Field Gray

by Philip Kerr

  “The VdH.”

  “Of course. You were a prisoner yourself, weren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “A couple of years ago, I went to one of those exhibitions put on by the VdH,” she said. “On the POW experience. They had reconstructed a Soviet POW camp, complete with a wooden watchtower and a four-meter-high barbed-wire fence.”

  “Was there a gift shop?”

  “No. Just a newspaper.”

  “Der Heimkehrer.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a rag. Among other things, the VdH leadership believes that a free people cannot renounce in principle the protection of a new German army.”

  “But you don’t believe that?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not that I don’t think military service is a good idea. In principle.” I lit a cigarette. “It’s just that I don’t trust our Western allies not to use us as cannon fodder in a new war that some lunatic Confederate American general thinks he can safely fight on German soil. Which is to say, a long way from America. But which in reality no one can win. Not us. Not them.”

  “Better Red than dead, huh?”

  “I don’t think the Reds want a war any more than we do. It’s only the men who fought the last war, not to mention the one before that, who can really know how many human lives were wasted. And how many comrades were sacrificed needlessly. People used to talk about the phony war. Remember that? In 1939. But if you ask me, this war, this Cold War, that’s the phoniest war of the lot. Something dreamed up by the intelligence people to scare us and keep us all in line.”

  “There’s a waiter at the club,” she said, “who’d disagree with you. He’s a former POW, too. He came home last year, still a rabid Nazi. Hates the Bolsheviks.” She smiled wryly. “I’m none too fond of them myself, of course. Well, you remember what it was like when the Red Army turned up in Berlin with a hard-on for German women.” She paused for a moment. “I had a baby. Did I ever tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, he—the baby—died, so it didn’t seem important, I guess. He got influenza meningitis, and the penicillin they used to treat it turned out to be fake. That was—God, February 1946. They got the men who sold the stuff, I’m happy to say. Not that it really matters. Made in France, it was. Glucose and face powder dissolved in genuine penicillin vials. Of course, by the time anyone knew it was fake it was too late.” She shook her head. “It’s hard to remember what it was like back then. People would do or sell anything to make money.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be, darling. It was a long time ago. Besides, even after I had it, the baby, I was never really sure I wanted it.”

  “Under the circumstances, that’s hardly surprising,” I said. “You never told me this before.”

  “Well, you had your own problems, didn’t you?” She shrugged. “And that, of course, is the real reason I never sold my body to the Amis, of course. Gang rape. It tends to take away your sexual appetite for quite a while. By the time I did start feeling inclined that way again, it was too late. I was on the shelf, more or less.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Too late to find a husband, anyway. German men are still in rather short supply, in case you hadn’t noticed. Most of the good ones were in Soviet POW camps. Or Cuba.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true. You’re a fine-looking woman, Elisabeth.”

  She took my hand and squeezed.

  “Do you really think so, Bernie?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Oh, there have been men, all right. I’m not completely clapped out, it’s true. But it’s not like it used to be. Nothing ever is, of course. But…There was an American who worked for the U.S. State Department at HICOG, in the Headquarters Compound on Saargemünder Strasse. But he went home to his wife and children in Wichita. And there was a guy, a sergeant, who ran Club 48—that’s the U.S. Army’s NCO club. It was him who helped me to get the job at The Queen. Before he went home, too. That was six months ago. My life.” She shrugged. “It’s not exactly Effi Briest, is it. Oh, I do okay at the club. Pays well. The customers behave. Good tippers, I’ll say that for the Amis. At least they show their appreciation. Not like the British. Worst tippers in the world. Hell, even the French tip better than the British. You wouldn’t think they’d won the war, they’re so tight with their money. They say that even the mousetraps are empty in the British sector. I tell you, this fellow Nasser, I’m on his side. And when Uruguay beat England, I think I was even more happy than I was when West Germany won the actual trophy.”

  “Talking of West Germany, Elisabeth, do you go there ever?”

  “No. I’d have to cross the Green Border. And I don’t like to do that. I did it once. I felt like a criminal in my own country.”

  “And East Berlin. Do you ever go there?”

  “Sometimes. But there’s less and less cause to go. There’s not much there for those of us who live in West Berlin. Just before Jimmy—my American sergeant—went back to America, we took a trip around old Berlin. He wanted to buy a camera, and you can still get a good one for not much money in East Berlin. We got a camera, too, but not in a shop. On the black market. The only shop we visited, a department store the communists call H.O., had very little in it. And as soon as I saw it, I realized why so many East Germans turned up here last year to get a food parcel. And why quite a few of them never went back.”

  “But you wouldn’t say it was dangerous.”

  “For someone like me? No. You read about the odd person getting snatched by the Soviets. Injected with something and then bundled into a car. Well, I suppose if you were important, that might happen. But then, you wouldn’t go there in the first place if you were someone like that, would you? All the same, I wouldn’t have thought you would want to go across to the Russian sector. You having escaped from a POW camp and all.”

  “Look, Elisabeth, there’s nobody left in Berlin I can really trust. If it comes to that, there’s no one left I even know. And I need a favor. If there was anyone else I could ask, I would.”

  “Go ahead and ask.”

  I handed her an envelope. “I was hoping I could ask you to deliver this. I’m afraid I don’t know the correct address, and I thought—well, I thought you might help. For old times’ sake.”

  She looked at the name on the envelope and was silent for a moment.

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “But it would help me a lot.”

  “Of course I’ll do it. Without you, without that money you sent, I don’t know how I’d ever have hung on to this place. Really I don’t.”

  I finished my coffee and then my cigarette. I must have looked as if I was about to leave, because she said, “Will I see you again?”

  “Yes. Only, I’m not sure when. I’m not living in Berlin at the moment. For the foreseeable future, I’ll be staying in Göttingen.” She looked puzzled at that. So I explained: “With the VdH? Göttingen is near the Friedland Transit Camp for returning POWs. They’re there for only a couple of weeks, during which time they receive food, clothing, and medical aid. They’re also given army-discharge certificates, which they need to obtain a residency permit, a food-ration card, and a travel warrant to get home.”

  “Poor devils,” she said. “How bad was it, really?”

  “I’m not about to sit here and tell any woman from Berlin about suffering,” I said. “But maybe, because of it, we’ll know how and where to find each other.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Do you have a telephone?”

  “Not here. If I want to make a call, I always use the telephone at the club. If you ever need to get in contact with me, that’s the best place to do it. If I’m not there, they’ll take a message.” She found a pencil and paper and scribbled down the number: 24-38-93.

  I put the number in my empty wallet.

  “Or you could write to me here, of course. You should have written before to let me know you were coming. I’d have prepared something. A c
ake. I wouldn’t have been in my dressing gown. And you should have sent me an address in Cuba. So that I could have written back to thank you.”

  “That might have been a little difficult,” I confessed. “I was living there under a false name.”

  “Oh,” she said, as if such an idea had never occurred to her. “You’re not in any trouble, are you, Bernie?”

  “Trouble?” I smiled ruefully. “Life is trouble. Only the naïve and the young imagine that it’s anything else. It’s only trouble that finds out if we’re up to the task of staying alive.”

  “Because if you are in trouble…”

  “I hate to ask you another favor….”

  She took my hand and kissed the fingers, one by one. “When are you going to get it through your thick Prussian head,” she said. “I’ll help you in any way I can.”

  “All right.” I thought for a moment and then, taking her pencil and paper, I started to write. “When you get to the club, I want you to make a call to this number in Munich. Ask for a Mr. Kramden. If Mr. Kramden isn’t there, tell whoever it is that you will call back in two hours. Don’t leave your name and number, just tell them that you want to leave a message from Carlos. When you get to speak to Kramden, tell him I’ll be staying with my uncle François in Göttingen for the next few weeks at the Pension Esebeck, until I’ve met Monsieur Voltaire off the train from the Cherry Orchard. Tell Mr. Kramden that if he and his friends need to contact me I’ll be going to the St. Jacobi Church each day I’m in Göttingen, at around six or seven o’clock in the evening, and to look for a message under the front pew.”

  She looked over my notes. “I can do that.” She nodded firmly. “Göttingen’s quaint. Pretty. What Germany used to look like. I’ve often thought it would be nice to live there.”

  I shook my head. “You and me, Elisabeth. We’re Berliners. Hardly cut out for fairy-tale living.”

  “I suppose you’re right. What will you do after Göttingen?”

  “I don’t know, Elisabeth.”

  “It seems to me,” she said, “that if there’s no one else in Berlin you know, or who you can trust, then you should think yourself free to come and live here. Like you did before. Remember?”

  “Why else do you think I sent you that money from Cuba? I hadn’t forgotten. Lately, I’ve had to do quite a bit of remembering one way or another. Telling my story to—well, it doesn’t matter who. A lot of stuff I’d rather forget. But I don’t forget that. You can depend on it. I never forgot about you.”

  Of course, not everything had been told back at Landsberg.

  A man should keep some secrets, after all, especially when he’s talking to the CIA.

  Special Agents Scheuer and Frei might have opened a file in Elisabeth Dehler’s name if I’d told them every little detail about what happened on the train from the pleni camp in Johannesgeorgenstadt to Dresden, and then Berlin, in 1946.

  I hadn’t wanted them bothering her, so I hadn’t mentioned the fact that the address on the envelope containing the several hundred dollars Mielke had given me was Elisabeth’s.

  29

  GERMANY, 1946

  Instead of pocketing this money, I’d resolved to deliver it to her myself—as the MVD assassin would have done if I hadn’t killed him first. Besides, I needed somewhere to stay, and where better to stay than with a former lover? So, when I got off the train from Dresden in the no-less-depressing ruin of Anhalter Station in Berlin, I’d quickly boarded a westbound tram and headed straight for the Kurfürstendamm.

  From there I walked south, convinced that at least one of Hitler’s predictions had come true. In the early days of his success, he had told us that “in five years you will not recognize Germany,” and this was certainly true. Kurfürstendamm, formerly one of Berlin’s most prosperous streets, was now little more than a series of ruins. Even for me, a former policeman, it was hard to find one’s way around. Once, forgetting the uniform I was wearing, I asked a woman for directions and she hurried away without reply, as if I’d been the carrier of plague. Later on, when I heard about what the Red Army had done to the women of Berlin, I wondered why she’d not picked up a rock and thrown it at me.

  Motzstrasse was not as badly damaged as some. Even so, it was hard to imagine anyone safely living there. One decent earthmover could probably have leveled the entire street. It was like walking through a scene from the apocalypse. Piles of rubble. Buttressed façades. Moon-sized craters. The prevailing smell of sewage. The road underfoot as uncertain as a mountain path. Burned-out armored vehicles. The occasional grave.

  The window on the landing in front of Elisabeth’s apartment was gone and boarded over, but the weather-beaten door looked secure enough. I knocked at it for several minutes until a voice shouted down the stairs and told me that Elisabeth was out until five. I glanced at the dead major’s watch and realized I needed to kill some time without drawing too much attention to myself. It wasn’t that an MVD officer was unusual in the American sector, but I thought it best to avoid contact with anyone official, who might have asked what I was doing.

  I walked until I found a church I almost recognized, on Kieler Strasse, although given the state of Kieler Strasse it might just as easily have been Düppelstrasse. The church was Catholic and strangely tall and angular, like a castle on a mountaintop. Inside there was a fine mosaic basilica that had escaped the bombs. I sat down and closed my eyes, not from reverence but sheer fatigue. But this was hardly the quiet sanctuary I had expected. Every few minutes an American serviceman would come in with loud, polished shoes, genuflect to the altar, and then wait patiently on a pew near the confessional. Business was brisk. After the day I’d had, I might have confessed myself, but I wasn’t feeling particularly sorry about that. I’d been wanting to kill a Russian—any Russian—ever since the Battle of Königsberg. I told Him that myself. I didn’t need a priest to come between us in what was, by now, an old argument.

  I stayed there for a long time. Long enough to make peace with myself, if not God, and when I left the Rosary Church—for that was its name—I put a few of the MVD major’s coins into a collection box, for his sins, if not mine. Then I walked north again. And this time Elisabeth was at home, although she regarded my uniform with horror.

  “What the hell are you doing here dressed like that?” she demanded.

  “Ask me in and I’ll explain. Believe me, it’s not at all what it looks like.”

  “It better not be, or you can be on your way again. I don’t care who you are.”

  I entered her apartment, and it was immediately clear from the bed and the gas ring that she was living in just the one room. Seeing my eyebrows flex their surprise, she said, “It’s easier to heat like this.”

  I dropped Major Weltz’s bag onto the floor and took the envelope of money from inside my gimnasterka tunic and handed it over. Now it was Elisabeth’s turn to exercise her eyebrows. She fanned herself with several hundred American dollars and then read Mielke’s note, which made everything clear.

  “Did you read this?”

  “Of course.”

  “So where’s the Russian who was supposed to give me this?”

  “Dead. This is his uniform I’m wearing.” I thought it best to keep things as simple as possible.

  “Why didn’t you keep this for yourself?”

  “Oh, I would have,” I said, “if it had been anyone else’s name on that envelope. After all, it’s not like we’re strangers.”

  “No,” she said. “All the same, it’s been a long time. I thought you must be dead.”

  “Why not? Everyone else is.” I told her, as briefly as possible, that I’d been in a Soviet POW camp and that I’d escaped. “I was supposed to be on my way to Berlin and then to the Anti-Fascist School near Moscow. All arranged by our mutual friend, of course. But I think he figured I knew too much about his past and decided the safer thing was to have me eliminated. So here I am. I thought that the woman named on that envelope might be prepared to overlook the fact tha
t I left her for another woman and let me lie low for a couple of days. Especially when she saw those dollars.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “How is Kirsten?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen or heard from Frau Gunther since Christmas 1944. Earlier on today, I took a walk down my old street and found it isn’t there anymore.”

  “I guess if it had been, then you wouldn’t be here now and I wouldn’t have this.”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  “Well, that’s honest, anyway.” She thought for a moment. “People who were bombed out usually leave a little red card on the ruins, with some sort of address, in case a loved one turns up.”

  “Well, maybe that’s it. Loved one. Kirsten never was what you’d call loving. Unless you mean herself, of course. She always loved herself.” I shook my head. “There wasn’t any little red card. I looked.”

  “There are other ways of contacting relatives,” said Elisabeth.

  “Not looking like this there aren’t. It’s only a matter of time before I’m picked up. And shot. Or sent back to the POW camp, which would be worse.”

  “It’s true. Maybe it’s the uniform, but you don’t look so good. I’ve seen healthier skeletons.” She shrugged. “Very well. You can stay here. The first time you try any funny stuff, you’re on your toes. Meanwhile, I’ll see what I can find out about Kirsten.”

  “Thanks. Look, I have a little money of my own. Perhaps you could find or even buy me some clothes, too.”

  She nodded. “I’ll go to the Reichstag first thing in the morning.”

  “The Reichstag? I was thinking of something a little less formal, perhaps.”

  “That’s where the black market is,” she said. “The biggest in the city. Believe me, there’s nothing you can’t get there. From a pair of nylons to a fake denazification certificate. Perhaps I can get you one of those, too. Of course, it’ll mean I’m late for work.”

  “Tailoring?”

  She shook her head grimly. “I’m a servant, Bernie,” she said. “Like nearly everyone left alive in Berlin. I’m the housekeeper for a family of American diplomats in Zehlendorf. Hey, perhaps I can find you a job, too. They need a gardener. I can go into the labor office at McNair on my way back from work tomorrow.”