The Hidden War

by David Fiddimore

  ‘Tiny?’

  ‘Left on the Aid Station steps. Maybe he had a thinner skull than I thought. He might get shipped home after this . . . all’s well that ends well.’

  ‘I think you’ve said that to me before.’

  I pushed him. ‘This is real hardball stuff, isn’t it? Gangster versus gangster?’

  Tommo sighed and said, ‘No, Charlie, it’s business. Business is nothing more than the continuation of war by other means.’

  ‘Didn’t Clausewitz say something about that?’

  ‘I said it better.’

  I persuaded Dolly to let me share her bed, because I didn’t want to go back to Marthe’s place on my own. We shared a cab. In bed Dolly turned her back to me. The last things said before we slept were me asking, ‘Where’s that Scotsman who’s supposed to be looking after you?’

  Pause, then Dolly muttering, ‘Angus. I’ve bloody lost him, haven’t I? That’s why I’m still here. There’s going to be hell to pay when I get back.’

  That gave me something to think about.

  Waking up beside Dolly in the morning, without having made love felt like being married . . . and I rather liked it. I wasn’t going to tell her that, and give her ideas. We ate breakfast in the communal canteen downstairs. Dolly wasn’t unfriendly but she was still preoccupied: she had dressed in uniform, and looked rather fetching. The cooks didn’t look too happy to be serving someone as scruffy as me at all. Scrambled eggs and grilled tomatoes. The American scrambled egg is sloppier than ours. I asked her, ‘Are you going to tell me what you’re here for?’

  ‘No. How long are you staying?’

  ‘Today and tonight. Flying out in the morning.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me what you’re here for?’

  ‘No. Trade secret. Business-in-confidence.’ We grinned at each other. ‘Have you really lost your partner?’

  ‘I didn’t realize I’d told you that.’

  ‘You probably didn’t mean to. You were sleepy. I know some people here . . . I could ask around.’

  ‘Only if you can be discreet. We don’t want to be embarrassed.’ I nodded. I still think that other nationalities don’t understand how dangerous it is to embarrass the English. I wasn’t going to push it. ‘Have you found a club called the Leihhaus yet?’

  ‘Of course. Everyone has; didn’t you take me there? That’s where I last saw Gus, you know.’

  ‘Join me there tonight if you like. I’ll buy you a meal if they’re serving. At least they don’t keep a snake.’

  The RAF Regiment corporal at Gatow was hardly accommodating. Maybe Old Man Halton’s writ didn’t extend this far. All I was offered was a scrubby space off the peritrack, marked out for what he called a temporary build. What was that when it was at home; a bus shelter? There was a piece of land marked off with string – he assured me that it was fifteen yards by ten. A small label on a wooden peg driven into the ground bore the words Halton Airways. I couldn’t help noticing six similar peg-outs with no names in them yet. It wasn’t much but at least we were ahead of the game as usual.

  The airfield had that unhealthily purposeful air about it which somehow spelled out war footing. I could see Meteor and Vampire jet fighters, and some REME Pioneers and DPs close by were building a series of huge three-sided bays, with walls of sandbags and old railway sleepers. I asked the corp, ‘What are they; stands for our aircraft?’

  ‘No sir, they’re the coal bunkers . . . and we’re sinking a row of petrol tanks over there. Didn’t anyone tell you?’ He pointed to the other side of the airfield. Nobody tells me anything, son.

  I had to sign for it, of course . . . and for a short shopping list, more or less identical to the one I’d seen the day before. It did occur to me to wonder if Halton Airways was good for what I was spending. I got him to drop me off at the hotdog wagon; he told me to come over to his office later on, and he’d show me a book with pictures of the things I’d signed for. Big deal.

  The Countess still wore last night’s make-up, and Randall was leaning on the counter. They looked over-friendly. Randall’s hands and wrists were black with oil. When he saw me he said, ‘Changing her plugs; OK?’ I nodded. I assumed he was talking about our aircraft. ‘. . . and I’ll get a new main wheel tyre if I can. One of them’s beginning to creep . . .’

  ‘What’s creep?’

  ‘What it says. The tyre is beginning to creep around the wheel, instead of staying where it was put on.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  He looked exasperated: amateurs like me shouldn’t ask questions.

  ‘You put a spot of paint on the tyre, and another just under it on the wheel rim. When the spots start to move apart you got creep. It means the tyre wall’s getting soft and stretching. Not too many landings left on it.’

  ‘Can you do anything about it?’

  ‘Just be tender with her for the time being; like undressing a sensitive broad.’

  I don’t think that I’d met many of them yet, but I got the point. The Countess’s coffee was better than Marthe’s. She probably had better sources. We left her, and went to sit on the concrete in the sun, with our backs against an arseholed bunker of some sort. I asked him, ‘Where did you get to last night?’

  He smirked. I hadn’t known that he could smirk. ‘Furthering US–Polish relations. Working hard at it in fact.’ He smiled at the memory.

  ‘Polish?’

  ‘Magda. She was born in Poland; that’s what Russian Greg has over her – he can always send her back.’

  ‘Even though she lives on our patch?’

  ‘She seems to think so.’

  I thought about it for a moment, and then asked him, ‘Do you know one of our pilots called Dave Scroton? Thin, ugly guy with a scar on his forehead?’

  Randall thought about it for a moment.

  ‘Yes. I met him once. Flies a Dakota, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Flies anything: he’s a maniac.’

  Another one of those damned pauses. Two men tiptoeing around a conversation.

  ‘What of him?’

  ‘If you’re doing what that grin on your face says you’re doing, then you’re sharing his German girl with him. I wouldn’t fetch up in this town at the same time as him if I was you, unless you wanted complications. He could be in love: he’s daft enough.’

  He had an angry red weal on the back of one hand: I could see it through the grime. I asked him, ‘What did you do to get that?’

  ‘That Alice . . .’

  ‘She didn’t bite you?’

  ‘No: she gave me a kind of kiss: a scrape . . . I just got my hand clear in time. I don’t think she broke the skin. Anyway, she wouldn’t bite a fellow American.’ Obviously no one had told him her story yet: Alice had more notches on her rattle than Curly Bill Brocius.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Sure; it stung for an hour, but now it’s only an itch. I’m fine.’

  ‘One day someone’s going to have to do something about that snake,’ I told him.

  Because I had little else to do I mooched around a bit to try to find someone I knew, and inevitably ended up at the Leihhaus soon after it opened up. Empty drinking places always feel as if they’re haunted, and you can smell the cigarette smoke and disinfectant in a way you never can when there’s a shindig going on. They are the ghosts of parties past. The Riesling I drank had the same label as that in Tommo’s bar. Someone must have cut a deal. Russian Greg grabbed a glass and another bottle from the bar as he walked over an hour later.

  ‘English or German?’ he asked me.

  ‘Russian: I need to practise.’

  ‘You can’t talk Russian for shit Charlie. We be here all night before you say your own name.’

  ‘German then.’

  We spoke German. I asked him, ‘A friend of mine has lost a military Scotsman. Where would I go to find him?’

  ‘What’s he look like, this Scotsman?’

  I described him and added, ‘A soldier. He definitely looks like a s
oldier; but in civilian clothes. He was wearing a brown suit the last time I saw him . . . and he’s probably got a soldier’s weapons: a machine gun and a pistol. He probably came here on his own.’

  Russian Greg stroked his chin. He had a heavy growth, and it never seemed to shave properly. His hand rasped. I had seen that gesture before and knew what it meant. It wasn’t that he was deciding whether or not to tell me the truth; it was whether he was going to tell me anything at all. Eventually he swallowed his wine and poured another glass. Then he gave an exaggerated shrug, and sighed. It was all a production.

  ‘I’d look for him somewhere in the Lower Havel, Charlie . . . the Scharfe Lanke or the Jungfernsee. I heard about someone there . . . somewhere like that. With a knife between his shoulder blades of course.’

  Bugger it. The Lower Havel was part of the river and lake complex that flowed through Berlin.

  ‘Did your lot kill him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘He was dead before you flew out last trip. He probably smells now. We think the Jews did it.’

  It was my turn to sigh.

  ‘You can’t blame them for everything. What’s the matter with this country?’

  ‘Nothing’s the matter with this country; nor mine neither. The Jews done it. Accept it. It is always them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They are like the butlers in your English detective stories; the Jews always do it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he came out here to find them.’

  I didn’t know what to say next, but Greg did.

  ‘If you don’t believe me, Charlie; I won’t tell you any more.’ Then he changed the subject, just like that. A few minutes later he said, ‘As a special favour I could arrange for the body to be recovered in your sector, or the Americans’. That’s all I will do.’

  There was never any point in beating about the bush with Greg. I asked him, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘An English passport. A kosher one.’ No, it wasn’t a joke.

  ‘I’ll have to ask someone.’

  ‘I trust you, Charlie.’

  Dolly didn’t come to find me, so I went to find her. I found her eating alone in that same canteen. The food looked bulky and unappetizing.

  ‘I knew a Scottish squaddie who made something that looked like that,’ I told her as I flopped into a seat opposite. ‘Corned beef and mashed potato and their skins. You found your Scotsman yet? Did you have any luck?’

  ‘No. I spent the day at the Control Commission. I must have read all the magazines and newspapers in the place, waiting for a twenty-minute interview.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘A French officer who had a German clerk. The clerk kept smirking all the time. I thought that he looked like a Nazi.’

  ‘That’s no longer an issue, my friends tell me. The issue is whether he is one of our Nazis, or one of their Nazis. Flashing your legs didn’t work?’

  ‘No. Gus hasn’t been lost long enough to be officially lost yet.’

  ‘Did you actually call him Gus?’

  ‘Not to his face. I went to his wedding only a month ago.’

  Sometimes it’s hard to resist giving someone both barrels, isn’t it?

  ‘Then you can tell his blushing bride that she’s a blushing widow. He was knifed the day before I last left Berlin.’

  Dolly put her fork down, and pushed the plate away. Sometimes bad news really does for your appetite. She looked away. She didn’t want to look at me, which gave me a peculiarly powerful feeling. She lit up a Senior Service, and pulled the aluminium ashtray towards her, and whispered, ‘Sure?’

  ‘I haven’t seen the body; it’s in one of the lakes – but there’s an element of trust involved here. Friends told me he’s there, and I believe them. They recognized the description I gave them, although it was vague.’ I used the plural deliberately: no names, no pack drill. No drill for ever, for poor old Gus.

  ‘Did they tell you who did it?’

  ‘Yes; but that I didn’t believe. They said the Jews did it. People have been saying that sort of thing in Germany for fifty years: it was never true. They also said that they can arrange for the body to be recovered, and found in an Allied sector. You can have the remains back, but for a consideration . . .’

  Throughout the conversation she hadn’t raised her voice, and it was almost as if it hadn’t occurred to her to doubt me. Just as it hadn’t occurred to me to doubt Greg . . .

  ‘. . . that element of trust, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes. A Russian I know wants a British passport. Can you arrange it?’

  ‘Yes, but it will take a few days, and Gus . . .’

  ‘Gus is already moving. You’ll probably be notified by the Control Commission or the police tomorrow. I told you . . . an element of trust was involved. You can leave the passport in a plain envelope behind the bar at the Leihhaus. OK?’

  She finished her cigarette, and lit another from its stub.

  ‘OK . . . Do you know, Charlie; I can’t make myself say Thank you to you. Isn’t that strange? What do you want to do now?’

  ‘To fuck you.’ I said it fast without thinking about it. It sounded even uglier than it reads here. ‘I want to take you upstairs and fuck you. Part of me loves Berlin because she always makes me feel dirty. Tonight I want to fuck you until I feel clean again.’ The words were coming out staccato now; like machine-gun fire. They had unnatural gaps between them.

  Dolly said, ‘OK.’ She still hadn’t lifted her eyes to look at me.

  We were brutal with each other. If it hadn’t been a coupling it would have been a fight. Afterwards, before we slept, I shared a cigarette with her because I couldn’t be bothered to get up and fill and light a pipe. As I took the fag from her she said, ‘You probably have scratches on your back. I hope that you won’t have to explain that to anyone back home.’

  ‘If there had been someone I needed to explain to, I wouldn’t have been here. I expect you’ve got a new collection of bruises as well. I’m sorry about that; it’s been an odd few days, and all sorts of dark things inside me seemed to burst out just now.’

  She took the cigarette back. ‘Ditto. Don’t worry about it. Sometimes I almost get to the point of loving you, Charlie . . . did you know that? Then it never quite happens.’

  We lay in silence. Moonlight through the open curtains made beautiful patterns on her body. A last tram rattled towards the Tiergarten and the burned-out Reichstag – the tram stop they now called Black Market. I had one of those strange moments when old memories collide with the present, and join up. I said to her, ‘I should have guessed what you were up to. You were chasing Israeli immigrants when I met you in London last year. You’re still doing it.’

  ‘I prefer to think of them as terrorists actually. Irgun. The Stern Gang . . . yes . . . you’re right, of course.’

  ‘Why bother?’

  ‘I’m here because they were going to try to smuggle a couple of men from Berlin into the UK. They have funds to buy weapons for their people in Palestine; they even want their own navy and air force now . . . and when they’ve done that, they’re going to assassinate Bevin.’

  ‘Nye Bevan? You cannot be serious?’

  ‘No. Ernie Bevin. Isn’t that sad? They believe he’s an anti-Semite, and excessively pro-Arab. He’s going to be blown to kingdom come: made an example of. Gus and I were supposed to make sure these men were stopped before they got to England. If we couldn’t arrest them Gus was supposed to stop them any other way he could. He was a specialist . . . we heard a couple of rumours, that was all. Gus went off to check them out, and then nothing: no Gus; no assassins.’

  ‘I’d go home if I was you; once you’ve got Gus back.’

  But I wasn’t prepared to tell her why. I was in enough trouble already. The Joes I’d smuggled into Lympne had already turned up at an auction buying Spitfires, hadn’t they?

  I went back to Marthe’s place on the way to Gato
w. It was still unlived in. The last thing I did was hide two cartons of cigarettes under a loose floorboard in her kitchen. Then I moved a chair over it. She would notice the chair out of place as soon as she walked in, and guess that there was something there.

  I had more or less worked out how the money racket operated. Marthe could sell a carton of fags at ten dollars a pack in the Tiergarten . . . and she would insist on the real dollar. So she’s got a hundred dollars . . . on the black market she could get a thousand occupation marks for each dollar – you can work it out from there. There wasn’t a Berliner over twelve years old who wasn’t an expert at exchange control, and how to get round it. You remember that Tommy Dorsey number ‘The Music Goes ’Round and Around’? Well; money was like that in Berlin in ’48. Not that it always meant a lot: inflation could wipe it all out before the song ended.

  Germany in 1948 was the first place I heard the word inflation. It only took you two trips to Berlin to find out what it meant. I once saw a woman office worker pushing her week’s pay in a pram. No one bothered to rob her because it was virtually worthless by the time she got it home.

  PART TWO

  Back To Berlin

  Chapter Nine

  Randall banked the Oxford round, and down towards Lympne. That glorious consistent purr of the little aircraft’s seven-cylinder engines was like sweet music; I know why he loved her so much. The sun was just dropping away over the edge of the ocean, and its light reflected under the layer above us, changing the colour of the clouds to orange and gold. It was a staggeringly beautiful sight . . . one of the occasional gifts of flying that you can never truly explain. Beneath us there were yachts out from Folkestone and Hythe. The light made their sails glow red, and reminded me of that old Guy Lombardo song. It was one of Milton’s favourites; he always sang it when he was juiced.

  The harassed squadron leader I met at Lübeck had been a doddle compared to the Celle witch, and Gatow’s twitchy little corporal. I hadn’t said much to Randall on the flight home since then, nor him to me. He had a cob on; or its Anglo-American equivalent. He hadn’t liked being told that Magda already had a boyfriend. Everyone hates the messenger who brings bad news. When we had landed, and taxied up to the office, he shouldered his way out of the aircraft in front of me, showed me his back and walked off.