‘They took away his pointing nail,’ Max said. ‘He goes to pieces without it.’
‘I’ll get him another.’ Then I told Red, ‘Look. I know that you’re in some sort of trouble. Can I help you at all?’
‘No.’
‘Will you tell me about it?’
‘No.’
Sometimes the simplest questions are best. ‘Why not?’
He gave me a look that wasn’t unfriendly. ‘You wouldn’t believe me, boss.’ I thought that was all he’d say, but he surprised us both by adding, ‘I’ve told too many folk already. Maybe that’s the problem.’
Max asked me when we would get the Pig back.
‘Your guess is as good as mine. I suppose that I’d better find you two somewhere to stay, and go and find out . . .’
Accommodation turned out to be no problem because the police weren’t prepared to let them off the airfield anyway. The same warrant officer gave them keys for rooms in the barrack block, and chitties for food. He’d already taken their passports and identity cards. Now he took their dog tags as well. He thought that it made moving around impossible for them. They would have to pay for their own drink so I left them twenty-five dollars each, and headed off-base to do a little thinking. I hate it when things begin to get complicated. I’d consult Old Man Halton, and then maybe it was time I brought Bozey into play. I picked up yesterday’s Sunday Pic in the crew room as I wandered away. There was a picture of Halton with a group of other pirate airline executives on the front page. The headline was Air Bridge. If it was in the papers it had to be true I suppose.
I was sitting in the Klapperschlange a few hours later, drinking a little wine and talking to Alice. Talking to Alice always worked for me. Tommo was upstairs with his girl, and I had asked the barman not to tell him I was here yet. Alice flickered her tongue at me, and her eyes glinted. Her tongue was black, and in the forced light of the bar her eyes looked black as well. As black as new rubber tyres.
Something at the back of my mind was nagging me. There was a telephone on the bar. I asked the barman, ‘Is that thing connected?’
‘Sure is, bud.’
‘Can I speak to Gatow?’
‘Sure can, bud.’
He got me through. I asked to speak to the warrant officer, whose name, I remembered, was Power. Good name for a warrant officer, that. I probably sighed before I spoke to him. After identifying myself I asked him, ‘You don’t happen to remember what my Dakota’s tyres were like, do you?’
‘No, sir. Might that be important?’
‘It might.’
‘Wait one; I’ve one of my blokes in the office here . . .’ After a decent pause he came back and said, ‘Normal Dakota tyres, sir, perfectly standard.’
‘American or British?’
I heard him relay the question. When he spoke to me again he said, ‘American tyres, sir. Worn but serviceable. Can I ask why it’s important?’
‘Because she flew into the Russian Zone on a brand-new set of Russian tyres I had bartered with the Reds before the bridges came down, and she flew back into Gatow with a set of used Yankees. They must have had the wheels off her, Mr Power.’
He paused before he replied, but it wasn’t a long pause. ‘I can have her in a hangar tomorrow morning, sir.’
‘Very good, Mr Power; when would you like me to come out?’
‘1030 hours seems like a respectable time to begin, sir; I’ll have one of my lads put the kettle on.’ I didn’t like the bastard, but at least he was quick on the uptake.
I put my head down close to the bar when I put the phone down, and looked hard at Alice. Snakes aren’t supposed to have eyelids, but I’ll swear that she winked at me.
I splashed around the peritrack in a soft mist of autumn rain. It didn’t affect the flying – there was an aircraft landing every few minutes. Half of them were civvy jobs and I didn’t recognize the liveries. I was driving Tommo’s small Mercedes saloon: the one with a cannon-shell hole in each of the back doors. I would plug them with conical-shaped pieces of carved wood. Les had taught me how to do that years ago. Tommo was hiring the car to me: he said there would be good money to be made in the future, hiring cars out to folks. He was crazy, of course: everyone would want one of their own. They’d manoeuvred the Pig into a hangar that was strictly speaking too small for her. It was probably designed for a Ju 88 or Me 110 in the night-fighter days. She was already up on trestles, and they were ready to drop off the wheels.
Power came bustling over, throwing back at his people, ‘The officer’s here, boys, time to get moving. Chop-chop.’ Then he asked me, ‘Cuppa char while you wait, sir? Shouldn’t take more than ten minutes to get the first one off her.’
There was a large canvas-wrapped package inside each of the tyres. They were bulky and irregular.
‘Could be that Indian hemp stuff,’ the warrant officer told me before we opened one, ‘or penicillin. People are paying small fortunes for either.’
It was neither. The packages were full of hundreds of soft shiny black sticks, about six inches by a half – each with a flattened end – and flat thin rolls of the same material. There were also long twisted rods of the stuff, each more than a foot long. The warrant officer sniffed it. He said, ‘Familiar smell somehow. What is it? Plastic explosive?’
I had the knife the Frenchman had given me. I opened it, and cut an end off a piece, and gave it to Power. Then I took a piece myself and popped it in my mouth. Power copied me, and said, ‘Why: It’s . . .’
‘Bloody liquorice . . .’ I finished for him, ‘. . . and I know the bastard who put it there.’
I don’t often get so angry that I lose it. I did then. When I got to the Leihhaus I walked rapidly across to Greg’s table, lifted him out of his chair by his lapels and flung him across the room. I was even impressed by it myself. Until then I’d always been a little leery of him: this was the first time I managed to scare him. He even spoke in English without thinking about it first. What Greg said was what you sometimes still see in word bubbles in boys’ comics. He said, ‘What the . . . ?’ as he was trying to pick himself up from the floor. It would have sounded better in Russian, wouldn’t it?
I actually saw him through a veil of red mist the way they tell you, and followed him. It was oddly satisfying to see the sudden terror flood his face. I reached for him again, but an arm pulled me back. Bloody Bozey. Then Bozey did almost the same as me, but to me. He lifted me up by my lapels until my feet were off the ground, and held me against the wall. As I stared at him the red mist dissipated, and incredibly we began to laugh. Then he let me down because I was safe again. I wonder if he realized that when I had put my hand into my jacket pocket I was reaching for my pistol. Greg slid away from me: he wanted space between us.
‘What did I do, Charlie?’
‘Kidnapped my aircrew, pinched my tyres and put me through three days of hell.’
He went white. I said as evenly as I could, ‘Now fuck off, Greg. Fuck off before I kill you.’
He picked up his ridiculous dinner plate of a cap from where it had fallen and did just that: maybe I could learn to become a proper officer and give orders after all. I didn’t move a muscle until I heard his big GAZ jeep fire up outside. I righted the chairs which had been swept over, and sat with Bozey at the table. I had to fight to stop one leg trembling. He asked, ‘Know what you’re doing, boss?’
‘Not exactly. It felt quite good though.’
We both had a little laugh over that: men’s stuff. He walked to reach over the bar, and returned with a couple of bottles of beer.
‘Would you have pulled that gun on me?’ So he knew, but he’d stopped me anyway. That was interesting.
‘I don’t know. You were daft to risk it.’
He shrugged. He was better at shrugging than me.
‘It’s still better than sewing mailbags, isn’t it?’ I smiled back at him I guess. It was probably a weak smile. So he asked me, ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Go bac
k to the airfield and find out where our aircraft are, and when the next one’s due.’
‘Aren’t you supposed to know that?’
‘Yeah, but I seem to have lost track . . .’
‘OK, boss. Leave it to me.’
After he’d left, Marthe came out of the kitchen. I didn’t know if the look on her face was anger or sorrow. She spoke in English, which was unusual these days – maybe she wanted to make sure that I understood.
‘You beat up on Greg. Why?’
‘Because he betrayed me.’
She got herself a beer from the deserted bar, and drew up a chair to join me.
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes. Isn’t it enough?’
‘You men are doing it all the time. What you expect?’
‘In my country we have this saying: Honour among thieves.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘That even thieves should respect each other, and treat each other honourably.’
‘Only an Englishman would be stupid enough to believe. Is crap.’
That was me told, wasn’t it?
‘I expect so. Does that make things difficult for you?’
‘No, Charlie. It makes things difficult for you. You find somewhere else to sleep until you and Greg make friends again.’
‘You mean that?’
‘Yes, Charlie. I told you. I have to live here when you’re away. You have another phrase about bread and butter. An Irish priest taught it to me last week . . .’
‘Knowing which side your bread is buttered on you mean.’
‘That was it. Greg is the butter on my bread.’
‘What about me?’
I think there was genuine affection in the smile she shot at me.
‘You’re like an occasional sweet cake, Charlie. Enjoyed and not forgotten, but you don’t come round often enough.’
‘I told you; you can come back with me.’
‘I thought about it, Charlie, but I’m a German who happens to like Germany. It’s where I want Lottie to grow up.’
‘Even when it’s like this? Smashed up and . . .’
‘Maybe especially when it’s like this. Don’t you feel the spirit in the people around us? That is very Germanic . . . I won’t leave unless Lottie begins to starve. I decided that.’
‘Thanks for telling me, anyway. It’s hard to believe that a couple of weeks ago you were almost in love with me, isn’t it?’
She looked at me as if I’d said the stupidest thing in the world.
‘No. It’s not hard to believe. But what’s that got to do with it?’
What indeed, Charlie?
The Old Man was quiet when I told him. The line crackled when he spoke. ‘You’re sure they’re all right, Charlie?’
‘Yes and no, boss. Maxwell is fine, apart from the corns on his backside from flying the Pig back on a makeshift seat. But they tortured Ronson. They burned him with cigarettes. His hands are a mess.’ There was a sharp intake of breath. That was interesting because I had never put Halton down as the squeamish sort. The line crackled again. I said, ‘This is a bad line.’
‘No it’s not, Charlie . . . and the noise we just heard wasn’t me: it was Mrs Curtis listening in. Put the telephone down Elaine.’
There was a click, and when Halton came back his voice was stronger. ‘Why did they hurt the engineer?’
‘I’m not sure. He won’t tell me.’
‘Get him to.’
‘I won’t burn him.’
Halton went into one of his serial coughs. He’d actually thought that funny. When he came back he said, ‘Understood, Charlie. I expect you to be subtler than that. How’s the operation?’
‘Each of the Lancs is flying a trip a day, sometimes two. Whisky does a trip every day, but some of those are between fields in our own zone positioning cargo for the RAF. They don’t pay as well . . . but overall you’re making a lot of money.’
‘Problems?’
‘A few local difficulties that’s all. Nothing I can’t fix. What’s Dorothy going to be doing?’
‘UK to Lübeck and back shuttling heavy cargo. They like Dorothy in Lübeck.’
‘We’ll have to pull one of the Lancs back for maintenance next week, and the other the week after that: we’re flying the pants off them.’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘Get another so we can relieve them.’
‘Impossible, Charlie. There isn’t an aircraft to be had this side of the Atlantic.’
‘Get one over the other side then, boss. If you keep flying yours at this pace they’ll start dropping out of the sky.’
There was a pause and a cough. I don’t think he was angry when he said, ‘I didn’t expect you to be this good, Charlie. I didn’t actually expect you to be a clever manager.’
‘Nor did I, Mr Halton, but I’m getting used to it.’
I thought that neither of us had anything left to say: if I needed anything I would ask Elaine or the Chiefy . . . Halton surprised me. He asked, ‘Have you seen Frieda today?’
Bollocks! I swallowed before I replied, ‘Actually I haven’t seen her since the day she landed, boss; I . . .’
‘Then get over there now. It’s one of the things I’m paying you for.’ Goodbye England and good luck.
Chapter Eighteen
I put it off of course. I wanted an hour for thinking. I went to Gatow on the pretext of catching up with Bozey, who was in Operations there. I phoned James from the plywood call box in the crew room.
‘Everything’s fine, Charlie, but you can’t talk to the boys. They’re out on a tractor somewhere with Maggs. Some farmer’s wife she’s pally with.’
‘Tell them I called.’
‘Of course.’
‘Anything new?’
‘You don’t happen to fancy retiring and learning to cook, by any chance? I need a new person in the kitchen.’
‘What happened to the old one? Jules. I thought he was happy with you.’
‘He was. It’s just that he was even happier with Eve Valentine. They’ve sailed off into the sunset on the Valentines’ yacht. The Captain is livid.’
‘I’ll bet.’
I suppose I should have seen that coming. What would he miss most, I wondered, the woman or the boat? You can always get a new woman, but the yacht must have been worth a few quid.
The sexiest song I have ever heard is that Joan Baez recording of ‘Danger Waters’ made in the 1960s. You may be unsure of what the danger waters were, but I never was. I was past my best by then of course. The first time I heard it a memory of Frieda from 1948 sprang into my mind.
The security at the end of the avenue was being provided by a Navy shore patrol: they looked bored. I’m sure that they were off-duty and moonlighting. They didn’t fancy my old RAF jacket, and made me leave the Merc with them and hoof it. Ten minutes later I was climbing up the path to Frieda’s front door. The lawns had been dug over, and planted out with winter veg I guess, but they had left a foot of grass around the edge to show what it had once been: it was that sort of place – they had to keep reminding you. The concierge who barred my way at the top of the steps had probably worked for Heinrich Himmler. She was big and squat and the marks on her cheeks looked suspiciously like duelling scars. I didn’t think that girls had done that sort of thing. She didn’t even try me in German. She asked, ‘Yes?’ That’s not what it sounded like. It sounded like yaess?
I gave her back my best German: I was getting better. ‘I have come to visit Fräulein Frieda.’
‘And you are?’ The way she asked the question said that she was disinclined to believe the answer.
‘Mr Bassett, but tell her HMV and she’ll understand.’
The troll didn’t; neither did she smile. They don’t have a sense of humour, you know – I should have believed my dad when he told me that. HMV was His Master’s Voice: a gramophone company. They did both the gramophone and the 78rpm discs we stuck on them when we fancied a knees-up. I was kept waiting there
until I felt the sun on the back of my head. The gardener came out with what looked like a medieval edged weapon, and proceeded to straighten the grass verge with it. I don’t think that he trusted me either. Eventually the ogress came back to the door and waved me forward. She barred my way momentarily at the threshold and looked pointedly at my boots and the doormat. I complied, but made up my mind to do something about the old bat.
The huge door to the Halton apartment was open. I closed it behind me, and wandered from room to room looking for my quarry. She was in the very last one, dwarfed by an enormous armchair, and with her feet up on a sagging leather hassock exposed to the sun. The pungent smell of pear drops in the air told me that she was drying recamouflaged toenails. The shade of pink was very pale: it matched the lipstick she was wearing. Her feet were beautiful. Have you ever noticed how few people have beautiful feet?
‘Geoffrey prefers darker shades,’ she told me. ‘I prefer lighter colours.’
‘They make you look younger.’
The skin of her calves was very white.
‘Thank you. I will be ready in a few minutes.’
‘That’s OK.’ It was ridiculous: I felt shy.
She was wearing the same dress I had first seen her in: I suspected that it was silk. Dark blue, and buttoned up to a high neck. Big white polka dots. Bare pale arms. There was a pair of white open-toed flatties alongside her chair. I asked, ‘How have you got on tracing your relations?’
‘Sorry. I didn’t understand the question . . .’
OK, so my command of German was hardly perfect yet. I tried slightly different words in a slightly different order.
‘Did you find your relatives?’
She smiled and nodded, but that was only because she had understood me. Then she shook her head. ‘No. They are not on your lists, nor the Amis’ . . .’ – that was slang for Americans. ‘They won’t give me access to the lists in Eastern Zone.’
‘Who did you ask?’
‘The Control Commission . . . and some friends of Geoffrey. You will have to help me. Geoffrey said . . .’
‘I know what Geoffrey said . . .’ I cut her off.
The Hidden War Page 25