Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  “The man’s a clown.”

  “Sure. What we do now just mumble till it looks kosher? Like we’ve actually discussed it?”

  They went back, Stanley and Eddie were indeed discussing news from home and the price of sausages.

  Frank said, “Soap’s OK. I can get soap. S-O-D.”

  “S-O-D?”

  “Soap on delivery. I need to know you guys can do what you promise.”

  “Do what we fuckin’ promise? We’re British sappers not some nancy American outfit in pressed trousers and shiny shoes! We’re muck and boots we are. We built Pentonville nick. We built the Albert fuckin’ Hall! An’ if yer believe Rudyard Kipling, Noah used our blueprints for his fuckin’ ark!”

  “So you can do it?”

  “’Course we can fuckin’ do it!”

  §146

  It took less than a day. The following morning Wilderness, Frank, and Eddie stood in a ten-foot-high circle of rubble, Hitler’s Stonehenge, staring at their “hole.” Once there’d been a cast-iron kiosk on top, just like the one still standing in Monbijou. There were fragments of it scattered everywhere. The pickelhaube aslant in the mud as poignant as the feet of Ozymandias.

  “Bloody rotten luck,” Eddie said. “We should have got here six weeks ago.”

  “Six weeks ago we didn’t need it,” Wilderness replied. “Spilt milk, Eddie.”

  He looked down the shaft. The spiral staircase seemed to be intact, but really, there was only one way to find out. He flicked on his torch.

  “OK, follow me.”

  They both shook their heads.

  “Nah,” said Frank. “Not me. This isn’t me.”

  “What do you mean, it isn’t you?”

  Eddie said, “Small dark spaces. Never could abide them. Like being locked in the cupboard under the stairs. Me grandad used to do that to me when I’d been naughty.”

  “Sure,” said Frank. “Small dark spaces. Give me the creeps. Hell, I don’t even ride the New York subway.”

  “You mean you’re leaving it all to me? I’m on me tod? You pair of bastards.”

  All the same he set off.

  “It’s going to take me about two hours to get to the other end and back. I reckon it’s about two miles each way. If you aren’t coming then you’re on guard duty. You watch my arse, right? You don’t leave this spot till I get back.”

  “’S’OK,” Eddie said. “I brought sandwiches and a thermos.”

  It was surprisingly dry. Everything about it was a tribute to German engineering, a hundred or more years before the phrase was famous. He could stand up in it at the centre, right between what seemed to be the stone version of railway lines cut into the floor. The tunnel was pretty well the same shape as the tunnels on the London Underground, but smaller, and arched in dressed stone rather than steel panels. It was easy to imagine that whatever the original purpose of this tunnel, some sort of wagon or carriage had run along here, hauled by donkeys or pit ponies—if, that is, it had ever been used. It was old, but it was pristine, no signs of wear. As von Jeltsch-Fugger had said, who knows who or what it was meant to convey and where? Ending at the zoo looked like error or abandonment.

  The tunnel curved without any sharp bends. Nothing had collapsed, despite everything the RAF had dropped on the city above, despite the Nazis last-ditch attempts at scorched and flooded earth. The worst he had to contend with was the occasional puddle, lots of dust and countless cobwebs. He felt much the same about rats as Eddie did about the cupboard under the stairs, but he saw no rats. The spiders had the place to themselves.

  It took about forty-five minutes to reach the other end, to stand a hundred and fifty feet below the kiosk von Jeltsch-Fugger had shown him. The ascent was tiring, and the reward was the light cutting through the iron mosaic of the kiosk, the dappling pattern it made on his uniform and the smooth click of satisfaction as the key von Jeltsch-Fugger had given him turned in the lock.

  This was going to work. The adrenaline surge of certainty carried him back to the zoo end in half an hour, to catch Frank and Eddie each trying to fleece Stanley at pontoon.

  “Find what you was after?” Stanley said.

  “More or less,” Wilderness equivocated. “I need one more favour.”

  “It’ll cost yer.”

  “You don’t know what it is yet.”

  “It’ll cost yer whatever it is.”

  “Can you rig up a pulley, something like a block and tackle down the shaft, and another one at the far end?”

  “Dunno. Where is the far end?”

  “Monbijou.”

  “Russian sector?”

  “Yes.”

  “Russkis is extra. It’ll cost you another fifty bars.”

  Frank slapped down his hand of cards and feigned exasperation.

  “Jeez, do you think I’m made of soap?”

  Wilderness said, “If that’s your price. But I want a trolley, something like a small railway maintenance wagon. You can throw that in for the price.”

  “Wot? Like a push-me-pull-you? Suppose I can. What gauge? Did you measure it?”

  “I did. Nought point seven of a metre.”

  “Nought point bleedin’ seven of a soddin’ metre? That’s wot I hate about Le fuckin’ Continent. Everything’s fuckin’ metric. What’s wrong with an honest-to-God gauge like four foot eight and a half?”

  There being nothing to say to this, Wilderness said nothing.

  He took a pencil from his pocket, scrounged an old envelope off Eddie, and drew what he wanted.

  “Flat bed, optional sides, right? Something that can be left off if needs be. Between the wheels, so the centre of gravity stays low, I want a motorbike battery. Light enough to haul up the shaft for recharging. Big enough to do the job. At either end I want a pair of brackets on the uprights, I want headlamps on the brackets that can be swapped over front to back for the return journey. Across the uprights at both ends I want a bar at this height.”

  He held a hand at nipple height to make his point.

  “I don’t want to have to bend all the time. Wrap these bars in something soft, like leather. OK?”

  “Pullman class?”

  “Whatever.”

  “S-O-D again?” Stanley concluded.

  “Damn right,” said Frank.

  §147

  In Paradies Verlassen that night Frank said, “What is the plan, kid? Pulleys? Railways? Are we the Union Pacific now?”

  “I think you’ll find they went West, Frank. We’re going East. But, yes, we are indeed a railroad. An underground railroad. Think of it as a literal underground railroad. This time it’s soap, coffee and scent not runaway slaves.”

  Frank understood him.

  “We could . . . we could move more shit than we ever did on the surface. There was I thinking we’re fucked, and . . . and y’know . . . we just moved into the big league.”

  “Yep. The tunnel’s dead flat. A wagon well oiled should roll at a touch. We could move a thousand pounds of coffee as easily as a packet of fags.”

  Eddie emerged from his Bierstein sniggering and blowing bubbles of lager.

  “If we could get a thousand pounds of coffee!”

  “Oh, you leave that one with me,” Frank said. “Things are hotting up, things are really hotting up nicely.”

  It was almost magical timing. At that point Larissa Tosca walked by, smiled at Joe and Eddie, stuck her tongue out at Frank. Wilderness hadn’t even noticed she’d been sitting there, and he relied on the constant buzz of Paradies to render any conversation private. But where had she been sitting. How close? At her usual table or closer?

  Half an hour and two beers later Yuri joined them.

  Wilderness brought him up to scratch.

  “Good,” he said. “Good good.”

  “I’ll need a bloke or two at the other end, whenever we send something through. Pick a couple of big buggers, they’ll have to haul the load up the shaft.”

  “Good good,” said Yuri, and Wilderness began
to think it might be all he would ever say.

  Then he said, “Sugar. As much as you can carry.”

  Frank looked perplexed, “Sugar? Just like that?”

  “Sugar I can shift. Sugar I can sell. Either you have sugar or you haven’t. If not I go elsewhere.”

  Wilderness stepped in, “No, Yuri, you can’t. No one else will sell to you in the quantity we can. Anybody else will be taking the risk of passing the checkpoints, and if your blokes find sugar they’ll just confiscate it in Joe Stalin’s name, sell it back to West Berliners and you won’t get so much as a shufty.”

  “Shufty? What is shufty?”

  Frank said, “What Joe is trying to tell you is that we’re a partnership, Yuri. You, me, Joe, Eddie. We’re in this together. Why would you even think of looking elsewhere?”

  Yuri croaked out a sour little laugh. “Partnership? All you dogs want is my dollars.”

  Then he swilled beer, wiped his lips, and as his hand passed over them he began to smile.

  “The old team, eh? OK, comrades. How soon can you get my sugar?”

  Frank and Joe exchanged glances. Wilderness took a punt.

  “Friday. We can do this Friday.”

  When Yuri and Eddie had left Frank said, “I can get him two hundred and fifty pounds by Friday, but will Stanley have us up and running by then?”

  §148

  In the absence of Spud and Pie Face it occurred to Wilderness that there were risks and gains in recruiting afresh, and that the risks outweighed the gains. The gain would have been labour—helping hands, to shift the equivalent of one fat man in sugar across Charlottenburg, into the zoo park, onto the pulley and down the shaft. Instead, Frank declining to dirty his hands with manual labour, it was left to a wheezing, sweating Eddie to lower the sugar down the shaft to Wilderness.

  Fat Stanley had knocked up a Heath Robinson masterpiece. A solid oak deck, greased bearings, steel wheels. A flick of a switch and the tunnel was filled with light. A touch of the leather-bound bar and the trolley rolled. But Wilderness had not allowed for heat. Pushing was not like walking. After a mile of pushing the “one fat man” on the trolley, Wilderness stripped down to his underwear. Hotter, but also slower. He’d allowed forty-five minutes for a journey that took ninety. What would happen if Yuri ever asked for 250 pounds. of butter? It would be close to rancid mush by the time he got to the other end..

  When he flashed his torch up the Monbijou shaft Yuri’s voice echoed down in anger.

  “Черт возьми, где ты был?” Where the hell have you been?

  He got quicker.

  The next Sunday it was back to basics—coffee again. An all-embracing smell that seemed to fill the tunnel. And a lighter load. He got the trolley to Monbijou in just under an hour, his back and thighs aching like a galley slave’s.

  It occurred to him that he had grasped the shit end of the stick.

  He said so to them both in Paradies.

  “Can’t be helped,” Frank said. I ain’t fakin’. Nor is Ed. Small, dark places, kid. Small, dark places.”

  He pushed a vodka martini across the table to him.

  “A little of what you fancy. You earned it.”

  This, Wilderness thought, was condescending crap. Eddie could not, would not lie about claustrophobia, but Frank?

  “Just tell me it’s worth it Frank and stop soft-soaping me.”

  Frank leaned back smiling hugely, the paterfamilias, all-but-hugging in his bonhomie and so full of . . .

  “Greenbacks, Joe. On the nail every time. Yuri pays up. Good as his word. We’re creaming it. Gotta hand it to you, when Uncle Joe started his blockade I thought we were screwed.”

  His voice dropped to a stage whisper.

  “But we’re richer than ever. If this blockade lasts all winter, we can retire to the Ba-fuckin-hamas.”

  The grin was infectious. Wilderness sipped at his vodka, and couldn’t help smiling back at the gleaming, white, all-American teeth Frank was flashing at him. That was the awful seduction of the con man—you wanted him to be real, you wanted to like him and him to like you.

  “Bahamas,” he repeated to himself, swirling the martini, looking back at Frank.

  “Bahamas?” said Eddie. “I think I’d prefer Skegness.”

  §149

  Wilderness knew better than to boast or say “I told you so,” but one day towards the end of August, as he and Frank were trying in vain to get to Der Kater Murr, a surge of schadenfreude proved almost irresistible.

  The scuffed and faded line that had marked the meeting of sectors at Potsdamer Platz had become a fortress of barbed wire and steel posts. Some poor bugger was on his knees sloppily painting the white line back where it had been and being barked at by a British corporal. As for the MPs, there were more than he could count.

  Frank said for him, “Well kid, you were right. It’s our side cutting us off. I think you found your tunnel just in time. Sure as fuck . . . no more jeeps.”

  §150

  Smuggling became like adultery. A secret that would never trouble the conscience, but which required a strategy to avoid detection.

  Wilderness kept a complete change of uniform, “bought” from RAF stores at the cost of three bottles of Courvoisier, at the bottom of the zoo shaft, but hardly ever had recourse to it in full. He pushed the trolley wearing only his underpants and took to bathing back at Fasanenstraße, with the same brand of soap that Nell favoured in the bathroom at her flat—an unadorned Palmolive green, with, luckily, no particular scent to it. It was soap that smelt of soap. A household rather than a boudoir item. The trick was to meet Nell of an evening exuding the right combination of cleanliness and grime. Never with wet hair, the biggest giveaway of all. Never soaked in the stinking sweat of hard labour . . . the merest glow of manly aroma that might have been acquired in a dishonest day’s graft.

  Tinned food was the worst, it bulked small but weighed heavy. Frank would dump five hundred tins of tuna at the top of the shaft and somehow imagine that this would be moved as readily as five hundred bags of ground coffee whilst weighing more than four times as much. Tinned food worked up a sweat, tinned food knackered him. Booze slowed them all down. Bottles of scotch needed careful handling. If Eddie dropped a case of tuna, they just dented. When he dropped a case of Lagavulin all twelve bottles shattered at the bottom of the shaft and showered Wilderness in single malt whisky—a smell that took three baths to get off him and lingered in the tunnel for the best part of a month.

  The oddest load of all was caviar.

  Wilderness hefted a tin in his hand before Eddie dropped two hundred more down the shaft.

  “Have you read the label?” he asked Frank.

  Frank was ever nonchalant, hand in pockets as if to demonstrate that nothing would make him get them dirty, standing around while others toiled.

  “Nah,” he said. “You know I don’t read Russian.”

  Wilderness counted to ten waiting for Frank’s brain to kick in.

  “Shit! I get it! This fish paste came from Russia in the first place.”

  “Fish eggs, Frank. Sturgeon roe from the Black Sea.”

  Frank picked up a tin as though knowing what it really was had somehow improved his grasp of a foreign language.

  “Well, whaddya know? What’s that phrase you guys have? Coals to Newgate.”

  “Newcastle, you fucking idiot.”

  “French soap, Scotch whisky, Californian tuna . . . Russian caviar. There are times I reckon we could sell ice to Eskimos.”

  Most days had a run along the tunnel. He would count it a bad day if he made the run twice, and would feel like bollocking Frank, but that necessity never arose. Eddie would always get his two penn’orth in first.

  Frank would say, “So? I do all the driving. I take the biggest risk of all. I drive a car from Tempelhof to the zoo, loaded down with stolen crap, past my guys, past your guys and past the Kraut cops. You two have a concrete wall ten foot high around you and Fat Stanley and his gu
ys watching your ass. I take all the risks!”

  Eventually, a month or so into their new venture, Wilderness replied with, “And you collect all the money.”

  Frank leaned in closer for confidentiality, “And he’s still paying on the pop. We might have to open a bank account or something kosher. My mattress is bulging with mazuma. Bahamas here we come.”

  With consummate timing a message cylinder clunked down from the celestial network of overhead tubes.

  “For Joe. Table 21.”

  Inside was a note. “I still say he’s a rogue. LT.”

  Wilderness looked across the room. She was sitting at the table where he had first met her, sipping another martini, smiling but not beckoning. All it would take was a wave.

  §151

  It might have been said that Ernest Bevin was a surprise appointment as Britain’s Foreign Secretary in 1945. He had been Minister for Labour throughout the war, a post for which, as a former trades union leader, he would seem to have been eminently qualified. But Foreign Secretary? To understand Mr. Attlee’s choice would require recourse to terms such as “rough diamond” and “autodidact”—although Mr. Bevin’s didact was probably auto enough for him not to grasp the meaning.

  He was a man who would call a spade a spade, and deem it so in an unwavering West Country accent. Part of the shock to the national, if not international, system, was that he followed in office Anthony Eden, a sophisticated, if neurotic old Etonian, former army officer and trusted lieutenant of the recently rejected prime minister Winston Churchill. A man who spoke fluent French, German, and Russian—to say nothing of Arabic and Farsi. Those there were who said that Bevin was not even fluent in English. Eden was the kind of figure of a man who’d grace a Noël Coward comedy on the West End stage with a gin and it in hand, not the saloon bar of the Dog and Duck with a pint of mild.

  But . . . there might be another reason, another model of the statesman to which Ernest Bevin conformed—Vyacheslav Molotov, the USSR’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs since Russia entered the war in 1941, the hammer in Stalin’s right hand.

  They were two of a kind. No one in the British cabinet looked more like a Russian than Ernie Bevin. Indeed, swap Molotov’s pince-nez for Bevin’s horn-rims, draw a moustache on Bevin . . . and they might have been separated at birth—the rough bruisers of the diplomatic boxing ring. Although to be fair to Molotov he had kept better control of his waistline.