Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  “Goalposts, you idiot. It’s not much and it’s in your own interests.”

  “So?”

  “So put your hand in your pocket right now and peel off two hundred dollars.”

  Frank did not hesitate. A wry, quizzical look on his face as though he was paying for a little extra in a bawdy house with no real expectation of what the new trick might be.

  Wilderness took the money.

  “That’s for my new passport.”

  “It is?”

  “Not getting busted is part of the plan. Right?”

  “Sure.”

  “If the plan goes wrong—”

  “It won’t.”

  “It has. Or we wouldn’t be here. If . . . then you don’t want me caught with a passport that can be traced to you and will bring the State Department down on both of us, do you? This will buy me a good fake. Nothing the blokes on the checkpoints would spot, nothing that would fool the best Langley has.”

  “Good thinking, kemosabe.”

  They’d almost reached the Metro station. Frank’s anxieties had eased up and the mindless bonhomie that typified the man was all but oozing from him. He was back in control, the illusion of efficacy. Wilderness would not have been surprised if Frank suggested they adjourn to a bar and get drunk over lunch. But it was time to go their ways.

  “One last thing.”

  “I thought the two hundred bucks was the one last thing?”

  “No. That was the one more thing.”

  “How much this time?”

  “Nothing. It’s Yuri.”

  “Yuri? I don’t get it.”

  “I keep seeing Yuri.”

  “You mean in Berlin?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m not sure. It’s happened twice now. I catch a glimpse of a man who looks like Yuri and when I catch up . . . well I don’t catch up . . . he’s gone.”

  “What does this guy look like?”

  “Like Yuri.”

  “Yuri 1948 or Yuri now?”

  “I don’t know. Just . . . Yuri.”

  Frank stuck both his hands in his pockets, rattled his coins—a slight squirm of the torso as though what he was going to say required muscle.

  “Joe, how old do you reckon Yuri was in 1948? He was older than us. Had to be forty, maybe forty-five. Now, he’d be sixty. He’d been NKVD. When we knew him he was MGB or whatever. Just supposing he made it into the KGB—and every time they changed the initials heads rolled . . . Old Joe Stalin had a purge, here a purge, there a purge, everywhere a purge purge—Yuri probably collected epaulettes and collar tabs the way my kid brother collected cigarette cards—just supposing . . . there are a lot of possibilities for Yuri at sixty. He made general, and he’s a desk jockey in Dzerzhinsky Square—he’s retired—he’s in a fucking gulag—he’s dead. All possible. What’s not possible is that fifteen years later he’s still knocking around Berlin. You said it. You’re not sure. I am sure. You didn’t see Yuri.”

  Frank was utterly serious. Wilderness looked hard at him. The joker, Frank’s habitual mode, was not in play.

  “On the other hand if you’re looking over your shoulder for spooks, keep your eyes peeled for Nell Breakheart.”

  “What?”

  “She’s still in Berlin, Did you really think she’d be anywhere else? She was forever telling us she was ‘ein fucking Berliner.’ But you don’t need to worry. She’s too high up for you. She’s Deputy Chief of Staff to the Mayor. In so far as West Berlin has a Foreign Minister, she’s it. All those languages after all. She keeps Willy Brandt au fait with all the foreign papers and briefs him on all the foreign muckety-mucks that show up in Berlin. Any day now she’ll be minding Jack Kennedy for him. June 26. Fifteenth anniversary of the airlift. To the day. Hell, it’s got to be irresistible hasn’t it? Another goddamn speech and this time a captive audience. A concrete wall to keep them in has to be one up on locking the theatre doors. Nell’ll be there. She’ll have her hands full. She won’t be hanging around on street corners looking for old boyfriends to get even with or new ones to fuck.”

  “You know, Frank, you can be so damn crude when you want to be.”

  §189

  From somewhere Erno produced a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label. Wilderness was not partial to neat scotch, but felt he should keep Erno company. Erno pulled a face when he asked for a jug of tap water.

  “My God, you buggers make the stuff and you’ve no idea how to drink it.”

  He’d thrown open the windows. If he’d had a terrace they’d both be sitting on it.

  “You’re very trusting Joe. Why do you not think Frank is up to tricks again?”

  “I dunno. He could be. But . . .”

  “But the money’s too good, eh?”

  “That I can’t deny.”

  “But the scheme itself, Joe. You had a good word earlier on . . . cockamamy. It doesn’t translate so well . . . but it sounds wonderful . . . a combination of the marvellous and the crazy. Better than nonsense, short of believable. Very seductive. It would be typical Frank to be caught out by one lie and then tell you another.”

  “Yeah well. It might be.”

  “Do you honestly believe his tale about Israel? About the Russians and the Americans?”

  “Dunno. But she is Marte Mayerling. As for the rest . . . I’ll tell you on Thursday.”

  “Why Thursday?”

  “Because I’m going across. If I’m followed by anyone . . . then it probably is a line Frank made up. If I’m not . . . I’ll conclude there’s a fair chance he’s telling the truth.”

  “Of course, they can’t follow everybody. And with the passport I shall give you, they will be unlikely to suspect you.”

  “Professional pride eh, Erno?”

  “Exactly. You’re either going to have to trust Frank or walk away from it. And somehow I can’t see you turning down the money.”

  “Is this where you tell me I’m a fool?”

  “No. We all need money. And I make mine in a market far more dubious than yours. But nobody shoots at me. When we met you were a kid on a roll. The prince of Schiebers. I thought you’d make a fortune or die trying. Somehow you did neither. And I think that perhaps you feel the chances passed you by and that Frank, against all your better judgement, is offering you that chance . . . to get rich quick.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “And you didn’t say ‘get thee behind me, Satan’?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Cockamamy,” Erno mused.

  “So you said.”

  “But . . . there is a certain logic to it.”

  “What logic?”

  “There are no easy pickings in a stable world. The black market was a gift to men like you and me. The Berlin Wall is a gift—so good for business. If Germany ever unifies I’ll be out of work permanently. You and me, men like you and me and Frank . . .”

  “Don’t forget Yuri.”

  “OK, Yuri too. Men like us . . . scavengers . . . we make our living at the rough edge of society, and when society has no more rough edges we make zilch. Russia versus the West. Good for business. Israel versus the Arabs. Good for business. And we, we scavengers, we as individuals are not all that different from the organisations . . . CIA . . . KGB . . . they just pretend to legitimacy. Whereas we are honest criminals. We are highwaymen, they are robber barons. They’ll both thrive on the conflict this scheme of Frank’s will perpetuate.”

  “Honest criminals?”

  “Not much of an oxymoron. It fits.”

  “Indeed it does. But in our roll call of absent friends we’ve forgotten one altogether. Eddie Clark.”

  “Swift Eddie? Whatever became of him?”

  “He’s a copper. A sergeant at Scotland Yard.”

  Erno choked, coughed up whisky. Wilderness thought he might die laughing.

  “He’s the right-hand man to one of the most famous coppers in the country—Commander Troy of
the Yard—and it’s rumoured Eddie never leaves his desk except to bet on a horse.”

  Before Wilderness left for the night Erno set out a driving licence, a passport, and a 7.65 Walther PPK complete with shoulder holster and spare clip.

  Wilderness glanced at the passport.

  “Reinhold Schellenberg?”

  “One name is much the same as another when none of them are real. Walter is dead, and if he weren’t he could hardly object.”

  Wilderness flipped the clip out of the handle of the PPK. A Major Weatherill moment. Tooled up again.

  “You never cared for guns, did you Joe?”

  “I still don’t. But dealing with Frank has taught me better. And dealing with Rumpelstiltskin . . .”

  “Who? Oh, the little man in green. Your imaginary friend.”

  “Forget it, Erno. A trick of the light or something.”

  “Whatever. I have one last thing for you.”

  Something heavy, wrapped in old newspaper clunked down on the desk between them.

  Wilderness peeled back the paper.

  A bunch of rusting keys. The keys to the Monbijou tunnel entrance.

  “Where did you . . . ?”

  “It was January 1949. I got home to find them outside my door. A present from Rumpelstiltskin.”

  §190

  Wilderness walked up the side of the S-bahn from Zoo Station to the car park. It was used as overspill and was mercifully empty. He hoped it would stay that way.

  There was an even layer of tarmac right across. The spot where the tunnel entrance used to be was invisible. He found it by pacing out the distance between two trees which had been there in 1948 and had survived. It was guesswork, but, he felt, good guesswork. With any luck the contractors had bridged the hole rather than attempting to fill it in. A hundred and fifty feet was a deep hole, but then Berlin had been a city of infinite rubble. They might just have tipped the lot down the hole.

  It was exposed, visible from the zoo, from the S-bahn, and from across the canal. They’d need cover of some sort. And they’d need a bluff to explain their presence.

  They’d be digging in daylight.

  He’d bring her out in darkness.

  §191

  The palace had gone. A scar upon the landscape where it had once stood. The merest beginnings of turning Monbijou into a park again. No doubt it all waited upon some five- or fifteen-year People’s Plan. The Russians had dynamited the Kaiser’s schloss years ago as though eradicating all trace of the Reich, any Reich. Wilderness wondered how and when they’d finally disposed of Monbijou. The schloss had been a bit of a monstrosity. Monbijou hadn’t. He’d seen it only as a ruin, and still it had been beautiful.

  It reminded him of the day he first saw the pickelhaube kiosk under the S-bahn. Von Jeltsch-Fugger had turned the key and the door had opened up without effort. Just as it did now.

  It was untouched. The pulley Fat Stanley had rigged up was still suspended in the shaft. He found the remains of a one-pound coffee packet at the foot of the well, spilled across the stone floor where some rodent or other has sampled it and rejected it, still bearing its USAF PX label.

  Nothing had fallen in, nothing had leaked. He stripped to his underpants to cope with heat and dust and walked to the other end in less than half an hour.

  The trolley was at the foot of the other shaft, where he had left it in the November of 1948. Its batteries corroded and its axles rusting, but otherwise intact. His spare uniform, coated in a thick layer of cobwebs, was still draped across it. He’d have no use for either.

  There was no tipped rubble. He climbed up the spiral staircase almost to the top. The other pulley was intact, and above it a sheet of flat steel had been laid. He reckoned the top of the pulley had been only about three or four feet below the surface. The City of Berlin had capped the hole and covered it with hardcore and a layer of tarmac. They hadn’t bothered to explore. They had, as von Jeltsch-Fugger had opined all those years ago, merely done what was asked of them without curiosity.

  §192

  In the evening Wilderness met Manfred Oppitz and three other Free University students in a café off the old Potsdamer Platz—a city square now stranded derelict in no-man’s-land. It was like Der Kater Murr, it might even have been Der Kater Murr made over. West Berlin at its very edge. He thought that might well be why they had chosen it.

  Wilderness had long thought memory as powerful a tool of imagination as anything. But try as he might he couldn’t bring the old Potsdamer Platz, the one he and Frank had trod so often, into the mind’s eye with enough strength and vividness to impose itself on the sight before him. “Desert” came to mind. The wall compounded by the clearing away of the buildings on the Soviet side. The Potsdamer Bahnhof, bombed into stone lace by the RAF, had gone and along with it almost anything else that had still been standing in 1945. The Russians had made a wilderness, a desert, a Great War no-man’s-land in the middle of the city. The Death Strip—a vast, empty space crossed only by the thin steel thread of an elevated walkway. Of course these kids had chosen this place. They wanted him to meet the wall—Die Mauer—before he met them. A matter of fact placed squarely before if not between them all. He found he had little or no reaction to it. In ’61 he’d watched the goons roll out barbed wire and lay a few breeze blocks in a manner not much above desultory. Now the wall was a solid body, but scarcely better built. The same desultory workmanship pushed to its lazy limit. The artlessness of the jerry-builder. He’d hardly glimpsed it at Checkpoint Charlie, there was so little of it to see. Now, here it was, architect of such vacancy. Ruler of such ruin. A ragged grey line stretching to infinity.

  If Oppitz had learnt to smile for the camera his photographs would have done him justice. He had a mischievous grin that would have alarmed any schoolmaster when he was twelve and attract any girl now he was twenty. He was far from the deadly serious Pol Sci student of his photograph.

  “Let me introduce you, Herr Johnson. Georg Kies—physics.”

  A big man, older than the others, his hair already receding, but still, Wilderness would guess, under thirty.

  “Friedrich Bochum—chemistry.”

  A skinny kid, topped out by the moptop haircut that was sweeping England in the wake of the Beatles, and now seemed to be invading the Continent as well. The sort of look that roused retired colonels to apoplexy and might even cause Burne-Jones to raise a disapproving eyebrow.

  “Traudl Brahms.”

  A blonde beauty, peering at him across the top of her spectacles.

  Wilderness stared back.

  “You are surprised to find a woman in the group, Herr Johnson?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I am the engineer. All these students of politics and science are just empty rhetoric without me.”

  They all laughed at this, then Oppitz said, “It’s true. We’d never have dug so much as a metre of tunnel without Traudl to prevent it all falling in on us.”

  “Well, I doubt this one will fall in on anyone. It’s been there more than a hundred and fifty years.”

  “You have been down recently?”

  “Yes. I walked the tunnel from the East this morning.”

  Oppitz nodded, Traudl spoke up.

  “If you have a tunnel why do you need us?”

  “It’s been built over at this end. I need help, experienced help, to reopen it. It’s long, it runs from Monbijou Park to the zoo end of the Tiergarten . . .”

  “Good God . . . that’s three kilometres.”

  “Closer to four.”

  “And we’d be digging at the zoo?”

  “Yes. No more than three or four feet. Down to a steel plate. Lift the plate—it’s heavy, about an inch thick—and the shaft and tunnel below are intact.”

  “We’d be digging in the open? That would require city permits.”

  “Just leave that with me. You’ll get all the paperwork you need. What I want you to do is get hold of tools, the lifting gear and screening—the sort of hoar
ding builders would put up around a structure they’re restoring. Keeps dust in and peeping eyes out. You’ll be city workmen excavating something. Water, gas, whatever fits the story. And I’m sure Frank Spoleto explained . . . he needs your political skills as much as your tunnelling skills.”

  Kies said, “Just one woman. A drop in the ocean. We brought out twenty-nine.”

  “I know. Everybody knows. That’s why we want you. To ensure everybody knows.”

  “Why not bring out more?”

  Wilderness had anticipated this question. He wondered if Frank had. As far as they were concerned the “one woman” was Hannah Schneider. He’d give them Hannah Schneider. They’d find out later rather than sooner who she really was. And if that blew their chances of using the tunnel again, so be it. But if it didn’t? Well, they had ideals—something Frank wouldn’t care about even if he understood in the first place.

  “There’ll be nothing to stop you once this job’s done. The tunnel will be yours. Be discreet about the location and you might get a few dozen out before the Russians shut it down.”

  “A few dozen? Why not a hundred?”

  “They will shut it down, believe me, they will.”

  Oppitz asked, “Do we have a deadline?”

  “We do. The evening of the twenty-sixth. Next Wednesday.”

  All four heads turned, looked at each other, exchanged quizzical glances.

  Oppitz said, “You know what day that is, don’t you?”

  “Of course he does,” Traudl said, a broad smile, teetering on laughter. “Herr Johnson is stealing thunder. We’re all stealing thunder.”

  §193

  “You can take off the wig now, Dr. Mayerling.”

  She frowned, turned her back on him, removed a couple of pins, tossed the wig onto the sofa and with one hand still ruffling her hair turned to face him.

  Much more had altered. The transformation was dramatic. It made him realise that she’d put on a far better performance that he’d given her credit for. An elasticity seemed to return to her body, she seemed to stand taller, and a youthful light had gone on in her eyes—an angry light, aimed at him.

  “You know my name? Do I know yours? Or do I go on calling you Mr. Johnson?”