Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  He walked back in the direction of Dorsoduro and settled for menu turistico—rubbery pasta and half a bottle of overpriced Chianti.

  §174

  Vienna, like the rest of Austria, had about a month to go before its independence was finally re-established. After the Anschluss, conquest, occupation . . . reparation . . . aid . . . treaties . . . any day now, the zones—American, British, French, and Russian—which had lasted more than ten years would be abolished, the forces of occupation, down to less than a hundred thousand, would withdraw and Austria would become the odd man of Europe . . . neutral by common consent, outside any sphere of influence . . . the ambivalence of aggressor/victim finally shuffled off into history.

  Gus Fforde was a rogue. Wilderness spotted him as a rogue at first sight. Gus Fforde was also First Secretary at the embassy in Vienna. His office was chaos, a warren of packing cases and cardboard boxes.

  “Please excuse the mess. I only got here a few days ago myself. We’re going legit,” he said. “No more delegations or military commissions . . . a full-blown embassy . . . diplomatic bags, cocked hats and sashes . . . the whole caboodle. It’ll just take a little time.”

  Wilderness produced his warrant, said he needed to see the duty Intelligence Officer.

  “Well,” said Fforde. “Until one actually gets here I rather think that might be me. What can I do for you?”

  “A secure line to London, perhaps?”

  “Ah . . . you may find us not exactly up to scratch on the cloak-and-dagger stuff yet. I can get you on the scrambler but it would be as well if anyone you refer to is called Smith . . . in fact . . . if you could talk in riddles . . .”

  Wilderness was put through to Burne-Jones in his office.

  “Vienna? Via Venice?” Burne-Jones sounded mildly incredulous.

  “Just what I was thinking,” Wilderness said. “They might just be two lovers running away. But for one thing . . . someone’s laid out a good paper trail for them, and someone’s paying for all this.”

  “What do you propose?”

  “That I stick with them until I know who. If I’m right they’ll get on a train across to Bratislava in a day or two. And their banker will make contact before they do.”

  “I agree. But that’s where it ends. If they get on a train to Bratislava don’t follow. Only if they don’t get on a train or they get a train to somewhere else do you follow. And if their man surfaces, you make no contact with him. Understand me, Joe. No contact.”

  §175

  Fforde said, “Let me buy you dinner. You may be wholly unexpected, but you are my first diplomatic guest. Besides, it’s all the same bloody pot isn’t it? I put in a chit or you put in a chit. Six of one half a dozen of the other.”

  They went to Café Landtmann. A traditional Viennese dinner of boiled beef, over which Wilderness filled him in.

  “Of course I remember Szabo. Who could ever forget him? Did us no end of harm with the Americans. I thought they’d never shut up about him.”

  “Yet,” said Wilderness. “Wherever he goes no one seems to recognise him.”

  “Mind you. Can’t say I remember her at all. What did you say her name was?”

  “Marte Mayerling.”

  “Nope. Not so much as a tinkle in the old brain box. Now, what exactly are we supposed to do with this pair?”

  “Just watch. It’s all I’ve done since they left Paris. They have every right to travel.”

  “On false passports?”

  “Hardly our problem. We’re watching for the simplest of reasons. Everything Szabo knows he told the Russians just after the war. Almost everything Mayerling knows is academic and can probably be accessed in any one of half a dozen journals that have published her work. They can’t teach the Russians anything they don’t already know.”

  “Then why are we even watching?”

  “The Russians can have them, that’s a given. It’s any third party that bothers London. Burne-Jones has sent me to see who’s paying for the joyride, that’s all he wants to know. If it’s Russia he’ll just say fine . . . and if it’s not . . .”

  Wilderness shrugged away the end of his sentence.

  “But who?”

  “Gus, name me a country that doesn’t want the atom bomb.”

  “Iceland, San Marino, Andorra . . . the Vatican.”

  “No Gus, a real country, not a provincial town masquerading as a country . . . and I think the Vatican probably does want the bomb.”

  “So what are we talking about? The Arab bomb? The Chinese bomb? Or just the highest bidder?”

  “I’ve no idea and I couldn’t give a damn. But the highest bidder? No. Money doesn’t interest this pair. They act on principle.”

  “So what you’re saying is that your job is to see them safely into the hands or our enemy.”

  “Yes. That sums it up nicely.”

  And Fforde said, “Supposing the Russians don’t get that?”

  §176

  On the way back to the Imperial, Fforde said, “I could get you into the Sacher. They’re just about up and running again. We’ve had it since the end of the war. Of course, the Russians had the Imperial. They’ve not been gone more than a matter of weeks, and it stands to reason they’ll have packed the place with bugs.”

  “Then I’ll be wary of that. But, no thanks. I need to be where I can see them. This is a snark hunt. It’ll be over in a day or two. I’ll hang up my gun and we’ll prop up a bar together. Meanwhile . . . I might need a camera.”

  Three mornings, three breakfasts later Szabo and Mayerling checked out of the Imperial. Wilderness anticipated and bagged a cab to the Nordbahnhof ahead of them. No one, as far as he had seen, had yet made contact, and turning over their room had yielded nothing new—who after all would bother to book for the thirty-minute train ride to the border? It could only go wrong if he had guessed wrong.

  He hadn’t. Ten minutes after he had arrived, Szabo and Mayerling got out of a cab at the station to be met by a short, stout, Slavic-looking man. At last.

  It seemed to Wilderness that Russia made its KBG-niks on a production line. This bloke was just a younger version of Yuri Myshkin—the same peasant sturdiness, the same look of joy in cunning and mistrust. Smiling as he stripped the rings off your fingers. Another apparatchik thug.

  There was a formal handshake—Wilderness didn’t think they’d ever met him before—then they were briskly escorted through the barrier to the 11:40 morning train for Bratislava.

  He kept back, and with the little pre-war Leica II he’d borrowed from Fforde got half a dozen clear shots of the man in profile as he put Szabo and Mayerling on the train. As he clicked for the last time, the man turned full-face, and for a second Wilderness thought he had seen him. But he turned back to Szabo. Shook hands a second time. Waited as the train pulled out of the station. A fond uncle packing the kids off home after a month in the country. It was nothing. He’d seen nothing. Wilderness flagged a cab and went back to the embassy. If Burne-Jones’s team back in London couldn’t find a match in their records, so what? He’d no doubts. The bloke was KGB. Written all over him. He should know. He’d never forget that pudgy little face, with its almond eyes and ruptured blood vessels, looming over him—the impish grin, the bitter taste of morphine.

  The job was over. All that knowledge, all that destructive, subatomic power safely delivered into the hands of an enemy who had no further use for it. Priceless and worthless.

  §177

  Fforde gave every impression of being bored. A new job, a new country and he seemed to crave company.

  Wilderness handed over the Leica, said, “Let’s get it developed and the prints off to London in the bag.”

  Fforde dropped it into the middle drawer of his desk and said, “I’m famished. Let’s nip out for lunch.”

  They had lunch.

  After lunch he said, “Do you fancy dinner at Landtmann’s again? Bags of stuff on the menu I haven’t tried yet.”

  He was like a kid in a sw
eetshop the day toffee came off the ration.

  Wilderness went back to the hotel. Stripped off his jacket. Caught sight of himself in the wardrobe mirror. Shoulder holsters looked absurd, a cross between a straitjacket and a bra. The job was over. He slung the holster into his suitcase. He couldn’t do that with the gun. It was a Burne-Jones rule. If you’re not carrying it, it’s still your responsibility. You do not lose it, you do not let it get stolen or otherwise mislaid.

  In the bathroom was a mirror-fronted medicine cabinet, set flush with the wall. Neat enough for him not to have realised it was a cabinet until his second night there. Inside were the first-aid basics—aspirin, cotton wool and Elastoplast.

  He tore off two long strips of Elastoplast and taped his Baby Browning to the back of the mirror. The maid would not be back until after he checked out in the morning, and if he couldn’t spot that there was a cupboard, why would anyone else? He wiped his own fingerprints off the mirror with bog roll.

  §178

  Over fish soup and grilled venison, Fforde missed England.

  “But you’ve only been here a fortnight.”

  “Not the point, old man. It’s a matter of how long I’ve spent in England. Welsh Guards during the war. A spell in Washington, two years in Lisbon, a year in Ankara . . . there are times I feel I’ve lost touch with the country I’m supposed to represent.”

  “I’ve not been there too much myself the last few years, but I was there most of ’52 to ’53.”

  “Lucky bugger! You were there for the coronation?”

  “Yes . . . but if you let me finish. You’ve missed nothing. England’s . . . stuck.”

  “Stuck?”

  “Moribund.”

  “Yeeees . . . awfully good word, ‘moribund.’ I had rather come to the same conclusion.”

  “They’re still fighting a war that ended ten years ago . . . in their minds at least . . . and on the cinema screen . . . and when they win that war, the war inside the head, they expect to find England just as it was in ’39.”

  This set Fforde off. A thesis on an unlamented, lost England. Against all appearances Fforde was a bit of a radical and had used his serviceman’s vote in 1945 to vote Labour, to vote against class and tradition, for the New Britain whose birth seemed to require a gestation longer than an elephant’s.

  Wilderness listened. It wasn’t boring. It reminded him of the conversations he had with Burne-Jones, but once he’d shot his bolt with “moribund” it was not an argument to which he felt he could contribute much.

  Over the course of the meal, they moved from red wine to white, to Tokay, to brandy.

  Outside the embassy, Fforde suggested they breakfasted together. Wilderness wondered if he could cope with the intensity of another Fforde meal and Fforde thesis, but he liked Gus so he said yes and walked on to the Imperial.

  I am not drunk, he told himself, with a drunk’s acute sense of euphemism, I am tipsy.

  Perhaps it was the booze. Perhaps it was the innate connection between being off duty and off guard. The first blow to the belly doubled him up, and the second to the face sent him to the floor scarcely conscious. He’d just about taken in the fact of the attack when he found himself dragged by his shirt collar to the bathroom. His eyes returned to focussing in time to see the bath full of water before his head was plunged in.

  When he thought he was dying, hands yanked him back up, he sucked in air and as his head went down again a voice uttered one of the few words that was common to most European languages, “Idiot.”

  After the third ducking, the hands let him go, and he fell against the side of the bath wheezing.

  He looked up. The little Russian was sitting on the painted wicker chair by the bathroom door—a semiautomatic in his right hand.

  “Идиот,” he said again. “You treat me like an idiot.”

  Wilderness got to his feet. Stripped off his sodden jacket. He felt blood on his face and in his mouth. He leaned over the basin, spitting. The gun stayed on him.

  “At the Gare du Nord, you are out in the open as though you think you are invisible. On the Orient Express you linger over your meals and gaze out of the window as though you have nothing better to do.”

  Wilderness stuck two fingers in his mouth and wiggled a loose tooth. Then he cupped water in his palm and rinsed a pink trail into the basin. He looked in the mirror. This bloke wasn’t wearing gloves, and there were no prints on the mirror. He’d been very careful in his search and wiped it down—or he hadn’t looked.

  “In Venice you . . . you English have a bird word for it . . . you swan around like a tourist . . .”

  “Bamdid,” Wilderness said.

  “Что?”

  “Band-Aid.”

  The Russian just waved the gun.

  Wilderness opened the cupboard. His Browning was still taped to the back of the mirror. The Russian could have found it. He could have emptied the magazine. He could have stuck the gun back up. But, then, the point of taping it up had been that any movement of the tape would probably show. It looked to be as he had left it, but there was really only one way to find out. He’d know by the weight as soon as he had it in his hand.

  He took out the roll of Elastoplast and closed the door.

  The Russian set down his gun in his lap and lit up a cigarette. Cocky, casual, but he could grab the gun in a split second.

  “And in the Nordbahnhof this morning, you practically waved a camera in my face. And still you think I do not notice you. English, you treat me like an idiot.”

  Wilderness tore off a strip, slapped it on the cut on his right cheek.

  The discourse rattled on. “Idiot, amateur, dilettante, бабочка.” Accomplished bore finds captive audience. Indeed, it occurred to Wilderness that the bugger might have gone to the trouble of sandbagging him simply to be able to give him a piece of his mind.

  He opened the cupboard door, put the roll of Elastoplast back, pulled the Browning free and aimed.

  The Russian just grinned—cigarette in his left hand, fingertips of his right resting on his gun. He took another long drag on his cigarette, exhaled a plume of utterly contemptuous smoke.

  “You’re doing it again. Treating me like an idiot. I know you English. You’re all just amateurs. Play the game chaps, play the game. Sticky wicket, googly, a maiden over. You think of Agincourt and cannot begin to imagine Stalingrad. What an absurd nation you English are. I know all about you. Gentlemen and players. Professionalism is vulgar, practice is cheating. Gentlemen and players? Ha! You won’t shoot. Your kind never does.”

  Wrong, wrong, wrong.

  III

  Then We Take Berlin

  So we beat on, boats against the current,

  borne back ceaselessly into the past.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

  1925

  §179

  New York: May 1963

  The Gramercy

  Frank had drifted in early, as though there were more on his mind than he was admitting and he admitted nothing.

  Wilderness was still shaving, half a mask of white foam across his cheeks. Frank lay on the bed, leafing through a copy of Life magazine and singing not quite tunelessly to himself.

  “You’re doing swell, you’ll go to hell, you can be sure of Shell.”

  Over and over again.

  “Frank?” Wilderness called from the bathroom.

  “Hear you loud and clear kid.”

  “Steve’s wife’s aunt. Hannah Schneider, right?”

  “Right.”

  “A Jew?”

  “Is the bear Catholic, does a pope shit in the woods? Of course she’s a Jew. You think a guy like Steve would marry outside the tribe? Hasn’t seen the inside of a synagogue in thirty years, but he’d never marry a shicksa. Personally I don’t get it. Who talks religion in the sack? Even if you fuck on Sunday.”

  Wilderness ignored this. Frank at his crudest. If the USA ever permitted the advertising of condoms, Frank was their man.
>
  “Steve’s been here how long?”

  “Born here. Round about 1900 or 1901. His old man came over from Ruritania or somewhere in the nineties. One o’ them pogrom things I guess. Changed the family name during the First War.”

  “And his wife. That is, Debbie’s family?”

  “About the same time I reckon. I heard her life story ten times over. Damn woman never shuts up.”

  “Aha . . . but the aunt got left behind . . . somehow.”

  “Yep.”

  “Where?”

  Wilderness heard the magazine rustling stop. As though he had Frank’s attention for the first time.

  “Whaddya mean where?”

  “Germany?”

  “Germany? Sure.”

  “Berlin?”

  “I guess so.”

  “And she survived?”

  “Obviously.”

  “In Berlin, during the war? Frank, how many Jews do you think survived in Berlin during the war?”

  “None. I guess.”

  “Actually, a couple of thousand survived. Against the odds but they did.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “Yep. I met some of them. When I was living with Nell.”

  “There’s a blast from the past. Nell Breakheart. Old flames never die, eh Joe? ‘You’re doing swell, you’re fucking Nell . . .’ Well . . . you may be right, but I never met any Jews in Berlin.”

  The magazine was rustling again. When Wilderness stepped out of the bathroom, Frank was angling the magazine sideways to take in an advert.

  It was hard to tell. Frank was indifferent to so many things it was often impossible to be certain whether or not he’d just given you the brush-off.

  §180

  They took breakfast downstairs in the Gramercy. They had it almost to themselves. Frank let his guard down, an old, familiar air of who-gives-a-damn.

  Between coffees Frank slid a passport and a driving licence across the table to him.

  Wilderness picked them up.

  “James Johnson?”

  “Easy to remember.”

  “From Hoboken?”

  “New York without being New York. It’s across the river in New Jersey. Sinatra’s home town. You used to do a good impression of Sinatra. Ought to be an easy accent if you ever need it.”