Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  Dorothy said, “You and Frank go back fifteen years or more?”

  “Yes.”

  “I like working for Frank. He’s . . . well, he’s a gas . . .”

  “I can hear that ‘but’ waiting to burst on your lips.”

  “Maybe it shouldn’t. He’s entitled to my loyalty.”

  “Is this where you feel you have to tell me that however affable, my old pal Frank is also a bit of a bastard?”

  “It could be.”

  “Then stay loyal, Miss Shearer. All my adult life women have been warning me about Frank. Girlfriends, wives, even a gorgeous major in the NKVD. He is a bastard and he is a rogue. But perhaps I am too.”

  “No, Mr. Holderness. I don’t think you are.”

  The door was yanked open. Frank loomed large and happy. A big grin spreading out over his fat face.

  “Joe! Bang on time, kid. Gimme thirty seconds and we’ll go see Steve.”

  Dorothy and Wilderness were looking at each other, not at him, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  §7

  Frank led him down a long, airy corridor. One wall was almost entirely glass. The other displayed framed posters of the products Carver, Sharma, and Dunn represented.

  Frank paused by “Mountain Lites—the light, full-flavored cigarette . . . anyplace, anytime.”

  “Remember these?” he said. “Tasted like shit. In fact they still taste like shit. How many do you reckon we sold back in Berlin in the old days?”

  The answer was not in hundreds, it was in thousands and might even top a hundred thousand. Wilderness did not reply, and walked on to the next poster.

  “Rodgers & Rutgers R’n’R Coffee—the full-flavored roast.”

  “Do you think we sold anything that wasn’t full-flavoured?”

  “Fucked if I know. I never read the labels. I never read the ads. Now I write the damn things.”

  Wilderness moved on.

  “Simply Silky Nylons—he’ll simply love you in Simply Silky.”

  “You know Frank I think you’ve inadvertently set up a museum of everything we nicked, smuggled or sold on the black market. If only you had Colonel Fogg’s Miniature Cigars, I think you’d have the full set.”

  “Nah,” said Frank. “We’d still need all the butter and the sugar and the canned fish and the lipstick and the soap and you name it. Whatever fell off the back of the truck.”

  “Soap? ‘Cadum for Madam.’ Was that one of your gems, Frank? Did you write that?”

  Frank laughed out loud, one of his belly-jiggling snorts.

  “Wish I had, Joe. Wish I had. Guy who penned that one probably made a fortune. More than I made smuggling the damn stuff. I’d give my left arm to have written that—that and ‘You can be sure of Shell.’ But I just break my balls trying to find a rhyme for Rutgers.”

  A head appeared through the open door opposite.

  “Are you two gonna reminisce all day? Or could you possibly find five minutes for business.”

  A small, balding, sixty-ish man in a suit that was worth triple anything Frank or Wilderness was wearing. A dark frown on his face, which dispersed like a blown cloud as a smile took over and a hand extended.

  “You must be Joe. Heard a lot about you. Steven Sharma. Senior partner. But that’s only to keep this bum from taking over the whole show.”

  “Then you have the advantage of me. I’m still a little in the dark here.”

  Frank lightly put an arm around each of them.

  “Then let’s put that right straightaway. Steve, we were just on our way to see you.”

  “Good. Come in, park your ass, and rest your voice. It’s time Mr. Holderness and I got to know one another.”

  Wilderness had never worked in an office in his life, but he knew from his wife that you could read the status in the room, and that a corner office with two views was what every pen pusher aspired to. Steve Sharma’s office boasted fine views over the building opposite, a peek at the treetops of Central Park, two sofas the size of pool tables, a pool table, half a dozen original Norman Rockwell covers for the Saturday Evening Post, and an antique desk the best part of eight foot across. What interested Frank was the drinks cabinet.

  “What can I get me?”

  “Sure, help yourself, why don’t you,” Steve said. “And while you’re helping yourself to my scotch, serve our guest.”

  And then to Wilderness, “Bull in a china shop, but I figure you know that? What’s your poison, Joe?”

  “Scotch will be fine. Ask the bull not to flood it.”

  “You hear that, Frank? Man who likes his scotch too much to want it drowned!”

  “OK. OK. You two, lay off me.”

  Frank clutched three glasses of scotch between splayed fingers and set them down on the hammered brass, Indian-looking coffee table between sofas. He filled a glass dish with peanuts and then sat next to Steve, facing Wilderness, with the peanuts balanced on his knees while he scoffed.

  “Joe, just one thing. You’re among friends here. What gets said in this room, stays in this room? Am I right?”

  “Of course,” Steve said. Then, “Tell me a little about yourself Joe. Give me a taste of your . . . ” and here he paused. “Résumé.”

  Résumé was not a word Wilderness had heard before, but its meaning was obvious. And Steve made it clear where he meant him to begin.

  “Frank tells me you and he met in Berlin, after the war?”

  “Yes. I was an NCO in British Intelligence.”

  “MI5? MI6?”

  “Not at that point. I never knew what I was really in. I was a National Serviceman, doing what I was told, going where I was sent. Nominally the RAF. But I hardly saw a plane, certainly never flew one or serviced one. I was low-level intelligence—I interpreted, I translated written texts, and I eavesdropped. Occasionally they let me interrogate Germans in the hope I’d find a few Nazis.”

  “And did you?”

  “Oh yes. No one in Berlin in 1947 was or ever had been a Nazi. Yet if you threw a stick up in the air you’d be pretty well bound to hit one when it fell back to earth.”

  Steve chuckled at this.

  “I had languages. I was getting fluent in German and Russian by then, and I’ve added some Arabic, French, Turkish, and Italian since. Even a smattering of Finnish. Frank was awful at languages, but I wasn’t in the same league as Frank. Frank was an officer, a captain, and unlike me he was quite certain what he was in—the Company.”

  “Shit. Why not rent a billboard in Times Square and paste it up in letters half a mile high?”

  Steve waved Frank’s faux anger away with the back of his hand.

  “You said it yourself not five minutes ago, Frank. What gets said in here stays in here. But you did serve in . . . whatever the British call their Company?”

  “Yes. Until a few years ago.”

  “And you did get to know Berlin?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well?”

  “I was there close to two years, and I’ve been back on many occasions since. It changes. It changes all the time, but there’s something about it that doesn’t.”

  “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?”

  “A touch of that.”

  “And since you left your . . . ‘Company’?”

  “I’ve been private. What you would probably call a gumshoe.”

  “A good living?”

  “A variably good living. Has its moments. I’ve worked for British Intelligence a few times since. They pay better now than they ever did when I was enlisted.”

  “Frank tells me you know Berlin from the ground up?”

  Frank shot him a look across the rim of his glass. Wilderness did not know how to read it.

  “More than that,” Steve went on. “He tells me you know Berlin from the ground down.”

  Now he knew.

  “Why not tell me what it is you want, Steve?”

  Steve paused. Wilderness did not think his question had taken the old man by surprise, b
ut still he seemed to need to gather his thoughts.

  “Frank. Freshen the drinks all round would you? Your legs are longer and younger than mine.”

  Frank bumbled through his bad impression of a waiter, topped them all up and refilled his dish with peanuts, which he still hogged.

  With a large, untouched scotch on the rocks in his hand, Steve was ready.

  “My wife has an aunt. Aunt Hannah. Hannah Schneider. Sixty-nine years old. Last of her generation in the family. Never married. She lives on her own in East Berlin. My wife Debbie is the only kin she has on earth. We’d like to get her out. To be exact—we’d like you to get her out.”

  Wilderness just looked at him and nodded.

  “I know we’ve missed chances. She could have left in 1933. But millions didn’t and millions died. There’s no wisdom in that particular hindsight. We could have brought her over any time after 1945. But we didn’t. And she wouldn’t. And who among us foresaw the Berlin Wall, the speed with which Khrushchev would be able to split the city?

  “Of course, we’ve been able to make contact with one of those student groups that have dug tunnels and such—but Frank tells me the Stasi, the Vopos, whatever, are pretty wise to that now. Kids get people out through the sewers, so they weld the sewers shut. Kids drum up fake passports, so they double- and triple-check everyone at the crossings. And they are kids. I think we can use them, I think they’re sincere, but they are kids. Nineteen and twenty. I think we need a man in charge who is not a kid. And I think that man is you.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  So obviously non-committal.

  “I’m in no hurry. She’s been stuck there for years already. A few more weeks won’t kill her. Take your time. Think about it for a day or two. It’s a business proposition. We’re both in business. I’ll meet your terms.”

  Wilderness hadn’t mentioned any terms. But neither had Steve or Frank.

  “What I’d like to avoid is incident. And this situation is fraught with possibilities. I don’t want Hannah exposed to anything . . . anything . . . well, like that old lady a couple of years back who seemed to be hanging off a building right on the sector line, in some kind of insane tug of war. Half the world looking up her skirt. Cop had her by the wrists, pulling her back up to the East, some guy looked like he was a fireman had her by the ankles and was trying to pull her down to the West, and she looked like she was about to fall and break her neck. I couldn’t expose Hannah to that. These kids are good kids, gerekhte kids, but they have no . . . discretion. Their pride gets in the way of discretion. They’re having too much fun not to want to boast about it. Discretion is a valuable commodity. You can get paid for discretion.”

  “And for knowledge.”

  “So . . . you bring me to the point, Joe. Frank tells me you know of tunnels under Berlin deeper than the sewers, older than the sewers?”

  “I know of a tunnel.”

  “And it’s possible the Reds don’t?”

  “It’s possible. I think it might be more accurate to say they knew and have forgotten.”

  “But you haven’t forgotten?”

  “You mean could I find it again? Oh yes. It’s seared into my memory. There are times I feel I spent a year of my life down there.”

  Steve made a circular motion with his right hand, reeling off a list as he did so.

  “The butter . . . and the sugar . . . and the canned fish . . . and the lipstick . . . and the soap?”

  He turned to Frank, a smile on his face. Frank grinned.

  “Yeah. Me and my big mouth. What a good job I’m not paid for my discretion, eh? Of course we used it for smuggling. It’s what we did. It’s what everybody did. Everybody was in the black market. We were just better at it.”

  “And now boys, you get to smuggle a person, a human being. How much more worthwhile than sardines and soap.”

  Steve stood up. The conversation was over.

  “If you boys will excuse me. I must get to Grand Central, or Debbie will meet every train at White Plains until I show up. Enjoy New York, Joe. It’s a feast. A feast for the eye, a feast for the mind, and a feast for the belly. We’ll talk again in a day or two.”

  Frank was still feasting on peanuts as the door closed behind Steve. He set down the empty dish, spoke through the last mouthful.

  “Let’s eat,” he said.

  §8

  They took a cab uptown. Wilderness wondered why they hadn’t walked. When the cab pulled up they were no more than twenty blocks from Frank’s office—but it seemed to him that Frank probably didn’t walk anywhere.

  He looked at the big yellow awning that spanned the pavement to meet any arriving cab in much the same colour. In sprawling italics it read “Elaine’s.”

  “You heard of it?” Spoleto asked.

  “Should I have?”

  “Have I heard of Quaglino’s?”

  “I don’t know, Frank. Have you?”

  Spoleto laughed. Gave him another of the hearty slaps that Wilderness was beginning to find wearing. Frank had always done this . . . expressive bonhomie . . . hail-buddy-well-met . . . but fifteen years ago, he’d weighed a lot less. Now, there was an extra thirty pounds behind every well-meant slap on the back.

  They were early. About a third of the tables taken in a large, dim, brown room, the walls covered in reproductions of Italian masters and the occasional mirror.

  A young woman in her thirties, already running a little to fat, was seated at the bar, sipping a tall glass of white wine. She slipped off the stool, scarcely coming up to Spoleto’s chin and hugged him.

  “Frank, I was beginning to think you’d forgotten me.”

  “Never. I even brought an old army buddy for you to make a fuss over. Elaine, this is Joe Holderness. Elaine Kaufman . . . one of the Big Apple’s success stories. Open less than a year and already you have to queue.”

  “Frank. I have never known you to queue for anything. All the same, any friend of Frank’s . . .”

  “Delighted,” said Wilderness.

  “Oh Frankie, you brought me an Englishman!”

  Now Wilderness got hugged.

  “Only he has no meat on his bones. My God, do they still have rationing over there?”

  A table by the wall, seated at right angles to one another, so they both faced into the room, watching as the tables slowly filled up and the room began to swell with chatter.

  “Everything’s good here. But whatever you have as a main course, don’t miss the cannoli when it comes to dolci. Out of this fuckin’ world.”

  By the time they got to dolci, Spoleto had run the gamut of small talk and got to what Wilderness thought might be the point.

  Spoleto said, “You were kind of coy with Steve. But that I understand. We both have things that we should be discreet about even now.”

  “Of course.”

  “You didn’t say how often you’d been back to Berlin.”

  “A lot. Most years in fact. It would be quicker if I named the years I wasn’t there.”

  “You ever see Nell Breakheart?”

  Breakheart. Always Breakheart. Would he never drop the gag and pronounce her name properly?

  “No Frank, I’ve never seen Nell.”

  “When were we last there together?”

  “Fifty-eight.”

  “So it was. My God. Time doesn’t fly, it gets launched from Canaveral.”

  “I didn’t go back at all between ’48 and ’51. In ’56 I was stuck in Tel Aviv monitoring traffic. Absolute waste of time. I damn near quit after that.”

  “Monitoring Russian airwaves is never a waste of time.”

  “This was Suez, Frank. A total cock-up, and I wasn’t monitoring Russian communications, I was monitoring yours.”

  “Yeah, well I guess that was pretty much the low point in the special relationship.”

  “From late ’58 to ’60 I was in Beirut. Now, that was fun. Pretending I was a stringer for The Times and eavesdropping on every indiscretion in the St. Geor
ge’s hotel bar. Getting rat-arsed with Kim Philby. Each of us pretending we didn’t know. I don’t know how I kept a straight face. Regular trips home, the occasional hop to Athens or Rome. Cairo or Istanbul. Didn’t exactly restore my faith in the service, but it kept me on board for a couple more years. Then in ’61 I was back in Berlin for the last time.”

  “Before or after the wall?”

  “During. I flew out just a couple of days after they started putting up the barriers. In August. The British had me observe LBJ’s visit firsthand. I stayed on a month or so after that. When Steve mentioned the old lady hanging off the building in Bernauer Straße to us . . . well I was there. That was September ’61. I saw it happen. I saw her fall. Her name was Frieda Schulze.”

  “But she lived, right?”

  “Oh yes, she lived. But something in me died. It was watching her dangle, both sides tugging at her. I can’t translate it into precise words, but if ever there was a symbol, writ large, especially for me, that was it. It was then I knew it was all over. I went back home and put in my papers. They could hardly object. They’d called me up for two years in 1945 and got the best part of sixteen out of me.”

  “And since then? You glossed over that too.”

  “And I’ll gloss over it now.”

  “Things ain’t been so good?”

  “No, they haven’t.”

  “The low-heeled life of a gumshoe in a high-heeled country where nothing much really happens? A country where no one carries a gun, and what’s a gumshoe without a gun?”

  “You could put it like that.”

  “Divorces. You do divorces?”

  “Yes. I do divorces. I’m the guy who follows the errant lovers down to Brighton at a prearranged time and catches them in the glare of a flashbulb in a seaside hotel.”

  “Crummy.”

  “I can think of worse words for it. I can think of more accurate words for it, but yes, crummy will do.”

  “And yet you hesitate when Steve makes you the best offer you’ve had since you left the service.”