Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  “You know, LAC Holderness . . .”

  He was never just Holderness or Joe.

  “We have an advantage. Missing out on basic training leaves you nothing to unlearn. No comparison between a close-quarters weapon like this and a rifle. You were quite right in your summary. Knowing how to swing a Lee Enfield .303 around on the parade ground with occasional cracks at a paper target isn’t knowing how to shoot. After all the bloke with the Lee Enfield isn’t there to shoot. He’s there to die.”

  “Eh?”

  “Do you know how many bullets from a Lee Enfield it took to kill a Jerry in the First War? I’ll tell you. A quarter of a million. And all but one would miss the bugger. That’s how useful the rifle and the bloke holding it are in the twentieth century. What mattered was that he died doing it. I’m not here to teach you to die, LAC Holderness. I’m sure you’ll manage that very well without me.”

  “Then what are you here to teach me, Mr. Weatherill?”

  “I’m here to teach you to kill.”

  Wilderness did a silent double take at this.

  “Ah . . . such innocence. Tell me LAC Holderness, what kind of an organisation did you think you’d joined?”

  Wilderness never answered this for fear Wetherill would put him right. He had few illusions, but he much preferred to hang on to them.

  By week three, Major Weatherill was complimenting him on his accuracy. It brought a silent, he hoped, invisible pride to Wilderness’s mind. The first thing he’d been really good at since Abner taught him to crack a safe. Russian and German were good things in their way, and his education at Rada’s hands was worth three years in any university . . . but this . . . a Sauer 38H in his fist . . . six inners and two bulls . . . this was . . . physical.

  §74

  The Atlantic Hotel was a refined version of hell. Wilderness did not fit in anywhere. There was no specific area for “other ranks,” but all the same the white-coated German waiters, all under the supervision of class-and-rank-conscious English batmen, always managed to sequester him several tables apart from any officer by what amounted to a cordon sanitaire. This pattern only altered if Burne-Jones was in town. The officers of the Control Commission ignored him—which had one advantage. He did not have to salute at five-second intervals every time he passed one.

  Most evenings he pored over the files Burne-Jones had dumped on him, and he had worked out that the reason—perhaps one of the reasons—he had been billeted here, the fish out of water, was that Burne-Jones wanted none of his files going astray. On the nights he took for himself he usually drifted over to the Victory Club—past the by-now familiar cries of “Fag, Tommy?”, “Chocs, Tommy?”, “Jig-jig, Tommy?”—at least the Victory had “other ranks” in letters a foot high over the door.

  One night, in the first week in December, he was in one of the bars at the Victory Club, drinking alone as he had made no friends among the NCOs either, and had turned down an offer to have his cock sucked for a packet of ten Player’s Navy Cut. His “war” was at the opposite of most. He was zenith or nadir—it didn’t matter which—starting his task as others were finishing theirs. Much of what they did and said was reminiscence, and he had no memories to trade. Every other night, perhaps even every night, the Victory Club played host to someone’s demob party. The joy soon went out of them, and if a dozen blokes came in hell-bent on getting rat-arsed, burning their pay books in the ashtrays, showing each other their backsides and staging water battles with stirrup pumps and fire buckets, he’d usually drink up, go back to the Atlantic and his pile of paperwork. But it was frustrating. Hamburg was a city that lived by crime. The black market was the only market and it seemed to be ubiquitous and elusive at the same time.

  On this occasion, a hand clapped onto his shoulder and a voice asked, “What’ll you have, mate?”

  It was the flight sergeant from the Lancaster that had flown him out. The hand moved into mid-air ready for Wilderness to shake.

  “John Blackwall. Call me Johnnie.”

  “Joe Holderness. Call me Joe. I thought your time was up?”

  “Nah, I got six months left. Skipper’s time was up. After we dropped you off he nicked anything that wasn’t nailed down, flew the old girl up to a little harbour near Kiel, put her down on the sands—hairiest landing of my life—and winched a yacht, sails and all, into the bomb bay.”

  “Don’t the coppers and customs look out for that sort of thing back home? How do you sneak a yacht past the military police for Christ’s sake?”

  “We didn’t. We dropped it into the Solent like it was one of Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bombs. We tried it with a Merc last summer. Skipper made whopping great water skis for each wheel. Looked like the daftest flying boat in history. Sank like a stone, just off Ventnor. Then in September we dumped five hundred pounds of NAAFI coffee beans wrapped in tarpaulin. Floated long enough for his pals to get it ashore. We got it right this time too. The yacht’s moored at Milford-on-Sea, just opposite the Isle of Wight, now. Expects me to crew for him next summer. I should cocoa.”

  This was ambitious. Impressive. A thief with nerve and imagination. Wilderness was looking for a good nick, but this was a nick far beyond him.

  “So what’s the crack, then?”

  “Crack?”

  “There must be something happening in Hamburg. Everybody nicks everything. Everybody has something to sell. Everybody lives by the black market.”

  “True, fags are better than pfennigs and a bag o’ coffee’s worth a quick fuck in an air raid shelter. And enough bags o’ coffee’ll buy you a Leica. You’re getting nothin’, then?”

  “Not a sausage. Sorry . . . I mean not a Wurst.”

  “I reckon I can tell you why. You based here?”

  “Not exactly. I’m with the nobs at the Atlantic.”

  Blackwall sucked in breath sharply.

  “’Struth. Need someone to black their boots do they? Or is it regimental arse-wiping?”

  “Security reasons, or so I’m told.”

  “O’course. The skipper said you was one o’ the colonel’s bright boys. But . . . it’s the Atlantic that’s stuffing you mate. All the action’s out at the base. ’Cos that’s where all the pickings are. There’s fuck all here. You can’t nick from the NAAFI, can you? I mean, look at those women they have behind the counter. They catch you light-fingered they’ll crush you to death with one hand. They get you between their tits and you’ll never see daylight again. Nah, you got to be out at Fuhlsbüttel. A quick visit to stores, a bit of a bung to the quartermaster and bob’s yer uncle. I always say, any posting, any town . . . you need to find the easy pickings.”

  “All I can do is flog off my own fags and chocs ration.”

  “Never get rich that way. So, you haven’t dealt much with reichsmarks?”

  “Hardly at all. All I see is Little England on the Baltic. Sterling rules. I take some reichsmarks if I sell me fag allowance. But mostly I give fags away. There are so many just begging for them.”

  “You give ’em away?”

  “Chicken feed,” Wilderness said.

  Clearly, Blackwall did not agree. He unrolled a 5RM note onto the tabletop.

  “Take a look. You see the little plus after the number? That means the Yanks printed it. If there’s a minus, the Russkis. Try not to take minuses. Stupid bloody Yanks gave the Russians the plates, they print money the way we print ‘Property of HM Forces’ on bog paper. It could all end up worthless. Before the war, there was a tale that people in Berlin papered rooms with reichsmarks because it was cheaper than buying wallpaper. One day all this could be so much cheaper than bog paper we’ll be wiping our arses on it. Here endeth the lesson.”

  Two pints of Flensburger arrived almost by osmosis. Blackwall gulped an inch off his and said, “Easy pickings, kiddo, easy pickings.”

  It was a slogan to live by, the sort of thing Abner might have told him.

  §75

  At last.

  Peter Camenzind caught his attention.
His Fragebogen was not one that had been singled out arbitrarily. He’d applied for a job with the state, the state being the Allied Control Commission for Germany, and that made a second look mandatory.

  Thirty-four years old, a former teacher from Berlin. His Fragebogen was bland. He’d never been in anything, not the Nazi Party, not a trades union, he’d never done any kind of military service, and he’d never been abroad.

  Before talking to Yateman, Wilderness put a phone call through to Berlin. The school Camenzind claimed to have taught in was rubble—the whole street was rubble. As was the Ministry of Education, in which any record of his scrupulously accounted employment might have been kept. All very plausible, all rather neat, and making further checks impossible.

  It was not a day when Burne-Jones was in Hamburg. At the start of the day’s work Wilderness set Camenzind’s Fragebogen in front of Captain Yateman.

  Surprisingly Yateman remembered him.

  “So he’s found a position. Jolly good luck to him. Should be a rubber stamp affair. In and out in two minutes.”

  “Position” not “job” was enough to show the extent to which the burger Yateman identified with the burger Camenzind. Certain people had careers, certain people had professions, certain people had positions, the rest had jobs.

  “No,” said Wilderness.

  “No, LAC Holderness?”

  “Since you do remember him, sir. Why did you not query his lack of military service? He was born in 1912. He’d have been called up for the invasion of Russia in 1941, if not before. If he was lame or ill, he’d have been in the Home Guard. At the very least, sick or fit, short of being in a wheelchair, if he could put one foot in front of the other, if he was anywhere near Berlin last year he’d have been in the Volkssturm, with the old men and the schoolboys. And he taught in a grammar school. Yet he lists no party or union membership.”

  Yateman was polishing his spectacles, avoiding eye contact with Wilderness.

  “Perhaps he wasn’t in either?”

  “The National Socialist Teachers’ League was pretty well compulsory, and the pressure to join the party itself would have been nigh irresistible. Like joining the Freemasons if you want to get on back home.”

  The wire loops of his spectacles hooked back around his ears with a dip of his head. And when at last he looked at Wilderness, the thin English lips were set like the slit in a pillar box, the little red moustache twitched independently in suppressed anger.

  “An odious comparison, Holderness.”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  All the same, they sent for Camenzind.

  There was a joke doing the rounds that had eventually reached Wilderness via Johnnie Blackwall one night at the bar in the Victory Club.

  A bloke sweeping the street pauses for a breather to find another bloke looking at him from a street corner. The cleaner turns to the other bloke and says, kind of haughty like, “I was a senior clerk at City Hall before all this denazification nonsense—now I’m sweeping the fucking streets.” And the second bloke says, “Before all this denazification nonsense I was sweeping the fucking streets.”

  And little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum. It was a world of fleas. They were meant to be finding little Hitlers not little fleas.

  Peter Camenzind was a flea—a flea in so far as he looked no different from any one of a hundred other men who had sat in front to Wilderness and Yateman. His jacket was ragged at the elbows and cuffs, his shoes resembled burst sausages, he had no topcoat, he looked as though he shaved with a rusty can lid, and he stank. He had applied to resume his former profession of teacher of mathematics to children of secondary-school age. He expressed no resentment at having his Fragebogen flourished in front of him, merely a hint of boredom and a passivity that passed for cooperation in the flea world. Wilderness had rapidly concluded that this was the chief characteristic of the “new” Germany—passivity, a mental exhaustion, a level of sloth that would not whip up enough adrenaline to get out of the way of a rolling tank. Less death wish than lethargy. An indifference born in defeat.

  But the scarecrow appearance did nothing to disguise the man. He spoke with a patrician Prussian accent, and nothing about facing a British army captain and his insignificant assistant dented his calm or his manners. He held himself well—the sort of boy who’d been beaten if he slouched, shouted at if he put his hands in his pockets.

  His hands weren’t in his pockets, they rested on his crossed legs, on the all but transparent fabric of his threadbare trousers, nails bitten down to blood, fingers stained to a deep ochre with nicotine.

  “Would either of you gentlemen have a cigarette to spare?”

  §76

  He passed muster. Smoked his way through half of Wilderness’s fags and told plausible lies.

  Why had he not served with the armed forces?

  Asthma.

  Why had he not been called to the Volkssturm?

  By 1944 he had been in Hamburg, but was registered in Berlin.

  Why was he in Hamburg?

  Berlin’s schools were bombed out, its children evacuated. A friend had offered him a job in Hamburg. The friend died, and the job with him.

  . . . “And since the war was lost—only an idiot or a fanatic would think it was not lost by the autumn of forty-four—was I to go home and await slaughter or capture by the Russians . . . or stay here and wait for the British?”

  How had he lived?

  “By my meagre savings and by the kindness of strangers.”

  He waved a lit cigarette in the air, smiling at Wilderness, a trail of smoke like a passing dragonfly in the air between them.

  “Lately it has hardly been an issue. Money becomes irrelevant when there’s nothing to buy.”

  §77

  Out in the corridor, Wilderness said, “He’s too cocky by half.”

  “You don’t believe him?”

  “With all due respect, sir, the man is blatantly lying.”

  “You know LAC Holderness, I doubt you know the meaning of the word ‘respect.’”

  “Then just keep him here.”

  “What?

  “Bugger respect. Just keep him here. Detain him, arrest him, play fuckin’ tiddlywinks with him. I don’t care. Just keep him out of my way while I turn over his gaff.”

  §78

  Camenzind lived in a converted air raid shelter. Conversion consisted of installing electricity (one bare bulb to a room), beds (straw-filled palliasses on rickety wooden frames), the odd scrap of furniture (a hat stand that could not have seemed more out of place than an antimacassar or an aspidistra table) and a gas ring that strove, in company with the kettle, to become a kitchen. The only running water was from a standpipe in the street. All but the top three feet of it was below ground level and it had no windows. It had ten rooms and was home to thirty-six men, half of whom were in residence when Wilderness called with an escort of military police and turfed them out into the winter cold where they shivered with only the merest of muttered complaints. A one-eyed man—a black patch over his left eye and a ragged red scar across the cheek beneath—wearing the remains of a haphazardly dyed Wehrmacht uniform—grey with black blotches, one breast pocket hanging loose like a waving handkerchief, the trousers baggy around his now-skinny frame—showed him where Camenzind slept, in a damp, dirty concrete room he shared with three other men.

  “You are here to search the room?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is there to search?”

  He walked away and left Wilderness to it.

  The man had a point. What Camenzind owned, and this seemed to apply to his roommates too, he was probably wearing.

  A small cardboard suitcase beneath the bed yielded clean if tatty underwear and three pairs of socks in need of the darning needle.

  Next to the bed was an upended crate that had once held oranges. Camenzind was using it as a bookcase. A couple of novels by German authors Wilderness had never come across, a volume of Schiller’s poetry,
a maths textbook full of quadratic equations and a slim, paperbound physics treatise. He shook each book in turn, hoping for something concealed, or simply something being used as a bookmark.

  Strips of torn newspaper fell from the Schiller and were nothing more than bookmarks a couple of inches across and ripped from the page regardless of the meaning of what was on them.

  From the physics treatise fell the one piece that had been clipped with scissors. A photograph captioned in a language he did not recognise. But he recognised the photograph. It had been in one of Rada’s files—the one curtly, aptly labelled “Armageddon.” Her copy had been cut from the New York Times.

  He looked at the title page of the treatise, and all the fragmentary unease he had felt from the moment he had first read Camenzind’s Fragebogen cohered, crystallised.

  Über den Nachweis und das Verhalten der bei der Bestrahlung des Urans mittels Neutronen entstehenden Erdalkalimetalle

  von

  Dr. Peter-Jürgen von Hesse

  Max Planck Institut

  Berlin Dahlem

  1939

  Rada had sent him away with books as well as files—all part of the education she wanted him to have, and he was pretty certain Burne-Jones was insistent he had. Some he read with pleasure, some from duty, and some he abandoned as boring.

  Peter Camenzind by the Swiss writer Hermann Hesse had been one of the latter—he’d given up in less than fifty pages. A turn of the century bildungsroman. Something about an angst-ridden Swiss teenager with a bit of a thing about St. Francis of Assisi.

  But . . . if you were looking for a change of name . . . it was wise to hang on to your Christian name—as you’d never answer to another—and from Hesse to one of the other Hesse’s literary figures? Well it saved stretching the mind too far. And what were the odds anyone had ever read the book?

  So, he wasn’t Peter Camenzind, he was Peter-Jürgen von Hesse of the Max Planck Institute in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem. A place with quite a reputation. Einstein had been its first director in 1917.