by Len Deighton
Potsdamer Strasse is Schöneberg’s main street, a wide thoroughfare that is called Hauptstrasse at one end and continues north to the Tiergarten. You can find everything you want there and a lot of things you’ve been trying to avoid. There are smart shops and slums, kabob counters and superb nineteenth-century houses now listed as national monuments. Here is a neobaroque palace – the Volksgerichtshof – where Hitler’s judges passed death sentences at the rate of two thousand a year, so that citizens found guilty of telling even the most feeble anti-Nazi jokes were executed.
Behind the Volksgerichtshof – its rooms now echoing and empty except for those used by the Allied Travel Office and the Allied Air Security Office (where the four powers control the air lanes across East Germany to Berlin) – was the street where Lange lived. His top-floor apartment overlooked one of the seedier side streets. Lange was not his family name, it was not his name at all. ‘Lange’ – or ‘Lofty’ – was the descriptive nickname the Germans had given to this very tall American. His real name was John Koby. Of Lithuanian extraction, his grandfather had decided that ‘Kubilunas’ was not American enough to go over a storefront in Boston.
The street door led to a grim stone staircase. The windows on every landing had been boarded up. It was dark, the stairs illuminated by dim lamps protected against vandals by wire mesh. The walls were bare of any decoration but graffiti. At the top of the house the apartment door was newly painted dark grey and a new plastic bell push was labelled JOHN KOBY – JOURNALIST. The door was opened by Mrs Koby and she led me into a brightly lit, well-furnished apartment. ‘Lange was so glad you phoned,’ she whispered. ‘It was wonderful that you could come right away. He gets miserable sometimes. You’ll cheer him up.’ She was a small thin woman, her face pale like the faces of most Berliners when winter comes. She had clear eyes, a round face, and a fringe that came almost down to her eyebrows.
‘I’ll try,’ I promised.
It was the sort of untidy room in which you’d expect to find a writer or even a ‘journalist’. There were crowded bookshelves, a desk with an old manual typewriter, and more books and papers piled on the floor. But Lange had not been a professional writer for many years, and even in his newspaper days he’d never been a man who referred to books except as a last resort. Lange had never been a journalist, Lange had always been a streetwise reporter who got his facts at firsthand and guessed the bits in between. Just as I did.
The furniture was old but not valuable – the random mixture of shapes and styles that’s to be found in a saleroom or attic. Obviously a big stove had once stood in the corner, and the wall where it had been was covered in old blue-and-white tiles. Antique tiles like those were valuable now, but these must have been firmly affixed to the wall, for I had the feeling that any valuable thing not firmly attached had already been sold.
He was wearing an old red-and-gold silk dressing gown. Under it there were grey flannel slacks and a heavy cotton button-down shirt of the sort that Brooks Brothers made famous. His tie bore the ice-cream colours of the Garrick Club, a London meeting place for actors, advertising men, and lawyers. He was over seventy, but he was thin and tall and somehow that helped to give him a more youthful appearance. His face was drawn and clean-shaven, with a high forehead and grey hair neatly parted. He had a prominent bony nose and teeth that were too yellow and irregular to be anything but his own natural ones.
I remembered in time the sort of greeting that Lange gave to old friends – the Handschlag, the hands slapped together in that noisy handshake with which German farmers conclude a sale of pigs.
‘A Merry Christmas, Lange,’ I said.
‘It’s good to see you, Bernie,’ he said as he released my hand. ‘We were in the other house the last time we saw you. The apartment over the baker’s shop.’ His American accent was strong, as if he’d arrived only yesterday. And yet Lange had lived in Berlin longer than most of his neighbours. He’d come here as a newspaperman even before Hitler took power in 1933, and he’d stayed here right up to the time America got into World War II.
‘Coffee, Bernard? It’s already made. Or would you prefer a glass of wine?’ said Gerda Koby, taking my coat. She was a shy withdrawn woman, and although I’d known her since I was a child, she’d never called me ‘Bernie’. I think she would have rather called me ‘Herr Samson’, but she followed her husband in this matter as in all others. She was still pretty. Rather younger than Lange, she had once been an opera singer famous throughout Germany. They’d met in Berlin when he returned here as a newspaperman with the US Army in 1945.
‘I missed breakfast,’ I said. ‘A cup of coffee would be great.’
‘Lange?’ she said. He looked at her blankly and didn’t answer. She shrugged. ‘He’ll have wine,’ she told me. ‘He won’t cut down on it.’ She looked too small for an opera singer, but the ancient posters on the wall gave her billing above title: Wagner in Bayreuth, Fidelio at the Berlin State Opera, and in Munich a performance of Mongol Fury which was the Nazis’ ‘Aryanized’ version of Handel’s Israel in Egypt.
‘It’s Christmas, woman,’ said Lange. ‘Give us both wine.’ He didn’t smile and neither did she. It was the brusque way he always addressed her.
‘I’ll stick to coffee,’ I said. ‘I have a lot of driving to do. And I have to go to Police HQ and sign some forms later today.’
‘Sit down, Bernie, and tell me what you’re doing here. The last time we saw you you were settled in London, married, and with kids.’ His voice was hoarse and slurred slightly in the Bogart manner.
‘I am,’ I said. ‘I’m just here for a couple of days on business.’
‘Oh, sure,’ said Lange. ‘Stuffing presents down the chimneys: then you’ve got to get your reindeer together and head back to the workshops.’
‘The children must be big,’ said Mrs Koby. ‘You should be with them at home. They make you work at Christmas? That’s terrible.’
‘My boss has a mean streak,’ I said.
‘And you haven’t got a union by the sound of it,’ said Lange. He had little love for the Department and he made his dislike evident in almost everything he said about the men in London Central.
‘That’s right,’ I said.
We sat there exchanging small talk for fifteen minutes or maybe half an hour. I needed a little time to get used to Lange’s harsh, abrasive style.
‘Still working for the Department, eh?’
‘Not any longer,’ I said.
He ignored my denial; he knew it counted for nothing. ‘Well, I’m glad I got out of it when I did.’
‘You were the first man my dad recruited in Berlin, at least that’s what people say.’
‘Then they’ve got it right,’ said Lange. ‘And I was grateful to him. In 1945 I couldn’t wait to kiss the newspaper business goodbye.’
‘What was wrong with it?’
‘You’re too young to remember. They dressed reporters up in fancy uniforms and stuck “War Correspondent” badges on us. That was so all those dumb jerks in the Army press departments could order us about and tell us what to write.’
‘Not you, Lange. No one told you what to do.’
‘We couldn’t argue. I was living in an apartment that the Army had commandeered. I was eating US rations, driving an Army car on Army gas, and spending Army occupation money. Sure, they had us by the balls.’
‘They tried to stop Lange seeing me,’ said Mrs Koby indignantly.
‘They forbade all Allied soldiers to talk to any Germans. Those dummies were trying to sell the soldiers their crackpot non-fraternization doctrine. Can you imagine me trying to write stories here while forbidden to talk to Germans? The Army fumed and threw kids into the stockade, but when you’ve got young German girls walking past the GIs patting their asses and shouting “Verboten”, even the Army brass began to see what a dumb idea it was.’
‘It was terrible in 1945 when I met Lange,’ said Gerda Koby. ‘My beautiful Berlin was unrecognizable. You’re too young to remember, B
ernard. There were heaps of rubble as tall as the tenement blocks. There wasn’t one tree or bush left in the entire city; the Tiergarten was like a desert – everything that would burn had long since been cut down. The canals and waterways were all completely filled with rubble and ironwork, pushed there to clear a lane through the streets. The whole city stank with the dead; the stench from the canals was even worse.’
It was uncharacteristic of her to speak so passionately. She came to a sudden stop as if embarrassed. Then she got up and poured coffee for me from a vacuum flask and poured a glass of wine for her husband. I think he’d had a few before I arrived.
The coffee was in a delicate demitasse that contained no more than a mouthful. I swallowed it gratefully. I can’t get started in the morning until I’ve had some coffee.
‘Die Stunde Null,’ said Lange. ‘Germany’s hour zero – I didn’t need anyone to explain what that meant when I got here in 1945. Berlin looked like the end of the world had arrived.’ Lange scratched his head without disarranging his neatly combed hair. ‘And that’s the kind of chaos I had to work in. None of these Army guys, or the clowns who worked for the so-called Military Government, knew the city. Half of them couldn’t even speak the language. I’d been in Berlin right up until 1941 and I was able to renew all those old contacts. I set up the whole agent network that your dad ran into the East. He was smart, your dad, he knew I could deliver what I promised. He assigned me to work as his assistant and I told the Army where to stick their “War Correspondent” badge, pin and all.’ He laughed. ‘Jesus, but they were mad. They were mad at me and mad at your dad. The US Army complained to Eisenhower’s intelligence. But your dad had a direct line to Whitehall and that trumped their ace.’
‘Why did you go to Hamburg?’ I said.
‘I’d been here too long.’ He drank some of the bright red wine.
‘How long after that did Bret Rensselaer do his “fact-finding mission”?’ I asked.
‘Don’t mention that bastard to me. Bret was just a kid when he came out here trying to “rationalize the administration”.’ Lange put heavy sarcastic emphasis on the last three words. ‘He was the best pal the Kremlin ever had, and I’ll give you that in writing any time.’
‘Was he?’ I said.
‘Go to the archives and look…or better still, go to the “yellow submarine”.’ He smiled and studied my face to see if I was surprised at the extent of his knowledge. ‘The yellow submarine – that’s what I hear they call the big London Central computer.’
‘I don’t know…’
‘Sure, sure,’ said Lange. ‘I know, you’re not in the Department any more; you’re over here to conduct a concert of Christmas carols for the British garrison.’
‘What did Bret Rensselaer do?’
‘Do? He dismantled three networks that I was running into the Russian Zone. Everything was going smoothly until he arrived. He put a spanner into the works and eventually got London to pack me off to Hamburg.’
‘What was his explanation?’ I persisted.
‘Bret didn’t provide any explanations. You know him better than that. No one could stop him. Bret was only on temporary attachment to us at that time, but he’d been given some piece of paper in London Central that said he could do anything.’
‘And what did my father do?’
‘Your father wasn’t here. They got him out of the way before Bret arrived. I had no one to appeal to; that was part of the setup.’
‘Setup? Were you set up?’ I said.
‘Sure I was set up. Bret was going out to get me. Mine was the only desk in Berlin that was getting good material from the Russians. Jesus. I had a guy in Karlshorst who was bringing me day-to-day material from the Russian commandant’s office. You can’t do better than that.’
‘And he was stopped?’
‘He was one of the first we lost. I went across to the US Army to offer them what I had left, but Bret had already been there. I got the cold shoulder. I had no friends there because of the showdown I’d had with them during the early days. So I went to Hamburg just as London Central wanted.’
‘But you didn’t stay.’
‘In Hamburg? No, I didn’t stay in Hamburg. Berlin is my town, mister. I just went to Hamburg long enough to work my way through my resignation and then I got out. Bret Rensselaer had got what he wanted.’
‘What was that?’
‘He’d showed us what a big shot he was. He’d denazified the Berlin office and wrecked our best networks. “Denazified”, that’s what he called it. Who the hell did he think we could find who would risk their necks prying secrets from the Russkies – Socialists, Communists, left-wing liberals? We had to use ex-Nazis; they were the only pros we had. By the time your dad came back and tried to pick up the pieces, Bret was reading philosophy at some fancy college. Your dad wanted me to work with him again. But I said, “No dice.” I didn’t want to work for London Central, not if I was going to be looking over my shoulder in case Bret came back to breathe fire all over me again. No, sir.’
‘It was my fault, Bernard,’ said Mrs Koby. Again she spoke my name as if it was unfamiliar to her. Perhaps she always felt self-conscious as a German amongst Lange’s American and British friends.
‘No, no, no,’ said Lange.
‘It was my brother,’ she persisted. ‘He came back from the war so sick. He was injured in Hungary just before the end. He had nowhere to go. Lange let him stay with us.’
‘Nah!’ said Lange angrily. ‘It was nothing to do with Stefan.’
‘Stefan was a wonderful boy.’ She said it with heartfelt earnestness as if she was pleading for him.
‘Stefan was a bastard,’ said Lange.
‘You didn’t know him until afterwards…It was the pain, the constant pain that made him so ill-natured. But before he went off to the war he was a kind and gentle boy. Hitler destroyed him.’
‘Oh, sure, blame Hitler,’ said Lange. ‘That’s the style nowadays. Everything was Hitler’s fault. How would Germans manage without the Nazis to blame everything on?’
‘He was a sweet boy,’ said Mrs Koby. ‘You never knew him.’
Lange gave a sardonic laugh that ended as a snort. ‘No, I never knew any sweet boy named Stefan, and that’s for sure.’
Mrs Koby turned all her attention to me and said, ‘Lange gave him a bedroom. At that time Lange was working for your people. We had a big apartment in Tegel, near the water.’
‘He came there,’ said Lange. ‘Bernie came there many times.’
‘Of course you did,’ said Mrs Koby. ‘And you never met my brother Stefan?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said.
‘Bernie wouldn’t remember Stefan,’ said Lange. ‘Bernie was just a kid when Stefan died. And for years Stefan hardly ever left that damned bedroom!’
‘Yes, poor Stefan. His life was so short and time passes so quickly,’ said Mrs Koby.
Lange explained to me. ‘My wife thinks that everybody cut her dead because Stefan had been a Waffen-SS officer. But in those days most Germans were too damned busy trying to find a handful of potatoes to feed their families. No one cared about their neighbours’ “regimental histories”.’
‘They cared,’ said Mrs Koby feelingly. ‘I am a German. People said things to me that they wouldn’t have said to you or to any American or British officer. And there were looks and murmurs that only a German would understand.’
‘Stefan was in the SS,’ said Lange contemptuously. ‘He was a major…what did they call SS majors – Obergruppenführer…?’
‘Sturmbannführer,’ supplied Mrs Koby wearily. Lange knew what an SS major was called, but he preferred a word that sounded cumbersome and comical to his ears. ‘They picked on Stefan because he was once an adjutant at Sepp Dietrich’s headquarters.’
‘Nah!’ said Lange. ‘He was only there a couple of weeks. He was an artillery man.’
‘They wanted Stefan to give evidence at the trial of General Dietrich, but he was too sick to go.’
It had become an argument now, the sort of quiet ritualistic dispute that couples indulge in only when visitors are there to sit in judgement.
‘Your brother had the bad luck to be in a division that bore the name of Adolf Hitler. Had he been in some other SS division, such as Prinz Eugen or the SS cavalry division Maria Theresia, he wouldn’t have attracted any comment at all.’ He smiled and drank some more of his blood-red wine. ‘Have a glass of wine, Bernie. Plum wine; Gerda makes it. It’s delicious.’
‘People can be so cruel,’ said Mrs Koby.
‘She means all those wonderful “liberals” who crawled out of the woodwork when Germany lost the war.’
‘It hurt Lange too,’ said Mrs Koby. ‘Bret Rensselaer came to the apartment one day and told him to get rid of Stefan. But Lange was brave; he told Rensselaer to go to hell. I loved him for that.’ She turned to her husband. ‘I loved you for that, Lange.’ I had the feeling that in all the years that had passed, she’d never told him before.
‘I don’t have creeps like Bret Rensselaer telling me who I can have in my apartment,’ growled Lange. ‘And where would Stefan have gone? He needed attention all the time. Sometimes Gerda was up all night with him.’
Mrs Koby said, ‘It was a terrible row…shouting. I thought Lange would hit him. Bret Rensselaer never forgave Lange after the argument. He said that Allied officers shouldn’t be sheltering SS war criminals. But Stefan wasn’t a criminal, he was just a soldier, a brave soldier who’d fought for his country.’
‘Bret loses his temper sometimes, Mrs Koby,’ I said. ‘He says things he doesn’t really mean.’
‘He was just a kid,’ said Lange again. Bret’s youthfulness had obviously added to Lange’s humiliation. ‘Having a rich father got junior a fancy intelligence assignment.’
‘It was the Russian woman,’ said Mrs Koby. ‘I always said she was behind it.’
‘Nah,’ said Lange.