Judgment in Berlin: A Spy Story

by Noel Hynd

  “Screw ‘em,” said Major Pickford. “Keep the damned stuff moving.”

  The Sunderlands returned to England, picked up more salt, returned with it, then gradually augmented their cargo with meat, cigarettes, whiskey, towels and linens, small hand tools, and shoes and boots as needed in Berlin.

  The Russians howled again. As they howled, Royal Navy seamen found an abandoned, half-sunken barge a kilometer upstream on the river, repaired it, and floated it to the location where the Sunderlands assembled. They retrofitted it with a pipeline, floated the pipeline with jerrycans, and created a mobile fueling depot. The operation came quickly to the attention of local Germans who were cheered by it. They pitched in and helped the British load and unload. Unable to leave well enough alone, one of the British seamen, who had also been an artist, painted the barge to look like a giant duck — to the amusement of local children.

  The Sunderland flights then expanded to ten a day. They had their liabilities: they had to be worked into the complicated Tempelhof flight patterns. Soon the British and the Americans were flying in fuel: coal to warm the city when the autumn came and gasoline, petrol as the British called it, to power generators and motor vehicles.

  The gasoline was a challenge. It was heavy, had to travel in heavy steel drums that made it even heavier, took up valuable cargo space, and had to be secured. An oil drum that broke lose in flight could kill a man. It was also a death sentence to the crew if a plane crashed.

  Allied cargo figures started to rise. They still couldn’t meet quotas and could barely feed Berlin. But as the Germans watched and as the Allied crews on the ground started to notice that some problems were being resolved, a more subtle message emerged, one that the Russians picked up on eventually.

  Giving fuel to Berlin suggested that the Allies were not going anywhere. It was a demonstration of resolve, although some on each side still didn’t believe it.

  The United States was digging in, stubbornly as always. No one was going anywhere without a fight. Or at least that was the message.

  Chapter 54

  Berlin – July 1948

  The car that Major Pickford made to appear was an Opel, pre-war from the late 1930s and if it could have talked, it probably could have told many exciting stories. Cochrane took Roth and Kern with him to Hangar 7 that Thursday night at nine PM. As the landing strips and the air above rumbled with American transports, and cargo flights set down and lifted off within minutes of each other, Cochrane and his two Germans pushed an Opel out the vehicle passage of the hangar to the roadway behind it.

  The Opel had been sitting for months. A mechanic named Clem from Louisiana had given it the once-over that afternoon: insecticide on the interior, fresh oil, ten liters of gasoline, clean windshield, upholstery wiped down, and it was ready to go.

  The three men crowded in. Otto Kern would drive and stay with the vehicle. He would deliver Cochrane and Roth to Club Weimar. Cochrane would go in first, buy a drink at the bar, and stay there. Roth would follow two minutes later. The men would not acknowledge each other. No point in indicating to anyone else that they were together. If one got in trouble, it allowed the other to coldcock the troublemaker and go find Kern with the car.

  After Roth bought a drink, Cochrane would scope out the place, see what was of interest, and find out if he could spot Bettina. Anna had said she was usually visible at a regular table on an upper-right balcony. Five years had passed since Cochrane had last seen her, so who knew what shape she was in? But he would persist. Meanwhile, Cochrane and Roth would remain in each other’s sight all evening.

  Both men wore hats. The hats were important. The hats were their version of semaphore flags. If a hat was removed, it was a sign of trouble. The hat held at chest level meant medium degree trouble but no need for departure. Hat in hand, held low at the side suggested that it was time to get out quick. As for the weapons, the pistols, they were to be used only to protect oneself or one another. No trawling in anyone else’s problem or fight.

  As Cochrane originally conceived the evening’s doings, Kern would drive long circles around the place, sit somewhere in the car, go idle, go past the front every twenty minutes. Fallback for that was the side exit and entrance on Brectenstrasse. Above all, stay clear of the local police. They were four and a half miles from Tempelhof and taxis and public transportation didn’t run at night. No electricity for the trams and trolleys. Too dangerous for hacks. It would be a long, dangerous walk even for two men with pistols. It was not something they wanted to do.

  Kern suggested a refinement on Cochrane’s plan, however.

  He lived about a kilometer away, much closer to Alexanderplatz than the end of the line. The streets there were quiet at night, better lit, and safer than the combative vice zone. He would loiter there at home with Cochrane’s permission but would drive past every twenty minutes – on the hour, at twenty past, and at twenty minutes before the hour.

  Cochrane admired the way Kern thought. Cochrane gave him permission.

  They arrived at the club at quarter to nine that evening. The block remained battered from the war, but someone had strung police-state, Communist-industrial lighting from end to end on both sides, using poles that had once been for phones, though no phones existed now in the neighborhood. It wasn’t difficult to spot the building that housed the Club Weimar. The only building that was up and running had had another use before the war — like the medical clinic and the new Lubyanka outpost that Cochrane had also visited. Cochrane guessed that the building that was now a club had been either a factory or a warehouse. But it didn’t matter.

  On arrival, they circled the block once, looked for hidden dangers, didn’t see any, and came back. “Park here, Otto,” Cochrane said softly as they moved up the block but had not yet reached the other vehicles. “Heinrich,” Cochrane said to Roth, “follow me in two minutes. Just as we planned.”

  Jawohl, came a guttural response from the back seat. Roth’s voice sometimes sounded as if it were coming up from beneath the street. Cochrane stepped out of the car and walked forward without looking back.

  There was a half-dozen cars in front, spread out, and none being too close to the next. A thug leaned against one, smoking a cigar, his arms folded across his chest. He stared at Cochrane because he hadn’t seen where Cochrane had come from.

  The goon gave the American a cold stare as he passed. Cochrane threw it back at him and kept going. This was no place to betray timidity or indecision.

  There was a burly chauffeur seated in a second car. Both the chauffeur and the standing man looked more Russian than German. Cochrane gave a careful glance as he passed each of them and saw Soviet military markings on both cars. The other cars were empty. Cochrane speculated that they were all together or maybe two groups of privileged revelers. The two caretakers looked like the security thugs the Soviets now had at most of their diplomatic functions, standing by the doors in lambskin leather, making sure no one left without permission.

  There may have been no hidden dangers that Cochrane could spot, but the obvious ones were sufficient. The conversation with Anna bounced back to him.

  It’s a den of vice for Russians and connected Germans,” she had said.

  Cochrane reached the door to the club, feeling four eyes on his back, maybe eight if Otto and Heinrich could still see him. As he neared the entrance to the club, he could smell cigarette smoke, hear voices upraised – male and female – and hear music, 1920s-style, live from a small band.

  Then there was the other noise. Almost absurdly, there was the sound of raspy, clanking motors, like a lawnmower or a threshing machine gone crazy. There were two of them, coming from both sides of the building and so loud that they gave the distant airplanes a run for their money. Cochrane could smell fumes, exhaust, and recognized the sound: they were generators, cranked up on diesel, providing the power to host the festivities within the club. In ways large and small, this was all making sense.

  The front door was half-open. Cochrane p
ushed his way in.

  Anna’s description had worked out perfectly so far. The bar was dark and crowded, maybe fifty men and a dozen females, but the bar area was lit enough so that he could see two bartenders, both men with slicked-down hair, white shirts, and ties. They were busy hustling drinks. Some men wore suits, others military uniforms. Cochrane saw an armada of gold, silver, and the red braid of the Soviet armed forces, including a few that looked more naval than army. A bunch of Red air force officers stood together.

  The women who circulated liberally were dressed to evoke the Weimar years: fake pearls and flapper dresses that were cut low on the tops and high on the thighs. Plenty of red lipstick and cigarette holders. Time had stood still, then gone in reverse. It was 1928 again. The soundtrack of voices was in Russian and German. Not surprisingly the bargirls spoke both. The girls looked more Germanic than Tartar or Slavic, but the arms that were around some of them or groping some others were all Russian. Cochrane could tell by the insignias on the cuffs.

  Cochrane made his way to the bar. He bought a bottle of beer. It was overpriced and warm. He paid with Deutschmarks and refrained from conversation. He knew he still had an accent. Little things like that could get a man shot in a place like this.

  Before him, behind the bar, which was out in the open as Anna had said, a large room rolled out for about fifty feet. Stairs on each side led downward. There was a ragtag band playing but playing well. Downstairs there was a stage that was dimly lit with nothing transpiring on it. He didn’t know whether there would be a show tonight but thought Anna had said that there was something every night to get the guys hot and excited.

  To the left, there was a seating area of table and chairs that wrapped around the room on the same level as the bar. Cochrane looked to the left and the right, scoped out the whole place, and took a close look at every woman.

  No Bettina. He would have had a sinking feeling, but he had just begun his search for the evening. For that matter, he saw no Anna, either.

  The bargirls might have been a distraction, but they left him alone. They were all busy. In one corner, a young man with glasses was doing a surprisingly good job with a battered accordion while the band now took a break. There was a wall of noise and voices. Cochrane was pleased. Music and noise could cover the small glitches in his accented German.

  Nearby, there was a huge colonel in an East German militia uniform. He was at least six-four and louder than any other three people present. He was boisterous and drunk out of his mind. He hoisted one of the flappers, one that was well less than half his weight, maybe two hundred fifty to one ten. He spun her around like a rifle in a drill, then hoisted her onto his shoulders as she squealed and laughed as other officers applauded. A huge Russian officer was similarly engaged with a second girl.

  The girls merrily rode them as they might ride a stallion, legs around the necks from behind. The Russian’s large brown eyes were wide and jolly. His girl grabbed his colonel’s hat and plopped it on her head as the top of her dress came down to her waist and all the colonel’s friends applauded as she rode him with bare breasts.

  For Cochrane, it was a perfect moment, even more perfect than it was for the giant East German officer and his Russian pal and the girls. No one was paying attention to Cochrane or Roth as the latter entered. Everyone was watching the girls and the clownish officers.

  The American and his German backup made eye contact. Roth went to the bar. Cochrane, carrying a bottle of beer, moved away from the bar and slipped through a group of Russian military men who were squeezing thin, audacious German women and blocking his access to the balcony corridor to the right.

  Throwing a glance to Roth every minute or so, he set his mind on finding Bettina, or as she was allegedly known here, Ilse Groening. Still, no one gave him any notice. He moved through the Russians and their girlfriends of the evening like black silk. Once he was gone from the bar, he had never been there. He exited the bottleneck of drinkers and came to a clear area just before the access to the elevated ramp above the main floor.

  He looked in the right direction and scanned faces and figures and groups of people at tables. Then his eyes slammed with a jolt on a figure of a thick woman in a shapeless, black dress. She was seated sideways to him. She was at a table in the near corner, as Anna had suggested; the woman known here as Ilse Groening. She was positioned where she could see the floor below, its clients, the important tables, the band, and the small stage.

  The woman looked to be in her late fifties. She smoked a cigarette in a holder. Cochrane could barely believe what he was seeing. In the compromised light and the shadows of the area where she sat, he couldn’t be sure. He thought that he recognized the characteristic crown of hair that framed her face and the way she held herself, drank, smoked, and smoldered at the world around her.

  But she had lost a considerable amount of weight. Much of the large, wide frame was gone. If this was Frau Schneidhuber, she looked simultaneously much better and far worse. She had died her hair jet-black and was engaged in an animated conversation with a pretty, open-faced girl who wore a flapper-style yellow dress and a long string of fake pearls the way the adventurous young girls had worn them in the Weimar Era.

  The conversation between the older woman and the younger one was one-way. The seated woman talked, the would-be flapper listened, not entirely pleased but saying nothing.

  Orders dispensed. Orders taken. Obedience personified.

  Cochrane approached them. The young woman scurried off in Cochrane’s direction, a flurry of bare arms and legs beneath a cloche hat, heading back to the bar. He caught a whiff of Evening in Paris as she bumped hard into him, excused herself with a girlish grin, blew him a suggestive kiss and hurtled past. She must have been sixteen, Cochrane guessed.

  The woman at the table looked up when Cochrane stood before her.

  Guten abend, he said, carefully avoiding any name. Her hand was brittle with a little quiver. So were the movements of her arms. She readjusted in her seat. There was a cigarette caddy, fashioned out of a black man as a bartender working a cocktail shaker. It was probably American but also very Weimar.

  Her head wobbled slightly. She squinted at him. Initially, she was startled and defensive. She wobbled again but then steadied as she peered through a fog of her own tobacco smoke.

  Then, her eyes illuminated. For a few moments, the better part of a miserable decade flew away to go torment someone else.

  “Why...! Good God Almighty,” she said. “Are you a ghost or in the flesh?”

  “The flesh, Bettina,” he said quietly.

  Several more seconds passed as reality sunk in.

  “You know, a little voice inside me always insisted you’d be back someday,” Bettina said. “Do sit down. I do believe I’m going to faint from joy.”

  Chapter 55

  Berlin – July 1948

  Cochrane sat. Across a distance of fifty feet, his gaze found Roth at the bar. Roth’s hat was still on his head. Things were still okay. The thought of Kern nursing the Opel around late evening Berlin gave Cochrane the jitters. There were already enough moving parts to this operation to make his guts explode and take his head with them.

  He sipped his beer. He drew a breath. When he looked back to her from looking for Roth, her eyes were locked onto his.

  “Looking for someone, dearie?” she asked. “I see you scanning the crowd.” Eine junge Frau vielleicht? A young lady perhaps?

  “Just looking around,” he said.

  “Ha, ha!” she laughed. “Folks like you don’t just look around. Folks like you who walk into an illegal Tanzsaal mit Bordell in Ost-Berlin don’t walk in unaccompanied unless you’re looking for a lady.”

  “Well, that would be correct,” he parried. “I came in to find you.”

  “Ha!” she snorted. “Good one. You always did have a silver tongue. That’s not a bad thing.”

  Several observations came upon Cochrane at once. He recalled now that Bettina spoke German with an Aust
rian accent, frighteningly like the way Hitler had. He could hear it again now even with the racket of voices and odds strains of entr’acte music in the club. While he had heard plenty of Austrian dialect in Berlin before and during the war, this time around he hadn’t heard more than a few utterances of it since he had landed at Tempelhof. He found it jarring.

  Additionally, he now noted with sadness that Bettina was drunker than he had estimated when he sat down. And she was still sipping. How was he to coax an inebriated woman into fleeing the city when she was three sheets to the wind? Then there was her right hand, he saw.

  Her fingers were bent in every direction. It looked as if she had been injured in some horrible accident. Or a bombing. He didn’t ask and didn’t need to know. There would be a time for that later. But her grip was weak. She had trouble plucking a second cigarette from a pack of English cigarettes, Player’s Navy Cuts, on the table before her next. The square pack with the British sailor lay next to a ledger that was open with a closed fountain pen lying in the binding between the two sides. She fumbled again.

  “Permit me to help,” he said.

  “You, mein Herr,” she answered, “may do anything to me that you wish. Anything.”

  He ignored the innuendo and picked up a cigarette. She held her lips apart in a suggestive gesture, as if expecting a kiss, and closed her eyes. Cochrane didn’t hesitate. The place was a Weimar recreation, he reasoned, and he might as well go with the old-time flow. He gently placed the white-papered stick in her mouth.

  “Oh, yes!” she said dreamily. “I love it when a man puts something in m y mouth. She chortled and closed her lips on the smoke, uttered a mmmmm sound, and waited as he lit it. She inhaled. Her pinkish eyes opened slowly, and she exuded the first laugh that he had received from her that evening.