘Both,’ the man said. ‘I used to be a lecturer. She understands English better than she speaks it. No Russian though.’

  ‘How did she learn English?’

  ‘How does anyone here learn English?’ Pulling a transistor from his pocket, the man twisted a knob and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ blasted out until the woman reached across, took the little radio from him and turned it off.

  ‘We get Radio West Berlin,’ she said.

  ‘When it’s not being jammed,’ the man added.

  Maybe Radio West Berlin was a real station. Maybe she simply meant they got radio from across the Wall.

  ‘She says you have money.’

  Tom took the five $10 notes he’d shown the woman and handed them across. She looked at them thoughtfully and then gave them to the man, who folded them in two and pushed them into the back pocket of his jeans.

  ‘I’m Helga,’ she said. ‘He’s Franz. We’re Instandbesetzer.’

  ‘Squatters,’ Franz said, seeing Tom’s face. ‘For us, it’s political.’

  ‘I left Mylo out there,’ she said. ‘Let me get him.’

  In the canyon made by the flats, the boy was singing to himself, his song unnaturally amplified, sounding both close and distant. Tom and Franz watched Helga pick up the boy, who nuzzled her vest until she pushed his head away. He was grinning. ‘How old?’ Tom asked.

  ‘It makes her happy,’ said Franz, answering the question Tom had really been asking. ‘Three now. Four in a month or two. She’ll probably stop then.’ He shrugged. ‘Then again, maybe not.’

  At the top of the steps, a doorway draped with brocade led through to a floor where every internal wall had been removed, and the ceiling ripped out. A huge skylight had been cut crudely into the roof above. He was in a studio, Tom realized. A black canvas the size of a missing wall had knife slashes from ceiling to floor. Holes had been stabbed through it and threaded with ribbon that looked like stitches to a wound.

  ‘Why do the police want you?’ Franz asked.

  ‘They think I killed someone.’

  Franz stopped, turning to stare.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Tom insisted.

  ‘You would say that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tom said. ‘I would. This time it’s true.’

  ‘This time? No.’ The man shook his head. ‘I don’t want to know.’

  40

  President Reagan was wrangling with Congress over his Star Wars initiative; the World Court had decreed that the US shouldn’t have mined Nicaraguan waters. The Soviets were trying to contain fallout from Chernobyl. The Norwegians were scared that the fallout would contaminate their reindeer …

  ‘What are you listening for?’ Helga asked Tom.

  It was Franz who answered. ‘News of the man he killed, obviously.’

  ‘Didn’t kill,’ a grey-haired woman corrected. ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’ She was talking to Tom. ‘That’s what you’re listening for?’

  Tom didn’t deny it.

  From the markets, the West German newsreader went to sport …

  They were artists, poets, writers, dissidents, the grey-haired woman told him. Instandbesetzer. They didn’t exist. They were ghosts squatting in the cracks of Marx’s machine. She was pleased with that phrase. So pleased she pulled out a notebook to write it down.

  Cecil Blackburn, James Foley, Tony Willes-Wakefield …

  Tom recited the cast list from The Importance of being Lady Windermere in his head, wondering if it was coincidence they’d all been marked alpha. It didn’t feel like coincidence.

  There was a pattern. He just had to recognize it.

  The grey-haired woman was still talking when Tom returned his attention to her. Apparently, squatting took pressure off the waiting lists for decent housing. The housing for heroes they’d all been promised. The Instandbesetzer occupied buildings no one else wanted. They kept them functioning. Sometimes they even repaired them. In return, the state pretended they didn’t exist.

  ‘How do you live?’ Tom asked.

  ‘We steal,’ she said flatly. ‘Also, we sell.’

  ‘You sell what you steal?’

  ‘Mostly.’

  ‘The police leave you alone?’ Tom asked.

  ‘We’re tolerated. Look, they say, we have bohemi
ans too.’

  Tom glanced round the room and the woman read his mind.

  ‘Helga has real talent … Her friend?’ She nodded to the huge canvas with tears and stab wounds. ‘His work has a certain crude simplicity. Also his father heads up a regional committee of the Socialist Unity Party.’

  ‘That helps?’

  ‘Of course it helps. An apparatchik with a delinquent for a son? That gives the party leverage. They don’t even have to threaten.’

  ‘You speak like an insider.’

  ‘I taught at the Humboldt, Berlin’s oldest university. Marx studied there. Also, Max Planck, Heinrich Heine, Otto von Bismarck. Although we don’t talk about him much these days, imperial chancellors being out of favour. You should go. The library is amazing. You’ll find books not allowed anywhere else.’

  ‘Why aren’t you still there?’ Tom asked.

  ‘My husband was shot trying to cross the Wall.’

  ‘And you were disgraced?’

  ‘Oh no. I told them he was a filthy traitor and I’d have turned him in if I’d guessed for one second what he intended. We’d never loved each other. He was a brute, and an ignorant one. They were surprisingly forgiving.’

  ‘So why did you leave the university?’

  ‘I had a breakdown. It was the lying, you see.’

  She held out her hand and Mylo toddled over with what was left of a joint, which she sucked so hard cardboard flared; she coughed, then spat ruefully.

  ‘Last month,’ she said, ‘they brought an American here.’ She gestured at the squat. ‘So he could go home and say the GDR has bohemians too. He was writing on youth culture. Punks in Moscow, heavy metal in Vilnius, nerds in Belgrade … You know Yugoslavia broadcasts software? First you build your computer, then you turn on your radio and tape software. Load up the cassette and your computer will play. There’s a game where you repeatedly fly a plane over a city until you’ve bombed it flat. He couldn’t understand why I didn’t like that idea.’

  She looked sober for a moment.

  ‘I was eight when the Red Army arrived. Forty years later there are still bits of this city we haven’t rebuilt. I told him I didn’t think that game would be popular here. He told me it was just a game …’

  ‘Did he interview you?’

  ‘Mostly he took photographs.’

  Tom glanced towards Helga.

  ‘Oh yes, feeding Mylo obviously. Franz barefoot and playing a trumpet with his shirt hanging out. Mylo got to ride a trike through puddles of paint in the playground, doing skid turns on a huge piece of canvas and laughing.’

  ‘And they agreed?’

  ‘Have you ever been locked up?’

  Despite himself Tom shivered. Hearing steps on the stairs. Knowing that hiding made no difference. Not inside a cupboard. Not under a bed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  He could see she knew he had too.

  ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Tell me about this murder you didn’t commit.’

  41

  Tom arrived at the Bösebrücke crossing on Barnholmer Strasse at a time an East Berliner might arrive if he’d got up early to face an unpleasant day. The kind of day that saw a man briefly reunite with West German cousins to bury his grandfather; an old man he’d not seen since the Wall went up twenty-four years before. Checkpoint Charlie was for foreigners only. Diplomats, tourists, serving personnel from the Western military. And, of course, Frederika, but she had special dispensation.

  This man, the man Tom was, probably didn’t even know what dispensation meant.

  An iron bridge rose above the railway tracks that marked the border in this part of the city. You entered the waiting area for the bridge under the flat gaze of Grenztruppen, border guards chosen for their absolute loyalty. These were volunteers, not conscripts, the dark green of their uniforms marking them out from the NVA, the regular forces.

  A brick hut stood at the entrance. Huts beyond held guard quarters, search areas, dogs. Concrete barriers were positioned to prevent cars from trying to break through. Mesh fences helped corral people and stopped them going places they shouldn’t go. Guards on top of a concrete tower watched to make sure.

  To get from the waiting area to the bridge you had to be inspected, approved, possibly searched and still make it through a final barrier. Road traffic had a clearly marked route, with a special lane for VIPs. Everyone else used a walkway along the edge of the bridge.

  There was less theatre than at Checkpoint Charlie and there were fewer signs. For all the Grenztruppen were armed, this crossing ran with a skeleton staff on both sides. It was functional, with no need to impress.

  ‘Warm,’ a woman said.

  She was talking to him, Tom realized.

  ‘It’s going to be a long one,’ she added.

  The queue stretched ahead of them, self-servingly neat. No one wanted to be shouted at, nor sent to the back by boys in green uniform who’d done this so often that they might have been herding cattle.

  ‘Family business?’ she asked.

  Tom nodded, not trusting his accent enough to reply.

  Maybe she decided he was the silent type, maybe it didn’t matter and she just needed someone to talk to and he was it. She was older, if not by much, with wide shoulders, a waist thicker than it had been once, and her hair hidden beneath a brightly coloured scarf. Her clothes were functional.

  She talked for the next ten minutes and Tom took his cues from her face and nodded and smiled and frowned as he did his best to pretend that he understood more than every other word.

  ‘Cigarette?’ he offered.

  She took one, let him light it from a box of matches that exhorted them both to exercise regularly and get plenty of fresh air, and lapsed into silence as the queue shuffled forward another few feet. When she looked as if she might strike up conversation again, Tom offered her a second cigarette, and let his fingers brush her hand as he offered her a light. She blushed and looked away.

  His friends in the squat had done well. The suit they’d found him was shabby, slightly too large in a way that suggested he’d shrunk recently. It was the kind of suit that lived in the back of a closet or was folded and wrapped in plastic if no cupboard was available. Exactly the kind of suit a man not used to wearing suits might drag out for the funeral of a grandfather he’d not seen since 1961.

  The only flamboyant touch was a Lenin badge on his lapel.

  It was small, circular and cheap, its enamel some kind of resin set over red paint. The grey-haired woman had been pleased by its tackiness. Loyal, and insignificant, she explained. The ideal East German combination.

  Its owner wouldn’t be needing his suit, his travel papers or his badge. A hundred dollars had convinced him to spend the next three days drunk with grief. So drunk he couldn’t be expected to notice he’d been burgled. There was no crime in East Berlin, but what there was was committed by gypsies or delinquents. One of these had obviously found him passed out on his floor and stolen what little he owned.

  Who knew what they’d taken?

  Poor Johan wasn’t even sure why he’d applied for travel papers for a day and a night. He hated the West and his family there weren’t much better. He’d told lots of people he was going. That must be how the thieves discovered he had a pass. Of course, when it came to it, he couldn’t bring himself to go. He hadn’t seen his grandfather in twenty years. He had no idea who’d gone in his place.

  That was Johan’s story and he’d be sticking to it.

  42

  ‘Papers.’ The East German border guard held out his hand.

  Handing over the pass that gave its owner thirty-six hours in West Berlin, Tom shuffled his feet and stared at the dirt as the guard checked its stamp and glanced at the photograph on Tom’s borrowed ID.

  He barked at Tom to remove his cap, which Tom did, straightening up so the guard could see his face. Unshaven, red-eyed. He looked like someone whose grandfather had recently died.

  The guard pointed at Tom’s case and he opene
d it meekly. Inside were tatty pyjamas. A washed white shirt still slightly grubby at the collar. A black tie faded to charcoal. And a washing bag with a drawstring holding a toothbrush, toothpaste, a safety razor and shaving soap.

  That was it. The rest of the cardboard case was empty.

  The guard ran his hand under the clothes, checking for anything hidden, and felt along the inside edges, despite it being bare cardboard and having no lining. A vague wave dismissed him and Tom shut his case, clicked its locks and turned to join the queue of those about to enter West Berlin.

  The chatty woman was behind him. She sounded nervous now, the guard having to ask her something twice.

  ‘Keep up …’

  Tom nodded his apologies.

  He refused to let himself look at the far end of the bridge. Think nothing, he told himself. He tried to let his shoulders relax and felt sweat bead in his cropped hair and begin to trickle down his ribs. It was all right though. A man like him would be nervous. He’d have spent a lifetime obeying orders and trying to avoid being noticed. The grey-haired woman’s words were in Tom’s head: obedient and insignificant. The guards would expect a man like him to look worried. And he’d be hung-over. His face was bound to have an unhealthy sheen. All the same, Tom felt his chest tighten and his stomach pull against his spine.

  The queue shuffled forward and he shuffled with it: keeping inside painted lines, trying not to catch the interest of a pair of Grenztruppen with sub-machine guns. Beyond the two men, on the other side of the bridge, were their West German equivalents. Occasionally one of the two Grenztruppen would turn to stare at them. Mostly though, they watched those approaching.

  Tom let his shoulders droop.

  He was almost at the final gate with only a handful of others ahead.

  Nobody was looking at him. No one had followed him here. He was almost sure of that. He’d slipped from the ruined flats near Hackescher Markt when it was still dark, stamping up to Alex station like a man on his way to work, cut through the huge station and out the other side. No one had followed.

  He’d stake his life on it.