Black Out (Frederick Troy 1)

by Lawton, John

  ‘Just after the action – around 1945, suppose, I thought you were going completely potty. But I started to think about it and for the first time I looked at the way things had gone for me, and yes you’re right, I do think I had a good war . . .’

  ‘Imprisoned by the British, shot down by the Krauts and bunged a couple of gongs as a consolation prize!’

  ‘Not at all. I felt no bitterness about being interned. As for being shot down. I spent a couple of hours in the drink off Sheerness and got picked up. Not a mark on me. On the whole I got off lightly. The war was, as you put it, good to me. I rather think I enjoyed it. But you didn’t did you? You got shot -’

  ‘Twice.’

  ‘Stabbed.’

  ‘Four times.’

  ‘Bombed.’

  ‘Twice again.’

  ‘Beaten up.’

  ‘More times than I can count. Look, Rod, what’s the point you’re trying to make? You’re not telling me all this tosh just to let me know I missed a trick by not volunteering.’

  ‘I really thought you’d had an awful time . . .’

  ‘Of course war’s an utter fucking picnic! Millions get slaughtered for the benefit of the nostalgia of the survivors . . .’

  ‘Not what I meant at all. I thought you’d been battered every which way for a while. Then, looking back, I remembered my first command. My first squadron in forty-one. The chaps I had under me then used to astound me. The way they ran to those crates, the sheer eagerness to get in there, into the thick of it. I wondered if I’d ever been like that. I knew I hadn’t. I realised what they had that I hadn’t. What they were that I wasn’t. They had the killer instinct. And I knew that because I’d seen it in you. I’d seen it in you even when we were kids. You hated me for years after I pushed you off your bike, and for a dozen other things that should have been inconsequential. Nothing petty or spiteful or momentary, but unremitting hatred. That unforgiving, relentless pursuit.’

  ‘That’s the business I’m in. Some call it justice.’

  ‘Just as well. I’d hate to think you were on your way to Berlin just to settle an old score.’

  ‘Rod, I’m a policeman. The sweetest, the most beautiful words in the English language are “I arrest you in the name of the law”, I don’t have to kill him. I don’t have to kill anybody. The law is the law and that should be enough.’

  Rod patted him on the side. On the coat pocket. Right where Troy had his revolver.

  ‘No harm in asking though, was there?’

  The Dakota picked up revs again. The sound of the propellers swamped them. There was no space in which to say any more. Rod smiled and climbed down the steel ladder to the runway. Troy wrapped his hand around the gun and asked himself why God had so ordered the world as to make elder brothers into know-alls.

  86

  A stout, miserable corporal, buried beneath an army greatcoat, met Troy at Gatow field.

  ‘I’ve gorra a jeep and the CO sez I’m to take you anywhere you want to go,’ he said in best Birmingham misery.

  ‘Thank you, er . . . ’ Troy looked at the stripes on his arm. ‘Corporal . . . er.’

  ‘It’s Clark, sir. Lance-Bombardier Clark actually, sir. Artillery.’

  ‘Known as Nobby?’ Troy ventured.

  ‘Swifty,’ the man replied. ‘On account of me being five foot six an’ fifteen stone. I’m a translator. Anything you need to say – just put it through me. I’m fluent in German.’

  Troy found this hard to believe. The man scarcely seemed fluent in English.

  ‘Do you know the Uhlandstrasse Police Station?’ Troy asked.

  ‘Indeed I do, sir.’

  ‘I’m meeting an Inspector Franck.’

  ‘I know. He phoned to say he’s gone home.’

  Troy sighed.

  ‘You are two hours overdue, sir. He said he’d see you around noon tomorrow.’

  Troy sighed again. Half a day lost already.

  ‘I’d better find somewhere to stay,’ he said.

  ‘All taken care of, sir. You’ll be at the Officers’ Club on the Kurfürstendamm.’

  87

  By noon Troy and Clark were waiting for Inspector Franck in his office. It was hardly warmer inside than out. Troy put a hand to the radiator – it was stone-cold. Clark flipped the lid on an old iron stove.

  ‘There’s a spark of life here, sir. I imagine the main boiler’s out of fuel. This looks a bit like a make-do-and-mend job to me.’

  ‘Are we going to hear that phrase the rest of our lives?’

  ‘Now if we had a bit of wood . . .’

  Troy looked out of the window. A ragged army of navvies was clearing up what was left of the building across the street. A large man in a fawn mackintosh was gathering an armful of wood – he scurried back across the rubble and out of sight. A uniformed constable brought in two cups of coffee. He said something to Troy. Troy looked at Clark.

  ‘He says this will warm you up, sir.’

  Troy sipped at the coffee – hot it was, but it tasted as though it had been used and reused for days, squeezing the last drop of life from the bean. He pulled a face.

  ‘I know,’ said Clark. ‘Welcome to Berlin.’

  The door burst open and the large man Troy had seen in the ruins across the street came in clutching his booty. He rushed to the stove, flipped open the lid with his elbow and shoved in as much as the belly of the stove would take.

  ‘It’s a slow process,’ he said, ‘but bit by bit we are feeding most of Old Berlin into our pot-bellied stoves. That’s the third building in this street we have stripped back to nothing since the blockade began.’

  He dusted down his coat with the palms of his hands.

  ‘Franck,’ he said extending a hand and smiling broadly. ‘Dieter Franck. Please call me Dieter.’

  Troy introduced himself, side-stepping his Christian name, and introduced Clark as his driver.

  Inspector Franck stretched out his hands and warmed himself as the stove began to roar. He was, Troy guessed, about the same age as himself, though wearing less well. He was thickening at the waist, and thinning at the hairline, but his smile lit up his wide, chubby face with a disarming impression of honesty. Rare in a copper, he thought.

  ‘To business. Your colleague, Sergeant—’

  ‘Wildeve,’ Troy prompted.

  ‘Yes, yes. Sergeant Wildeve called me yesterday morning. I believe you are in pursuit of Colonel Baumgarner?’

  ‘I have a warrant for his arrest.’

  ‘Ah . . . how I envy you!’

  Inspector Franck surrendered the stove to Clark, opened a filing cabinet next to his desk and took out a fat file bound with string. He slipped off the string and let the file fall to the desk-top with a demonstrative thud. A couple of black and white photographs spilled out. Baumgarner was fatter than Wayne, and was drifting into double chins and a puffiness around the eyes. Troy supposed he must be about forty now – but there was no doubt that it was the same man.

  ‘Baumgarner arrived here just under two years ago – in January last year. I started to hear rumours concerning him by about June - gossip on the underworld grapevine – and then I began to see evidence that went some way towards confirming what I was hearing. The Colonel is a man who has to have a sideline, whatever he does – in Berlin it’s weapons and it’s drugs.’

  ‘Drugs!?!’

  ‘Morphine. Stolen or – since Baumgarner is in the position he is – diverted from legitimate shipments into the underworld, sold on the black market at extortionate prices. I found that alarming – but that was nothing to what I heard next. Germany, as you would expect, was awash with weapons at the end of the war. Every thug who wants a gun can own one, but most prized of all are American weapons – souvenirs of victory, much more precious than a German gun. The teenage thug who can wave a Colt or Smith and Wesson in the face of an enemy cuts more ice than he would with an old Luger. Wayne caters to this market. He supplies an already welltooled illegal little army with eve
n better weapons. He is in effect funding an underground war.’

  ‘What evidence did you find?’

  ‘Young toughs picked up with the weapons. More talk of a mysterious supplier. And since last autumn half a dozen gang killings all of which point back to the trade in guns and drugs. Nothing that actually fingers Baumgarner, but plenty that adds weight to rumour. Informers say the source is a foreigner. Some speak of an American specifically. One or two even name him, but no one who’s seen him first hand commit any crime. Most think he’s German, but then his German is as good as mine. It’s Baumgarner, I know it. I’ve spent a lot of time on the Colonel. I have built up a profile. I think I understand him very well – not, of course, that I’ve ever met him.’

  Troy sat back to listen – the notion that Baumgarner could be ‘profiled’ was fascinating – it was the new vocabulary of police work – he half expected it to be gobbledegook.

  ‘Imagine a type of man, a man driven by God knows what – his hormones, his chemistry, whatever – driven to satisfy certain needs only in action. A man who needs must live on the cutting edge of life – life without danger is nothing. In wartime all countries need men like this – they search them out and they use them. The British, after all, turned them out in their hundreds, men and women alike, parachuted them into occupied France to take their chances against an utterly ruthless enemy. But the mask of legitimacy is distorting. The edge is less the edge if it is in some way sanctioned. If you are Colonel Baumgarner then the OSS and the CIA are your natural fields – nevertheless their sanction channels these drives to its own ends, so they find another way out. Men like Baumgarner need their sidelines – and it’s quite essential they should be illegal. For a while I think penetrating the Berlin underworld, turning it into his private market-place satisfied his drives – but it’s tame stuff after a war like he had. It demands the ultimate transgression – sooner or later only murder will do. So, comes the time some teenage thug double-crosses the good Colonel or tries to threaten him and he becomes the first victim, and the victims tumble like a row of dominoes, and bodies start to turn up all over the city.’

  Dieter paused. ‘You’re saying nothing, Inspector Troy. Does this not sound like the man you knew? I admit I’ve had less than two years to study him, compared to your—’

  ‘I had just under fourteen weeks. I had no notion of a profile of Baumgarner until you began to speak. I met him face to face only three times. The first time he asked me for a light, the second he said nothing, and on the third he tried to kill me.’

  Dieter laughed ironically. For a few seconds Troy was left to wonder what the joke might be.

  ‘Well, bang goes that theory. That’ll teach me to get philosophical. I was about to hypothesise that the key to Baumgarner is that he doesn’t kill in person. That it would be too easy for him. The gossip has it that he has a henchman, a tame thug, some young psychopath who pulls the trigger for him. I had deduced that the pleasure in killing for Baumgarner is in the control, the manipulation of another human being. A human gun he can point and say “Kill”. I’ve been relying too much on gossip, perhaps it’s meaningless.’

  Troy was hesitant. He had accounted to the Yard the exact details of the attempt on his life, but thereafter had thought of it in a mental shorthand. In saying Baumgarner had tried to kill him, he was eliding the truth, and eliding memory, but it accorded with the way he thought of it. Baumgarner had tried to kill him. The mechanical, toneless way he had said simply ‘Finish him’ was audible still.

  ‘No, no. You’re absolutely right. In London in ’44 he had four men killed in just the way you describe. I was to have been the fifth, but he didn’t pull the trigger in person.’

  ‘A henchman? A psychopath?’

  ‘A . . . a . . . woman,’ Troy said, and knew he could explore this subject no further without lying.

  ‘Odd,’ Dieter said. ‘But the pattern stands, does it not?’

  ‘It does indeed,’ said Troy. ‘I suppose you’d like him off your patch?’

  ‘Of course – but first I need watertight evidence.’

  ‘I’ve got that.’

  Dieter raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I’ve a gun with his fingerprints on it. A forensics report that matches the gun to bullets recovered from the murders he had committed and half a dozen witnesses to him shooting a man in London.’

  ‘Personally?’

  ‘Back against the wall. He was cornered. It doesn’t blow your theory that a cornered man, however manipulative, will kill without proxy?’

  ‘No. Not at all. It . . . delights me in a curious way to know that he can slip up and to know that we stand a chance of getting him.’

  ‘I have to get him back to England.’

  ‘I know. That’s what I told your Sergeant. If your warrant ran here I’d gladly drag the bastard off the streets and hand him over to you in handcuffs but . . . ’ Dieter did not finish. He got up and stretched.

  ‘Tell me, would you like to see our quarry?’

  ‘Of course. Do you know where he is?’

  Dieter shook the fat file and spread out dozens of pages on the desk.

  ‘You don’t speak German, do you?’

  Troy shook his head. ‘Schoolboy, and getting worse every year.’

  ‘This one is in English.’

  He pushed a dozen photographed documents across the desk to Troy.

  ‘It’s his diary. How on earth did you get this?’

  ‘There are no secrets in Berlin. At least not any you can keep for very long. I had his office . . . mmm . . . “burgled”. Quite discreetly. I have his diary for the whole of December. Alas, if he records meetings with the thugs they’re in some sort of code, but his work is there in plain English, and today at noon he is distributing Christmas presents to children at the Fredericksplein in the French sector. All part of the limitless goodwill of our new-found Uncle Sam.’

  ‘Beware this Uncle,’ Troy said. ‘He’s like The Man Who Came to Dinner. He never leaves.’

  Dieter leaned over and stabbed at 23 December with his index finger.

  ‘We can be there in twenty minutes in your jeep.’

  88

  One bombsite looked much the same as another to Troy. The RAF had left scarce one brick standing upon another, and if they had, Troy fantasised, then it required only a single Russian soldier to come along and boot the last brick off the next to last to have done with Berlin. To Dieter they were familiar landmarks. Troy sat in the back of the jeep with the canvas flapping wildly about him, while Dieter leaned in close to Clark and shouted instructions in German. All the same, when they jerked to a halt it was in the middle of what seemed to be yet another nowhere.

  Dieter turned to Troy. ‘We’ll attract less attention if we walk the last few blocks. If Herr Clark would not mind waiting here?’

  Clark flipped back his greatcoat and pulled a dog-eared volume of Penguin New Writing from the map pocket on the left thigh of his army trousers.

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said, ‘I’ll be fine.’

  A few minutes later they approached the back of a sizeable crowd, gathered in what had once been a square, if not of some elegance – that seemed unPrussian – then of some grandeur.

  The focal point of the hubbub, the adult murmur pierced by the shrieks of delighted children, appeared to be an army truck.

  From the back of the truck a hatless figure in a grey gabardine mackintosh was holding court on the fringe of vision. Troy elbowed his way a little closer, Dieter followed behind muttering apologies in German. He caught Troy by the sleeve.

  ‘Be careful, Troy. You don’t want to annoy these people. If there’s trouble, waving a warrant card will get neither of us out of it. It’s their occasion – they’ll let nothing get between them and the contents of that truck. They’re people who’ve had nothing for their children since the thirties. Do not tread on toes, figuratively or literally.’

  ‘Sorry, I have to see him,’ Troy said. ‘That is Baumg
arner, isn’t it?’

  ‘Indeed it is. And if I tried to arrest him now they’d tear us apart.’

  Troy looked towards the truck again. It was Baumgarner – doling out chocolate and fruit and gaudily wrapped presents to a host of squealing children and adoring adults. He played the audience like the ringmaster in a circus, or a pantomime dame, working their sense of anticipation and teasing out the rewards in rapid German that meant nothing to Troy, but if it amounted to no more than huckster’s patter he would not have been surprised. Baumgarner was fatter – the photographs now supplemented by his appearance in the flesh. He was thickening rapidly about the middle. The lean, vulpine shape was distorting, maturing into something else, something coarser, more bestial still. But the look was the same. His eyes rolled across the audience, at one point looking directly at Troy with not a hint of recognition, limpid blue and careless, as though the world at large meant little to him, as though his words and his thoughts made no connection – and as the fat huckster played his mob, the wolf’s mind lurked behind those smiling eyes, lean and hungry, and regarded them as just so many sheep. Troy glanced to either side of him. These Germans were thin and threadbare – the grubby, frayed overcoats had seen too many winters – the grey, hollow cheeks, the prominent, staring eyes had lived too long in the iron fist. Troy found an unbidden comparison fighting to the surface of consciousness – they put him in mind of those photographs from the final weeks of the war, when Belsen was taken, its gates opened and the first British soldiers across the line encountered the living dead. Once acknowledged it seemed absurd – these Germans were alive and reasonably well, their deprivations were slight, their bellies grumbling rather than permanently empty, and if they were wasn’t this what they deserved?

  Their eyes lit up, laughter and cheers rose in their throats at what Troy took to be jokes on Baumgarner’s part – bellowed out so they could be heard to the limits of the crowd. Each time he threw an item from the back of the truck, there was a surge in the crowd as they jostled for possession. A Hershey bar spun out towards Troy and landed two rows ahead of him – a dozen or more children descended on it like piranhas. Troy had seen nothing like it in England in the entire course of the war.