by Lawton, John
“Johnson will be fine.”
“How very . . . how very unequal. Tell me, Mr. Johnson, will I ever be able to trust you?”
“You trust Frank Spoleto.”
“That might be because he is Frank Spoleto.”
“Of course. What you see is what you get with Frank.”
She weighed this one up, unsure of how sarcastic he was being, waited a moment to see if he would relent and tell her his name. When he didn’t she picked up the wig and said, “You know, I think I’ll hang on to this. Who knows when I might need to be Hannah Schneider again. Hannah Schneider trusted you Mr. Johnson. I do not.”
Wilderness thought—all this for a fucking wig? Who lied to whom?
He said, “Well, if you can contain your mistrust we have plans to discuss.”
“Do you know when? You will appreciate I need to be prepared.”
“Of course, all the packing you have to do.”
He could have bitten his tongue. He’d got her back up. That was inevitable once he’d seen through the charade she and Frank had cooked up, but some demon on his shoulder was knifing her. He had to stop. He didn’t like her, she didn’t like him, and they had to work together.
She was staring at him, as though she would not utter another word until he answered her properly.
“Wednesday next week. As soon as it’s dark enough.”
“Wednesday? The twenty-sixth?”
She got up and fetched a two-week-old copy of the Berliner Morgenpost off the sideboard. Slapped it down in front of him.
President Kennedy to Speak at
Rudolph-Wilde-Platz
on June 26
“Are you sure that’s the best day?”
“Quite sure. In fact it’s a godsend.”
“How so? The city will be crawling with secret policemen.”
“And none of them will be looking at us.”
§194
Wilderness had Erno forge Berlin city maintenance permits. Oppitz, Kies, Bochum, and Fraulein Brahms would be looking into the matter of a ruptured sewer.
He met them in the car park. Handed out Erno’s handiwork and watched as they shrouded the site in dirty white canvas. Admired her nerve as Traudl put her hair up under her cap and strutted about like a workingman.
“You surely didn’t think I would let them leave me out?”
“Of course not.”
It was a risk, but hardly worth the worry.
Oppitz walked thirty yards out from the hoarding and set down a couple of metal signs on folding legs instructing Berliners not to use the car park while “Public Works in Progress.”
“They’re real,” he said to Wilderness. “So handy to have had them these last two years. You wouldn’t believe the natural obedience of my fellow Berliners.”
“Believe it?” Wilderness replied. “I’m banking on it.”
§195
Wilderness could face no more of Erno’s scotch and took him a bottle of Burgundy—a Gevrey-Chambertin 1952.
“Not Grand Cru or anything.”
“When you’re rich Joe, when you’re rich?”
After the first glass.
“She’s taken against me, Erno.”
“What did you do?”
“I suppose I exposed her as a con. She doesn’t trust me. I think she’d prefer to deal with Frank. Ridiculous, as Frank was the one who set up the con, and she’s lost absolutely nothing by coming clean. Except that I rather think she wanted to do this in disguise, be somebody else. As though whatever it is she has to do was done more easily as Hannah Schneider. There was no relief about dropping the mask, she seemed happier with it. It doesn’t much matter of course . . . she doesn’t have to trust me, she just has to do what she’s told. But she trusts Frank.”
The wheezing noise he concluded was Erno laughing again. He hardly ever heard Erno laugh in the old days. When he’d stopped shaking, stopped spilling his wine, he said, “When I was at school we read Shakespeare, translated into German of course. I forget the play. The Tempest perhaps or Julius Caesar. There was a wonderful line . . . ‘Ihr Götter, haltet fest auf der Party der Bastarde!’ What would that be in the original?”
“They lost a bit in translation, Erno. The line was simplicity itself . . . ‘Now, gods stand up for bastards.’ And it’s from King Lear.”
“Well the gods are certainly standing up for that bastard Frank. She trusts Frank Spoleto? That’s got to be the funniest thing I’ve heard since Hermann Göring killed himself.”
It came over him in a ripple, the infectiousness of laughter.
After the third glass.
“I was thinking, Joe. When you used to put on your Guards uniform and that plummy voice and go down the officers mess or commandeer a staff car . . . who were you?”
“I’ve still got that uniform. Who was I? I was me, I was always me. That was the fun, being me and conning them I was someone else. Conning them I was one of them. I suppose I was tinkering with the English class system. You know, Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion. If you can get someone to look right and sound right you can pass them off anywhere.”
Erno shrugged, sipped at his wine.
“There are other directions. Other reasons.”
“Don’t quite get your drift here Erno.”
“You were a boy. Part of the pretence was that you were a man. Something you would grow into anyway. You were a working-class kid—in so far as coming from a family of thieves constitutes any form of work—and you might one day become what you pretended to be. An officer and a gentleman. You might say that in marrying Burne-Jones’s daughter you had turned the pretence into reality.”
“Not quite. Burne-Jones did that when he accepted me as a son-in-law. I couldn’t do that, make that last move. I could have married Judy and still got rejected. He could accept me, and he did. An officer? I never made it past sergeant. When I went into civvies for him the pay kept going up, the rank never did. Burne-Jones told me rank didn’t matter.”
“So . . . you are what? The cockney thief made good.”
“If becoming Military Intelligence’s resident burglar was making good.”
“Suppose the journey were the other way around. That you were the brightest of the bright. You streaked through the system. The great and the good in your chosen discipline fought over you.”
“I see where you’re headed, Erno, but add to the mix that she’s female and Jewish.”
“I was coming to that. You achieve great acclaim, the Nobel eludes you perhaps only because you are female . . . yet your greatest achievement is a bomb that annihilates a hundred thousand in a few seconds, and has the potential to exterminate millions. A bomb that goes on to become the cornerstone of the post-war world. The international criterion of power. The greatest threat the planet has ever known. Think of Nobel himself—desperate towards the end of his life to be remembered for something other than dynamite. Suppose, even for a few hours at a time, you can slip back to simplicity merely by donning an old frock and a wig. She spent the war in a university in California. The richest place on God’s earth. As far removed from Belsen or Auschwitz as one could imagine. If she’d been in one of the camps . . . Belsen . . . Auschwitz . . . would we have any difficulty understanding a lack of identity, a search for identity, or a rejection of identity? All three would be in play. Supposing Marte Mayerling, splitter of atoms, could become Hannah Schneider . . . somebody’s old Jewish maiden aunt. Maybe she chose the name herself? Schneider. How many Jewish women from Germany and Poland have earned a living as tailors and seamstresses? Joe, it’s not just any disguise. It is Freud’s own mask.”
“What if Frank chose it?”
“No matter . . . it is what she makes of it. He offers an alias. She makes it into a mask.”
“And if she’s desperate to be Hannah Schneider . . . why Israel . . . why another fucking bomb?”
“Well . . . we have only Frank’s word for that.”
Wilderness stared into the ashes. There was always so
mething to be burned at Erno’s. The warmest night tinged by a few glowing embers. And it seemed to him that Erno’s fire was always a burning of deceptions, his Lenten bonfire of the vanities—this was where the old man got rid of all the evidence. The incriminating letters, the first drafts, the smudged failures. And it seemed that he was looking into the grey dust of months, probably years, of lies and deceit and that the few sparks that were glowing now were merely those he had added himself.
“I won’t be asking her that, Erno.”
§196
Erno burnt more vanities. Independent states East and West had hit hard these last few years. The cold war was nowhere near as good for business as military occupation. It was in the nature of things military that there was always a fiddle to be worked—and the beauty of things military is that they were all paid for by the taxpayer. Stealing them was not theft, forging them was hardly a crime so much as a challenge. PX and NAAFI were the initials on the gates of heaven. But the sad truth was that there were not enough fiddles left in the world.
He’d clipped his toenails onto a twenty-year-old page of the Der Angriff, and flung them into the stove. He’d got one sock on and was just pulling on the other when he became aware of someone else in the room.
“Joe?”
A woman sat down opposite him. The only light was the light from the burning fire, a flickering golden arc—he could see a pair of shapely legs and the hem of a skirt and little else.
“Joe, he says, Joe. I might have known.” And she leaned down, her face half in shadow half out, “You old rogue.”
“Nell?”
“I saw him this morning. The porters at the Kempinski brought a car round for him. He got in and drove off. I watched the car until I lost sight of it somewhere near the Kranzler. He still hasn’t got the hang of tipping. How long has he been back?”
“Just a few days.”
“A few days.”
“Maybe a week. You know. In and out. He’s been back before. This isn’t the first time.”
“Just the first time I’ve seen him. The British sent him?”
Erno had no idea how much to tell her.
“No. He’s not with the British any more. He’s a civilian these days.”
“So, what brings him back to Berlin?”
Erno knew she’d get it out of him, one way or another. He hoped to tell her something of nothing and hang on to the vital detail.
“He’s working for Frank Spoleto.”
“For Frank? Has he gone mad?”
Erno shrugged.
“You know Joe, Lenchen. Always the chancer.”
“Chance? What chance? Erno — tell me everything.”
§197
Nell had her regular Monday meeting with Brandt. The last such before Kennedy’s entourage arrived in two days’ time. There’d be other, impromptu meetings, but this was the last scheduled meeting before Brandt flew to Bonn to act the role of the most important non-person in the world—just visible in the shadows cast by the West German chancellor and the West German president.
“I have two fears,” Brandt said. “An anti-Russian demonstration of any kind—and who knows, Kennedy enthusiasm could well bubble over into that, and we would be compelled to react. Secondly, an escape. Either would constitute an ‘incident.’”
“What do we have to lose by an escape?”
“If it succeeds, nothing. Perhaps at the very worst a distraction. If one were to fail . . . neither farce nor tragedy would describe the consequences adequately.”
That word again Vorkommnis. Incident.
It required no thought—she wasn’t ever going to tell him.
§198
Wednesday June 26, 1963
Nell rode in the lead press bus. Just behind the open car that carried Kennedy, Brandt, and Adenauer. They all stood. She wondered if they had tied Adenauer to a post to keep him upright. Next to Brandt—tall—or Kennedy—handsome—the chancellor looked decrepit, a dying tortoise. She turned over Brandt’s “It can’t ever look like a Nuremburg rally” in her mind. It didn’t. It looked nothing like anything ever seen in Europe. This was America transplanted—a New York ticker tape parade, the uncontainable joy of a young country that did not prize restraint over enthusiasm. Asked how many Berliners were on the streets that June 26, Nell would have replied “all of them.”
Shortly after leaving Tegel airport the cavalcade had passed a construction site—every crane had pointed its arm skyward, and every strut was gripped or stood upon by a hard-hatted worker—a metal forest with human leaves.
Bouquets of flowers had been forbidden by the US Secret Service, so the celebration became more and more improvised. Flags at every window, the Stars and Stripes, the occasional flag of Berlin itself and in the absence of any flags just bedsheets, huge, white, flapping bedsheets. And . . . confetti, pink confetti. Shower upon shower of pink confetti. No one had thought to forbid confetti.
Ahead of the presidential car was a trailer of photographers, more than she could count, all with their lenses trained on Kennedy. Nell had had no say in this—she had been content that her route across the centre of West Berlin, around the zoo, along the rebuilt Ku’damm—had finally been approved—but it looked awful to her. She imagined it looked awful to Kennedy, to be looking at a camera lens at every turn of the head, but concluded he was used to it. A life lived in public. He might even like it. After all, he never stopped smiling.
At the Brandenburg Gate the president stopped smiling. A platform had been erected to enable him to see over the wall. Brandt’s prediction had been fulfilled as had his fear—the five arches of the gate were draped in red flags—the Russian stunt—utterly obscuring any view down Unter den Linden. The last time Nell had seen this had been in 1938—but then every red flag had borne a swastika—the German stunt. Today it was a touch, just a touch of a Nuremburg rally. A touch too far. And in front of the gate was a wide yellow placard explaining to the president in English and German that only the East had thoroughly denazified and that the promises of the West had all been broken.
Kennedy passed her as he came down the wooden steps from the platform, from his fleeting glimpse of the East, with not a flicker of a smile. He’d been smiling from the moment the stepped off the plane—but he wasn’t smiling now.
§199
They had thirty minutes rest before the main speeches of the day in front of the Rathaus in Schöneberg. Kennedy had Brandt’s office. Brandt had hers.
“There’s going to be a slight change of plan.”
“Slight” in politics never meant slight.
“President Kennedy thinks, and I agree, that his speech should be interpreted by a German, not simply a German speaker. He’s asked for a Berliner. He’s asked for you.”
“What? He’s never heard of me.”
“Apparently he has. He asked for you by name.”
Nell struggled to believe what sounded to her ears to be unbelievable.
“Alright. I don’t really have a choice. Do I?”
“Am I forcing privilege upon you, Nell?”
She ignored this.
“We have less than thirty minutes. When can I see the speech?”
“Ah . . . we have a slight problem there, too.”
That word again.
“They haven’t finished it.”
Brandt’s delivery was deadpan, conveying nothing of the apprehension he surely felt. Everything planned—from the order of greeting, to the motorcade route, to the choice of hors d’oeuvres at lunch . . . to the text. And now the Americans had begun to ad lib.
“The president’s in my office with McGeorge Bundy. They’d appreciate your help right now. But not half as much as I would.”
Brandt swept Nell into his office without knocking. Kennedy and Bundy were hunched over the desk with a few scraps of paper and a stack of index cards in front of them, talking softly as though they might be overheard—but then that had been the tone of the entire visit. Public statements amplified by a tho
usand microphones, private utterances at whisper level—the uncertainty of what was going down to posterity and what was not.
Brandt introduced Nell as “my right hand, my Girl Friday.”
Kennedy shook her hand, said, “I’ve been hearing about Fraulein Burkhardt from Mac for weeks now.”
Then, so suddenly she could hear herself breathing, Brandt and Bundy had ducked out and left her to it—and left her to him.
“It’s the hook.”
“I’m sorry . . .”
“The speech needs a hook. Mac and I agree it should be in German. I don’t speak a word, as I’m sure you know. I’ve been trying to remember that speech Mayor Reuter made during the airlift . . . ‘The world should come to Berlin’?”
“Reuter said ‘Völker der Welt, schaut auf Berlin.’ People of the world look at Berlin. I was there, Mr. President. I heard him.”
“You were there? You must have been no more than a girl.”
“I was, just a girl.”
“So we were thinking of something like, the world must watch Berlin. It just doesn’t have the ring . . . it isn’t a hook. People of the world, look at Berlin? It’s a great line, but I’d feel I’d borrowed it. It’s a moment to be original if that’s at all possible.”
“Mr. President. Does this have anything to do with what you just saw?”
“It has everything to do with what I just saw.”
“May I see your notes?”
Kennedy sat in Brandt’s chair, motioned for her to sit down and handed her the index cards. Nell read them through and leafed back to the third card, the one on which the typed script had been subject to crossings out and scribblings in two hands. This recently, instantly revised version read:
There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world.
There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future.
And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists.
And there are even a few who say that it is true that Communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Let them come to Berlin.