The Divided City

by Luke McCallin

  Reinhardt threaded his arms into his coat in a muted atmosphere. The station was calm and quiet, detectives and patrolmen like men after a hard night’s drinking, coming to terms with their excesses and starting to pay for them. Gieb was still missing, Stresemann was nowhere to be found, and Weber was still, apparently, in the doghouse. Reinhardt passed him on the way out, suggested again he check addresses—the one they had found at Zuleger’s apartment that the Grunewald police said was abandoned, the one they had gotten at the factory for von Vollmer, Kausch’s address in Wedding—but Weber only stared back at him sullenly, and Reinhardt walked away without another word.

  Reinhardt picked up the U-bahn at Bayerischerplatz and rode it north then east up the B line to Hallesches Tor. Jostled in the scrum of people, all changing trains, he squirmed through the crowd and took the B line back two stops, past the destroyed station at Möckernbrücke to Gleisdreieck. He came up out of the station and found a small café, where he took a table in the back and waited until a man stepped inside, a hat pulled down low over his eyes. He spotted Reinhardt and joined him at his table. Reinhardt leaned past his shoulder and held up two fingers at the waiter for coffees.

  “I got your message, Gregor,” Collingridge said, in German, hunching around so his back was to the window. His jaw clenched around his chewing gum. “It’s all a bit of a rush. Did we have to meet here?”

  “It’s as good a place as any,” Reinhardt replied, hoping he did not come out as too disingenuous. Collingridge flicked a glance at him, nodded, turning the movement into a slow glance over his shoulder. “Are you worried about something?”

  “I’m always worried about something,” the American quipped. “Anyway, I took my precautions.” Reinhardt grinned at him. He could not help it, Collingridge was so childish sometimes. The American’s eyes narrowed. “What? What the hell’s so funny?”

  “I’m sorry, David. It’s just, you can’t expect to walk around Berlin chewing gum, wearing a coat of that quality, and not have people spot you for an Ami straightaway. Besides,” he said, smiling to take the sting out of his words, “maybe whoever you think’s following you is following me.”

  Quick to anger, quicker to calm down, Collingridge nodded, ruefully. “That Russki you mentioned? Skokov? We got some things on him.” Reinhardt said nothing about Kausch, and Collingridge went quiet and leaned back from the table as the waiter put two mugs of coffee down, then leaned back in. “He’s a big cheese in their state security apparatus. Speaks fluent German, used to be in the embassy here back before the war, apparently. He’s something of a Germanophile, been in and out of the country countless times since the 1920s. We think he was initially trained by you Germans back in the mid-’20s, when you guys were secretly using the USSR as a training range for illegal military activities. Remember all that?” Reinhardt nodded. “Then Skokov turns up again in all that . . . hunky-dory stuff, ” he said, stumbling into English a moment, “between the Nazis and Commies, before everything went sour with the war.”

  Reinhardt nodded. The hunky-dory stuff Collingridge referred to had been part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and the Communist USSR. The Soviets had provided the Nazis with commodities—hundreds of thousands of tons of cereal, grain, and minerals—and gotten advanced industrial and military supplies and technology in return. The Nazis had used all that material to rearm and reequip, while Stalin had continued to believe Hitler would never invade him. Reinhardt had heard that the Soviets had continued to send grain shipments by train right up until Operation Barbarossa, the grain literally coming west as the Germans were going east.

  “Not too much more is known about Skokov. He keeps his head down, he doesn’t show up much in the Control Commissions, he’s only been spotted once or twice out at the Kammergericht. At first we thought he was involved with these rumors out of the Soviet Zone that they were setting up some kind of new political police. We’ve heard talk from Saxony about something called Kommissariat V. K5. You heard of it? Some of those Germans that came back from Moscow with the Red Army are heading it up. But now we think Skokov’s involved in some kind of Soviet operation to gather up technical knowledge and specialists from the Third Reich. Everything, from . . . coffee roasters,” he said, pointing at his mug, “to power stations. The Soviets feel they’ve got a lot of catching up to do, and they figure you guys have all the skills to help them do it.”

  “The race for whatever glitters in the rubble.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “You’re talking about the hunt for Nazi scientists, equipment, and resources.” Collingridge nodded. “That’s what the Allies are doing too.”

  “It’s true. We are. Except we can guarantee a nice job somewhere in the good old US-of-A and we’ll throw in the family as well, whereas the Soviets’ll promise you house arrest in Siberia for the rest of your natural life as you slave away for them.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” Reinhardt said noncommittally. Skokov and pilots. Reinhardt’s murder victims were all pilots. From a night-fighter squadron. What would Skokov want with night-fighter pilots?

  Collingridge shrugged, tapping a cigarette out of a packet. “You got skills the Reds want, they’ll take you off the street. Literally. You remember October last year. They did that, after they lost the elections. Cordoned off whole neighborhoods, went house to house, door to door, with lists. Everyone they wanted, carted off east.”

  Reinhardt lit a cigarette. “A Soviet state security officer, around since the 1920s . . . He’s seen it all come and go. Factions, wars, purges,” Reinhardt murmured. “The man’s a survivor.” And knowledgeable, he remembered, looking at Collingridge and thinking over what Skokov had said about himself.

  “The man’s a survivor,” Collingridge affirmed. “He has to be, with his background, to be his rank and in the crowd he runs with . . .” Collingridge shrugged, tapping ash onto the floor. He sipped from his coffee, and winced. “Jesus H. Christ. That’s like the inside of my shoes.”

  Reinhardt thought about Skokov’s German. Its fluency. Its precision. What he had said about Mrs. Meissner. A lady of class and quality. The old museums, the Decorative Arts, the Pergamon, the Tell Halaf. “I’d guess he was bourgeoisie at birth. Maybe even an aristocrat. Maybe his family were White Russians, exiled after the Civil War. His German’s too good. He learned it somewhere special. Probably here. In good schools and company. And I’m guessing he became a revolutionary as a young man, and he probably picked that up here too . . . back in the ’20s.” Reinhardt tailed off, remembering Berlin after the first war, the riotous mood of the capital, the clash of left and right, the teetering slide of politics.

  “And somehow, he keeps surviving . . .” pondered Collingridge. Maybe not, Reinhardt thought. He remembered Skokov’s metal teeth, the scars around his mouth. Something went wrong at some time. “In any case, don’t underestimate him.”

  Reinhardt nodded. “And the two Brits? Whelan and Markworth?”

  “Whelan’s a British rep on one of the Kammergericht’s commissions, the one on war crimes, criminal law reform. Markworth’s a bit shadier. He’s based out of Bad Oeynhausen,” he said, referring to the spa town in central Germany where the British had set up their Occupation headquarters. “He comes to Berlin from time to time, but he works on something relatively secret. Some British project. It’s nothing to do with CROWCASS,” Collingridge said, referring to the American unit running the hunt for Nazi criminals, “or I would have heard of it.”

  “And Carlsen?”

  “A lawyer. He worked with Whelan. I think I met him once or twice. Quiet guy, but pretty intense. We had eyes on him from time to time. He spent quite a bit of time in East Berlin. We suspected he was talking to the Reds.”

  “About what?”

  “Who knows? The guy was a lawyer. He had eyes on all kinds of things.”

  “But the Kammergericht commi
ssions are all quadripartite, right? What one side sees, the other three sides see as well.”

  “Except the confidential materials. The briefings and background notes. Like when General Clay’s got to go head-to-head with Kotikov, he’s got to be prepared. Take police reform. You should see the paperwork that’s generated in notes and assessments and political analysis. It’s valuable stuff. Embarrassing stuff, if taken out of context or put in the wrong hands.”

  Reinhardt thought a moment. “Skokov seemed to know a bit about Carlsen. That he was a German who’d fought for the British. Other things.”

  Collingridge shrugged. “Maybe Carlsen was talking. A lot of these German exiles have a thing for East Berlin, for all the old German Commies the Nazis banged up or who went to ground during the Reich. The heart of resistance against the Nazis, they say. If there’s one thing an intellectual likes, it’s talk, right? Maybe they prefer all that talk about a new society to actually getting out and building one.”

  Reinhardt breathed out slowly, his eyes on the sludge in his cup. “The Soviets take all that ‘talk’ seriously, David. Art, culture, theater. Germans do, too. There’s a place for that.”

  “Yeah? Well, I guess we all have our priorities. We want buildings rebuilt, people fed, and a clean government in place. They have no compunction about stripping their zone bare, dumping millions of refugees on us, and then demanding food and coal and God knows what else, but hey, at least the theaters are all open.”

  Reinhardt twisted his cup from one side to another. “Perhaps you should try living in a basement with a foot of stagnant water in it, or try living on the rations you allow us, David. Try putting your nose in a cooking pot, any cooking pot, in any house in this city. And then talk to me about what’s important. Or about what can take your mind off the hole in your belly,” he said, raising his eyes, feeling cautious and embarrassed but wanting, needing, to make Collingridge think again, think more, think complicated.

  “Well, however you put it, Gregor, you’re better off with us than them.”

  “I don’t know what it’s like in the Soviet zone, David. I hear things, that’s all. But I know of whole families here in Berlin sharing rooms, not because their own homes are wrecked, but because they were evicted to make room for officers’ wives and families from the States, or from France, or from the UK.”

  “What’s your point?”

  Reinhardt shook his head as he stubbed out his cigarette. “Every man’s misery is his own, David. And every man’s misery can only be taken and understood in the here and now.”

  “So you’re saying things were better with Hitler in charge?”

  “I’m sure you’ll hear a lot of that, and if that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll find it. But think of it this way. A family may have been starving on five potatoes before, but they’re starving on two now. Were they better off before, or after?”

  “Oh, really, Reinhardt. You can’t reduce before and now to a matter of potatoes on a plate.”

  “You absolutely can. That is absolutely the point for many people, but it’s not my point at all.” Reinhardt’s face screwed up a moment, a grimace of confusion and frustration. “I’m sorry, David. I’m not making much sense. My wife . . . she would always tell me I kept too much to myself and so made little sense when I actually opened my mouth. All . . . all I am saying is, you look at us, at us Germans, and you see one block. One great whole, and you look and you find the whole is riven with cracks, and through those cracks runs Nazism. But you confuse cause and effect, and you ask the wrong questions. You cannot expect any of us to draw lessons from our hunger about good and bad. You cannot expect a mother to draw a lesson from her child dying of tuberculosis about Nazism and democracy and Communism. They will not see justice in that, they will see injustice. They will see those who should have helped them doing anything but. They will not look beyond the immediate, and so the past will loom so much larger for them. A past when their needs, however imperfectly, were met.”

  “You know I think you’re wrong. Look at the elections. Social Democrats defeated the Communists just about everywhere. Especially here.”

  “They did. That’s a fact. As an exercise in democracy, they were an undoubted success. What does it tell you?”

  “I have a feeling you’re about to tell me,” quipped Collingridge.

  “It tells me there is one thing greater than hunger, and that’s fear.”

  The two of them stared at each other.

  “Christ, how did we get onto this? You can’t go back, and there’s only two ways forward. Ours, and the Reds’. You need to work out what you’d like, Gregor,” said Collingridge, a dark line of annoyance running across his brows.

  “I’d like to die in bed aged one hundred, shot by a jealous husband.”

  “Sorry. Was that you being funny? Only I’m not used to levity from you.”

  “It happens from time to time,” Reinhardt murmured.

  Collingridge shook his head as he stubbed out his cigarette. “‘You pays your money, you takes your chances,’” he said, in English. He looked at Reinhardt, his lips moving against his teeth. “So, when’re you due in the WASt?”

  “Next hour or so,” said Reinhardt, checking his watch. “If Markworth’s based in Bad Oeynhausen, what’s he doing in Berlin?”

  “No idea. Ask him. And happy hunting,” said Collingridge. He slipped a few packets of Luckies across the table. “For you. And if you need to grease a few palms.”

  From Gleisdreieck, Reinhardt took the U-bahn east to Kottbusser Tor, then a northbound D line. At the big interchange at Alexanderplatz, he was almost sucked off by people exiting, then washed back into the train by people pressing themselves on. He watched the crowds, remembering all the times he would get off at this station and take the stairs up to the square and over to the Alex to police headquarters. The train pushed on up the stops, languishing along the tunnels, moving slowly, finally emerging in fits and jerks to Gesundbrunnen and the D line terminus. The Wehrmacht Information Office for War Losses and POWs—the WASt—was a tram ride from Gesundbrunnen in Reinickendorf, in the French sector, and there was a streetcar waiting outside the station for once.

  He alighted at Eichborndamm Strasse, down the street from the WASt. It was a huge building of red brick, occupying an entire city block. Long-sided, low-walled, towers and turrets at each corner. Reinhardt could smell the archives the moment he stepped into the building. It was almost overpowering, a musty scent of paper and cardboard that flowed over and through him. A French soldier escorted him to a waiting room filled with dusty, red leather armchairs and left him there. He did not wait very long before a young officer scurried into the room, a lieutenant with two yellow bars on his epaulettes. The Frenchman skidded to a halt, almost stumbling in his tracks, and straightened a pair of rimless spectacles on his nose as he looked at Reinhardt.

  “You are the policeman?” he asked. “I am Lieutenant Armand De Massigny. Come with me. We see my chief. Then we see the papers.”

  Reinhardt followed him into an office where a French colonel sat like a beached whale behind an acre of desk. The colonel had Reinhardt’s access papers in front of him and, from what Reinhardt’s rusty French could make out, he wanted some reason to refuse him, so Reinhardt stayed silent and let the game play out without him. The colonel was some kind of throwback to a bygone age, a vast man stuffed like a quilt into his uniform, a splendid mustache spiking each side of his mouth, and aristocratic disdain in the way he looked at the pair of them, down the length of his nose. The skin of his cheeks was an archipelago of burst veins and purple skin. But for all his blimp-like size, his foul temper, apparent dislike of Reinhardt, and peremptory manner with his young subordinate, the colonel wore a Croix de Guerre on his tunic. Reinhardt glanced at it, thought of his own Iron Cross that he was no longer allowed to wear, and wondered if he and the colonel might ever have come at each other
across the trenches.

  Eventually, the colonel scrawled a signature across the papers, stamped them, and flicked them back at the two of them. The young lieutenant scooped them up with an air of barely repressed enthusiasm, snapped a salute and spun away. Reinhardt paused a moment, waiting until he had the colonel’s eye, then inclined his head.

  “Merci beaucoup,” he said. The Colonel blinked, his breath huffing like a walrus’s, then he nodded and went back to his paperwork.

  “You must excuse the colonel,” De Massigny enthused, as he led Reinhardt through a maze of corridors at a brisk clip. “He is a cross man. They bring him from retirement for this. He is, how do you say it . . . ? The old warhorse?” Reinhardt nodded. “He is not for the administration. He hates it,” De Massigny chuckled, his French accent layered thick across his German. “And, I am sorry to say, he hates the Germans too.”

  “What about you?”

  “I don’t hate the Germans,” De Massigny protested, his smooth face creasing in a frown. “I mean, you were not very nice in France. But I don’t blame the Germans for that. I blame the soldiers that were there.”

  “No, I meant what do you do? In the army?”

  “Ah, excusez-moi. I am sorry,” De Massigny said. “I am not a soldier. I am an archivist. I work in the state archives in Paris. They make me a lieutenant for a time, while I do this work,” he said, as he opened a door for Reinhardt. The room they had entered was ballroom-sized and filled, wall to ceiling, and in serried rows across the expanse of parquet floor, with filing cabinets and shelves of all shapes and sizes. Another soldier was on duty behind a desk by the door, and De Massigny handed him the access paper with an absent gesture, his attention fixed on the cabinets where pairs of French soldiers were dotted around the room, examining files and making notations.