Nightfall Berlin

by Jack Grimwood

  ‘You’re a prisoner?’

  The words came more easily and Tom risked checking his bruises. Glancing down didn’t make him sick but the extent of the bruising did. A cold lurch that translated as Oh fuck.

  ‘Nothing broken,’ the man said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, maybe a few ribs. Nothing serious.’

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘In an autopsy room having been cut open.’

  Tom looked at him.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry. No one will come in. And I was the one to collect you. I’m always the one to collect the dead. Doesn’t matter who they are or how they died. It’s a bit of a tradition.’

  The man had another go at helping Tom to his feet and this time Tom was able to stand, although he swayed a little and the lights made him feel sick. Stepping away, the little man used one hand to hold Tom steady.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘I hurt.’

  ‘You’re alive. Concentrate on that.’

  Walking around Tom he looked at the bruises, raising his eyebrows occasionally. Once he stopped to touch the scar on Tom’s shoulder. ‘New,’ he said. It wasn’t a question. ‘Small calibre,’ he said of the one in Tom’s thigh.

  He was bald, with wire-rim glasses. And, although it was clear to Tom that he was English, his words were so obviously inflected in the wrong places that it had to be years since he’d spoken his own language.

  He had all the presence of Dr Crippin blinking in the dock. A man whose murderousness had been matched only by his apparent meekness. You had to be resilient to survive in a place like this, though. To be foreign and become trusted took unusual skill. Even for someone medically trained.

  Grunting, the man reached for his pad.

  He looked Tom over one final time and sucked his teeth.

  ‘You drink, don’t you? I thought so.’ Dragging the yellowing pad towards him, he flipped it open, and scrawled Alcoholic? Ex alcoholic? across a page. ‘You have the look,’ he said. ‘Something about the eyes. And it shows in the skin around your cheekbones … It always shows.’

  He stared at Tom and began to make notes on the ready-inked outline of a human body. That done, he sketched in the scars that he could see from the front: knife, bullet, bullet … The wound in Tom’s shoulder stopped him.

  ‘Crossbow,’ Tom said.

  The man snorted as if it was a joke.

  He touched the arrow’s exit, tapped the damage left by a small-calibre bullet that almost ended Tom’s life on an Ulster hillside and hesitated at a whip scar that curled across Tom’s lower back and on to his buttocks.

  ‘That is old,’ he said.

  ‘Very.’ Tom kept his response simple.

  ‘Right. You died of heart failure. I found evidence of pulmonary valve stenosis. Congenital. That means you’ve had it since birth. And your liver …’ He looked sombre. ‘Cirrhosis. Your kidneys were almost as bad. Your spleen. Well, you’d probably have been fine if your liver wasn’t buggered. As it is …’ He finished scrawling and signed and dated the page. ‘I’m surprised I haven’t seen you earlier.’

  ‘They think they shot me.’

  ‘They did shoot you. But I can hardly write that down, can I? Random foreigner, shot. Heart attack, heart attack, heart attack … You’d be surprised how many of those we’ve had recently.’

  ‘What happens now?’

  ‘Oh. We cremate you. Obviously, that’s a bit of a loaded subject for most of the older Germans but it’s efficient, cheap and growing in popularity with the young. The bishops don’t like it for different reasons. But it’s His Holiness Karl Marx who holds sway round here.’

  Loaded subject?

  ‘Do you know who invented the first proper crematorium? Sir Charles William Siemens. Sounds English, doesn’t it? He wasn’t. His nephew, Carl-Friedrich, perfected it. German efficiency.’

  ‘You have one here?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Tom said.

  The little man nodded. ‘I started it earlier. And yes, that’s my job too. So I guess I’d better do it. Reckon you can get yourself down there?’

  He led Tom to green-tiled stairs that Tom negotiated by gripping a rail and moving crabwise, gasping at every step. At the bottom, the man pushed open the door to a double-height room and winced at the heat. A steel door that should have been in a bank vault opened when he tugged a lever.

  ‘Christ,’ Tom said.

  ‘It does get a bit hot in here. Still, in you go …’

  The man mimed pushing a body along steel rollers into the furnace and yanked the lever that shut the door. Flames roared on the far side of thick glass in a little window in the grey door’s middle.

  ‘Job done. Let’s have a drink to mourn your passing.’

  52

  Back in the autopsy room, the man took a bottle of surgical alcohol from a medical fridge, filled two small beakers about a third full, topped them up with chilled water and put one of them in front of Tom, raising the other in salute.

  ‘Your health.’

  Tom raised his own glass. The rawness of it made him cough.

  ‘Tony Wakefield.’ He looked at Tom archly. ‘Although my friends used to call me Flo. That was back then, obviously. When Berlin was more interesting than it probably is these days. And I wasn’t. Not even close.’

  ‘Wasn’t what?’

  ‘A Flo.’ Wakefield sipped at his glass, winced at its taste and knocked it back in one. For a second, with his head tipped back and his eyes staring at something long gone he looked like someone else.

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘is where you’re meant to tell me who you are.’

  But Tom’s thoughts were gnawing at the man’s name. He knew it, and through the shock of being shot, and the fierceness of the pain, he remembered where.

  ‘The Importance of being Lady Windermere.’

  Wakefield’s mouth fell open.

  ‘You wrote that with Cecil Blackburn.’

  Blackburn’s name seemed to rattle him. His face hardened and his voice became waspish. ‘I didn’t write that with dear Cecil. I wrote the bloody thing full stop. Cecil just added his name to it. As he was wont to do to everything. Loathsome man.’ Reaching for the bottle of surgical alcohol, Wakefield poured himself a healthy slug and drank it down in one.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Tom said.

  Wakefield sat back, his face so pale that Tom wondered if he was about to pass out. The doctor’s gaze flicked to the door as if expecting someone to burst in. Without even realizing, he reached again for the bottle. Tom pushed it closer.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I found his corpse.’

  ‘As in, didn’t kill him yourself?’

  ‘No,’ said Tom. ‘I definitely didn’t kill him myself.’

  ‘Pity. I’d like to shake the hand of the man who did. You know, you still haven’t told me your name, why you’re here and who sent you.’

  ‘You were expecting me?’

  ‘Yes. I was told yesterday I’d be getting a body. I was to take good care of it. I’ve been here more than twenty years. And I’m still alive against all odds. Sometimes the odds change. One side or the other was going to send someone eventually.’

  ‘I’m not here to kill you.’

  ‘You probably are.’ Wakefield poured a glass for Tom and another for himself. ‘You just don’t know it yet. Drink up. Alcohol will help numb the bruising. And I suppose I’d better let you dress.’

  Tom looked at him.

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to introduce yourself? Your name is our security, that’s something we used to say. I could trade you the clothes?’

  ‘You should probably just give me them.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’ Wakefield smiled. ‘Death comes in so many guises. Some less kempt than others. Let me get you today’s disguise.’

  There were two parcels wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. One was lumpy and the other smooth, with r
ounded edges. It could have contained folded blankets. About the right size for that too. Wakefield cut the strings with a scalpel and pushed both parcels across.

  ‘Go on then,’ he said.

  Ripping off brown paper, Tom stopped. He took the khaki jacket by the shoulders and shook it out, noting the cornflower-blue collar tabs. Shoulder bars proclaimed the owner a lieutenant colonel in the KGB. Extracting a shirt, tie and trousers Tom shook those out too, hanging them over the edge of the desk.

  The second parcel contained an officer’s cap with a cornflower-blue band and blue piping. Gold braid crossed the band below a hammer and sickle inside a sunburst. The hammer and sickle were red enamel. The sunburst gold.

  KGB issue, officers. Standard daily.

  ‘See,’ Wakefield said. ‘Many guises.’

  Tom took a look at himself in an ancient mirror above a sink in the corner of the autopsy room. He looked no stranger in this than in his usual uniform.

  One side or the other was going to send someone eventually.

  He was on the shores of the Baltic, no longer certain he was even in East Germany. He’d arrived not knowing why he’d been sent here rather than somewhere else. As certain, as much as he was of anything, that finding himself here was a chaotic mix of incompetence, happenstance and bad luck.

  Now he wasn’t sure.

  What were the odds of him ending up in the same camp as one of Sir Cecil’s old colleagues? Someone whose name was on the cast list?

  ‘Bastard,’ Tom said.

  Wakefield blinked.

  ‘Not you. Milov. The Soviet field marshal. He says he’s never heard of you. He wasn’t sure why I was bothering him. General Rafikov too. They’re both bastards. Milov’s the reason I’m here. He had Rafikov set this whole thing up.’

  Reaching for his beaker, Tom drained it down.

  ‘You look like you needed that.’

  ‘More’s the pity.’

  ‘Full blown?’ Wakefield asked.

  ‘Recovering. Maybe recovering. I’d got so used to the stuff that half the time I couldn’t work out if I was drunk or not. What about you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m always drunk.’

  Wakefield reached for the flask and refilled his beaker. He was careful not to refill Tom’s, simply moved the bottle within reach so Tom could fill his own if he wanted. It was a surprisingly gracious touch.

  The morgue was still as squalid as Wakefield’s prison uniform. The man himself was clean though, his hair almost neat. Pushing back his chair, Wakefield went to a steel cupboard and dug among boxes of yellowing bandages for a pack of tarot cards. Shaking free the cards, he cut the pack.

  ‘How am I doing?’ he asked.

  ‘No idea,’ Tom replied.

  ‘Pity.’ Wakefield scooped the cards up, closed his eyes and shuffled, then cut again and put one card on the table. ‘Helps me think,’ he said.

  The card showed a naked man and woman climbing from separate coffins with a child kneeling in a smaller coffin between them. In the sky above, an angel circled by stars spread flaming wings.

  ‘How fitting,’ Wakefield said.

  He pushed the card towards Tom who turned it round and found Judgement written in gothic script along the bottom.

  ‘Yours or mine?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Both, I’d say …’

  ‘I’m surprised they let you keep the cards.’

  ‘You don’t believe?’

  ‘Not in Tarot.’

  ‘What do you believe in?’

  ‘The power and the glory.’

  ‘How romantic. Did they beat that into you at school?’ Wakefield shrugged. ‘I can recognize lash marks when I see them.’

  ‘Those weren’t school,’ Tom said.

  Wakefield became very still. ‘Are you sure you didn’t kill Cecil?’ he said.

  53

  Wakefield cut the tarot cards as he waited for Tom to answer.

  ‘Sir Cecil was going home,’ Tom told him.

  ‘He must have been mad.’

  ‘All the same … I was sent to collect him.’

  ‘And our friend got there first?’

  ‘Which friend?’

  ‘This one.’ Turning the pack face up, Wakefield revealed a skeleton wielding a scythe, which he tapped lightly. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘What do you know about Patroclus?’

  ‘Hector killed him. And Achilles killed Hector.’

  ‘Not the man. The club.’ Wakefield sounded tired. ‘I always wondered what he’d do with it …’

  ‘Who?’ Tom said. ‘With what?’

  ‘Rafikov. With my confession.’

  ‘What did he do with it?’

  ‘Sent you. Apparently. It was meant to be a simple camping holiday, you know. With a friend of Cecil’s. Beautiful mountains, clean rivers, little clearings in the forest where we could sunbathe naked. He turned out to be KGB.’

  ‘You never suspected?’

  ‘He was so very beautiful.’

  That had to translate as no, or perhaps didn’t care.

  ‘Tell me about Patroclus,’ Tom said.

  Reaching for the cards, the little man began shuffling them with an ease that looked almost lazy but saw the cards align perfectly and so loosely that the sides could be tapped into place. Shuffling the cards one final time, he passed the pack to Tom and told him to turn up the bottom card.

  It was the skeleton again.

  Then he told Tom to cut the pack near the middle.

  A young man in ankle boots holding a flower and looking at the sky was about to step off a cliff while a dog gambolled at his heels.

  ‘How appropriate,’ Wakefield said.

  He put Death and The Fool side by side and face up.

  ‘You know the first well. The second less so.’

  ‘They’re both me?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  Scooping up the cards, Wakefield shuffled again and passed the pack to Tom, telling him to cut near the top. A naked girl knelt beside a pond holding a water jug in either hand. A huge star, circled by other stars, shone in the sky above her shoulder. He looked at the card and then back at Tom.

  ‘Who did you lose?’

  Tom felt his voice tighten. ‘My daughter.’

  Wakefield cut the pack and laid out three cards, aligning them exactly and tapping the corner of each as he gathered his thoughts. ‘You think her death is your fault. It isn’t …’

  ‘I don’t think it’s my fault.’

  ‘You do. Now, Patroclus was a bit of a movable feast. It wasn’t a real club. Well, it was, but not the kind you’re thinking. It was over an Italian restaurant in Old Compton Street. The floor was given over to three rooms of Kashmiri throws and battered chairs, Moroccan mirrors, Zulu masks. This was the sixties. You can imagine the sort of thing. The restaurant downstairs …’

  Wakefield shrugged.

  ‘Reassuringly ordinary; round tables with paper cloths, metal chairs, blown-up photographs of Mount Etna and the waterfront at Palermo framed in painted plywood arches. Ad people ate there, tourists occasionally, the Tin Pan Alley crowd, couples having affairs. Nice bottle of Valpolicella, a couple of pizzas, a shared gelato and on your way to bed somewhere.

  ‘There was a little door at the back with a sign saying More Tables Upstairs. No one was shown up who wasn’t known.’

  ‘Whose club was it?’

  ‘Eddie, an ex-copper, owned the building. At least he did on paper. So either the bribes were good or he was fronting for Cecil. Mind you, Old Compton Street, slap bang in the middle of Soho. All those brothels, strip clubs and clip joints. Maybe he really did own it. Not a nice man, our Eddie.’

  Wakefield put his hand on Tom’s wrist. The gesture was almost fatherly. Assuming you had the kind of father where it wasn’t safest to duck every time his hand moved. ‘Did he know what was going on upstairs?’ Tom asked.

  ‘It wasn’t,’ Wakefield said. ‘Not in the way you imagine. That went on elsewhere. In reform schools, mental asylums, orphanages. An
ywhere that held children nobody really cared about. That’s what I mean about it being a bit of a movable feast. There was a place near London. One in North Wales. Another in Northern Ireland …’

  Tom tried not to react.

  ‘Ah,’ Wakefield said. ‘They worked like hell to keep the last of those out of the news but they started late … And there was that boy.’

  ‘He talked to the police?’

  ‘He died,’ Wakefield said flatly. ‘It was getting to be a habit.’ He caught himself. ‘Not exactly a habit but it wasn’t the first time. Cecil gave everyone up, you know. When the authorities found out. And then the clean-up began.’

  Wakefield looked haunted. ‘Some of us bought our lives,’ he said. ‘Most weren’t offered that choice.’

  ‘What was the price?’

  ‘Total obedience. I got a call saying Cecil was lonely. Missing home, they said. Why didn’t I take a holiday in Berlin? They told me to play up the “old friends” act. See what I could find out about his defection. Cecil suggested a camping holiday. Just us and a couple of local boys. A week later I’m here. He came to see me, you know. Cecil. All shocked at the misunderstanding. He wanted to help …’

  ‘What did he want in return?’

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t know him? He wanted something of mine. A tiny notebook I’d kept for sentimental value.’

  ‘Really … Did you give it to him?’

  ‘It was at my mother’s. In London.’

  ‘And British Intelligence hadn’t asked for this?’

  ‘Oh, they didn’t know. It was a list of names from just after the war, no one important. A handful of sketches of a friend. Honestly hadn’t occurred to me.’

  Tom stared at him. ‘You told Sir Cecil who had it?’

  ‘Like a fool … I never saw him again. Luckily, I still had my uses.’

  ‘Where did you and Sir Cecil first meet?’

  ‘Berlin,’ Wakefield said. ‘It was where everyone met. You have no idea of what it was like to be in Berlin in those days.’

  ‘The horror?’

  Wakefield almost sneered. ‘The power,’ he said. ‘To thine own self be true. The self can be pretty vile if let off the leash. And whatever we did, it couldn’t be worse than what the people we replaced had done. There was always that.’