by Len Deighton
Stand outside the station and look towards Weidendamm Bridge and the narrow River Spree. On the night of the 1st of May 1945 Martin Bormann and a furtive band of Nazi big shots crept along this street and under this railway arch that is a part of the elevated station. They’d emerged from the dank safety of the Führerbunker, just down the street, where Hitler – married for only a few hours – having then killed his wife and committed suicide, had been doused with fifty litres of aviation spirit and ignited for a funeral pyre. The escapers were trying to get to Rechlin airport, which was still under German control. An experimental six-engined Junkers Ju 390 was parked there. It was capable of flying to Manchuria, and Hans Bauer, Hitler’s personal pilot, was with the party and ready to prove it. But they had little chance of getting that far. Half of Berlin was on fire and the other half was thronging with trigger-happy Red Army soldiers, and even if most of the Ivans were hopelessly drunk, that did not mean that such a conspicuous bunch of Nazis could escape unnoticed. Some Tiger tanks of the SS Nordland Division were on the far side of the River Spree, and shell-fire from them dropped among the escapers. Bauer was carrying in his pack Hitler’s favourite painting of Frederick the Great, and Bormann was carrying his Führer’s last Will and Testament to proclaim it to the world. They got across the river and sheltered in a well-known brothel that stood on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and the Schiffbauerdamm. After a discussion with the brothel-keeper and her daughter the two men set out along the same S-Bahn railway embankment that my train had followed, past the hospital, to where the Wall has now been constructed to block off the Invalidenstrasse. A few more steps and perhaps they would have escaped, but Bauer was taken prisoner by an alert Red Army man and Bormann bit hard on a cyanide capsule and died. Hitler’s last Will and Testament was never seen again.
Now I walked across the Weidendamm Bridge and nodded at the spot where the brothel once sheltered its much-sought visitors. I loved this filthy old town, and while away in California I’d sorely missed its inescapable allure. It wasn’t just practical reasons that made me choose to walk to Pankow. I wanted to feel the hard pot-holed paving under my feet and sniff the browncoal that polluted the air, and see the irrepressible Berliners go about their day.
Pankow is a Bezirk; a borough that comes complete with Bürgermeister and council. It’s on the north side of Berlin, and is one of the larger ones. To get there from Friedrichstrasse station I walked right across the Prenzlauer Berg. It gave me a chance to be sure I wasn’t shadowed. The Department’s instruction manuals insist that a man walking is a perfect target, but I’d joined the Department as a Kellerkind – a street-wise Berlin kid who played in the city’s postwar rubble – and I believed I could spot a tail within five minutes of the first contact. I knew the city streets and I knew the back alleys. I knew the big apartment buildings, many of them no more than gutted shells by war’s end, that I’d watched as they were rebuilt to the original cramped specifications of their nineteenth-century designs. I knew which ones had courtyards and second courtyards – Hinterhofs – and exits that emerged on the far side of the block.
I carried in my pocket a letter to post. This provided an excuse to go to a post-box and then turn about and go back the way I’d come. It is often all that is needed to totally disorganize even a skilled surveillance. I was there in twenty minutes.
VERDI’s father lived just round the corner from the Rathaus at the top of Mühlenstrasse, near the eye clinic. Berlin is not a very old town, compared with London or Paris. At the beginning of the century it was not very extensive. Fifteen minutes’ walk from the city centre you can already spot here and there the remains of grand country-style mansions, built by men who wanted to be well away from the Alexanderplatz and the hustle and bustle of city life. Now most such mansions had been demolished by urban planners and replaced with apartment blocks, their grounds and gardens swallowed up by sports centres or parks or Volksschwimmhalle like the one that could be seen from the apartment where Fedosov lived.
I knew these streets. This block was conveniently close to Pankow S-Bahn station, Pankow U-Bahn station, and to the police station too. These were the places chosen to house VIPs, senior security officers, a few Red Army veterans like Fedosov, and retired Stasi staff. At one time there was a permanent police patrol around the block, but even here the economy was being squeezed and today I could not see a uniformed officer.
Apart from an ugly modern block of apartments this was a street of old buildings. Single-family dwellings right up until Hitler’s time, they were now divided into spacious apartments like the one that Fedosov occupied on the second floor of number 16.
‘Ja?’ said a voice through the plastic grille at the side of the door.
‘Colonel Fedosov?’ I said, making a guess at what rank he might have retired with.
‘Captain Fedosov,’ said the voice. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ It was the petulant voice of a capricious old man.
‘I want to speak to you. I’m a friend of your son. Can I come in?’
‘Come up.’
I stood there shivering in the cold. There was some grunting and groaning and eventually a loud buzzer sounded and the door lock snapped open to admit me. As I pushed my way inside the warmth met me. No matter what you didn’t like about German communism, its heating arrangements were always extravagant to a fault. Heating was provided by the State as a part of the rental and they did not stint.
The lobby was grand, its floor black and white marble in elaborate patterns. Pankow had escaped from the war relatively intact. The Red Army’s artillery bombardments, and the air attacks, had concentrated upon the Mitte, the Reichstag, the Chancellory, Wilhelmstrasse and the Palace. After an initial few days of raping and looting, the best houses of the still intact bourgeois boroughs like this one had been commandeered for the military and political occupiers.
Even the marble staircase was original, with an ornate balustrade, although there was an unmistakable institutional look to the dull colours of the paintwork and the austerity of the repairs and fittings. Fedosov emerged from his front door above and looked down the staircase-well to see me. ‘Second floor,’ he called. His voice was hard as it echoed off the marble and brick. He didn’t seem to care who I was.
‘Can you spare me ten minutes of your time?’ I asked as I came huffing and puffing to his landing.
He nodded. He was a small man with one of those ferocious moustaches that you see generals of Stalin’s Red Army hiding behind in old photos. I wondered if he had some circulatory problem, for despite the comfortable warmth provided by the central heating system he was wearing layer upon layer of garments: a long sleeveless padded coat over a white roll-neck sweater from whose collar a blue shirt was trying to escape, brown baggy trousers, thick woollen socks and zip-sided red velvet slippers bearing his initials VF in gold embroidery. He looked like a marginally more prosperous version of one of the vagrants who are nowadays to be seen sleeping in the streets of most large towns of the affluent West.
‘Come in. Hang your coat on the hook,’ he said. He no doubt thought I was a writer asking him once more to plant the red banner on the roof of the Reichstag. Fedosov’s apartment was large and comfortable. His long-term residence here was evident on every side. It was a strange collection of treasures and keepsakes: ancient books, a pendulum clock, a crucifix, photos, badges, medals and souvenirs of a long military career.
‘I’d like ten minutes of your time,’ I said.
‘Go on through,’ he said.
The second room into which he’d shown me was a neat little den with a view of the street. Outside, on the window-sill, there was a wooden bird shelter fitted with a shallow water-dish. The carpets, like the armchairs, were old and large and run-down. They looked as if they might have served a generation or two of Berliners prior to the arrival of Fedosov and his comrades in May 1945. ‘Sit down,’ he said. I had the feeling that Fedosov would have willingly given ten minutes of his time to anyone who happened by. Thirt
y minutes perhaps.
On a side-table there was a pile of library books, copies of the Russian Army weekly newspaper and some Party magazines, all printed in Russian script. You have to be very bored to be driven to such reading matter. I looked around. ‘What a lovely apartment,’ I said. It was a shrine to Stalinism. The old brute’s framed portrait was in a place of honour. Arrayed round it were countless enamel souvenir plaques. A thousand rippling red flags celebrated endless Party events: rallies, conventions and anniversaries. Facing the window, where it got the best light, there was a large framed print of the action of May Day 1945 when Fedosov and the men of Banner Party No. 5 took their flag to the top of the Reichstag amid the bullets and shell fragments. The artist had improved considerably upon the well-known heavily retouched re-enactment that the Red Army photographers took in full daylight after hostilities ended, a photo in which sightseers could be seen in the streets below. In this painting the bullets were flying. It was dawn, with a very red sun prising its way through golden clouds. The men were tall and strong and handsome and had disdained such things as steel helmets and bayonets and guns. Their well-tailored uniforms were only slightly stained and their hands grasped a gigantic banner that floated in the wind so that its golden hammer-and-sickle device was well in evidence. This was war the way the propaganda service fought it.
‘Your son used to know me,’ I said. He moved a book from his armchair and sat down opposite me. I produced a pack of Philip Morris, took one and offered them to him. He took the pack and looked at it carefully before putting a cigarette into his mouth. ‘Back in the old days.’ I leaned forward and lit his cigarette for him, using a cigarette lighter that had belonged to my father. ‘Keep the packet,’ I said. I’d hoped that the lighter, a distinctive one with a double-headed eagle design, might provoke a memory, or even a comment. But he gave no sign of recognizing it.
‘Old days? When?’ He didn’t look like a soldier. That is to say he didn’t look like any of the retired military men that I knew in the West. My idea of a soldier was a fit active man with a ramrod spine, military haircut and brisk voice. But Fedosov wasn’t that kind of soldier: he’d been just one man of millions and millions who had hacked their way from Moscow to Berlin on foot. He served under generals who openly affirmed that the quickest way of removing an enemy minefield was to send an infantry company to advance across it. Fedosov had survived three years of Eastern Front fighting armed only with an obsolete submachine gun and his quickness of mind. Never mind his battlefield commission and the artist’s interpretation, such a man was not likely to be of the type who recklessly exposed himself to enemy fire. I reasoned that the law of averages said Fedosov would have learned to let others jump over the parapet and go to kill a hundred Germans single-handed; Fedosov, I decided, was going to be a man of caution and resource. He was hardly likely to resemble the men who presented arms outside Buckingham Palace. ‘Do you speak Russian?’ he asked.
‘A word or two.’
‘Old days when?’ he said again. He kept to his German; if he was going to relate his war experiences he wanted more than a word or two.
Fedosov got up to find an ashtray for me. I could look at him more carefully now. He was small and muscular and inclined to be hunched, perhaps as the result of some injury. He had a furtive manner and a dark-complexioned face that almost hid the scars of an unstitched wound that disfigured his cheek and extended to his ear.
‘The days of the airlift,’ I said. ‘Back when you worked with my father.’ I had given up smoking; I hadn’t had a cigarette in over a month. But, sitting there with a cigarette in one hand and a lighter in the other, I found that in Europe it is not so easy to maintain such embargoes. Everyone smokes, and the air of every restaurant and café, every train compartment and every home, is hazy with tobacco smoke. I lit up and he placed the ashtray at my elbow.
‘Air Lift. That is a long time ago,’ said Fedosov, his face betraying no sign that he might be guessing the identity of my father. I watched him carefully. I was in no hurry. One of the windows had been fitted with wooden shelves so that potted plants of all shapes and sizes – mostly cacti – filled the entire space. More plants crowded the wooden bench in front of us, and on the floor under it there was a bag of plant food and some empty pots. The light coming between the plants backlit his wispy white hair, making a fluffy halo.
‘Nineteen forty-nine,’ I said. I flicked ash into the large chinaware ashtray in the base of which the flags of the DDR and the Soviet Union were bound together with a scroll bearing the slogan: ‘Freedom, unity and socialism.’
‘You were not even born,’ he said.
‘I was very young,’ I admitted. ‘But I remember the planes going over – one every few seconds.’
He smoked the cigarette, letting the smoke trail from his mouth and nostrils, savouring it with eyes half-closed, as Dicky Cruyer did when he was showing you how to judge claret. ‘Do you know who lives in the apartment downstairs on the ground floor?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Klenze. Theodore Klenze, the famous conductor.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘The Bruckner specialist. He conducts at the Opera and works with all the big orchestras. Leipzig, the Brno State and in London too. I have all his records.’
Why shouldn’t the old man be proud to live so near him? As with every regime in the East, the earning of hard-currency royalties was the ultimate achievement in this hard-pressed communist land. Such earners were cosseted and given the best of everything, including comfortable houses. To be Klenze’s neighbour was to have shared that pinnacle of success. ‘Yes, he’s world-famous,’ I said.
‘When did you last see my son Andrey?’ asked Fedosov.
‘He’s important now,’ I said, rather than reveal it was to shoot at him on a country road near Magdeburg. ‘He runs his own department. Or so I heard.’ It seemed like a way of getting the old man started.
‘His pension will be twice mine,’ said Fedosov. ‘Mind you, he works hard; very hard. Did you know his wife?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘I wish he’d get married again, but he says it’s none of my business and I suppose he’s right.’
Perhaps he was still hoping that, by some miracle, I would start asking him about the Red Banner and forget his former indiscretion with the British Secret Intelligence Service. I nodded to show that I had no strong feelings about VERDI’s nuptial ambitions and we sat there staring at each other and smoking and thinking and nodding and watching the sparrows come to the window-sill, find no bread there and peck at the ice that had formed in the water-dish. He watched them solemnly as they flew away chirping angrily. I could see his mind was racing. All this small-talk was just a way of providing time enough to get my sudden appearance into some sort of perspective, to decide if I represented a threat or an opportunity. Or both.
‘He lives downstairs. Klenze, I mean. Not my son. The door with the brass knocker.’ He smiled.
I flicked ash upon ‘Freedom, unity and socialism’ and looked at this friendly old man so happily ensconced in his gemütlich little home. It was easy to forget that this white-haired pensioner and his hard-working secret-policeman son – helped by dedicated Party workers, apparatchiks, writers and intellectuals and musicians like Herr Klenze, who all were provided with equally comfortable environments – were propping up the whole rotten and corrupt system. It was men such as Fedosov who built the Wall and patrolled the electric fences around the work camps, and kept the communist world subdued at gun-point.
‘Who was your father?’ he said suddenly.
‘Brian Samson. The British rezident-director in West Berlin.’
He nodded sagely. Rezident-director was a KGB concept and not an accurate description of my father’s job, and still less of Frank Harrington’s role, but it was enough. ‘I remember him,’ he said soberly.
‘You worked for him,’ I said. ‘All through the Luftbrücke time, and long after.’
�
��No.’
‘You gave him good and accurate accounts of all the important meetings in Karlshorst that were concerned with the air bridge and Moscow’s plans to counter it.’
‘Do you know what you are saying?’
‘You reported to the British SIS,’ I insisted.
He got up and came to stand over me, his hands clenching in anger. ‘I’ll send for the police,’ he threatened.
‘Send for the KGB,’ I said. ‘Send for the Stasi; send for your son.’
‘What are you after?’ He walked away as if he would not wait to hear my reply.
‘I was in the rezidentura,’ I said. ‘I was just a child, but I knew my father came regularly to Pankow all through that time. And even after the Wall was up. My mother even suspected him of having a mistress here. But it was you he was meeting. I remember my parents, their voices raised in anger about him going to Pankow once a week.’
‘No.’
‘I’ve seen the documents. They are still on file in London.’
‘You are lying.’
From my pocket I took the payments card. Exposed to the bright light coming through the window the card looked very old and tattered. Its yellow colour was faded almost to white, and some of the ink signatures were faint. Only the pencilled entries were unchanged. Fedosov peered over my shoulder to see exactly what it was. I passed it back to him. He looked at it for a moment before going to fetch his spectacles from a case that was alongside his library book. With his glasses on he looked again at the card.