The Unfortunate Englishman

by John Lawton

  “Yes.”

  “And get it to me?”

  “Someone can bring it to you, yes.”

  “Then . . . strange as it may seem, Mr. Johnson, I wish you well. Bon voyage.”

  §5

  Everyone was telling him to go home.

  He went instead to a building that had been home for nearly two years not long after the war, to Grünetümmlerstraße, where he and Nell Burkhardt had lived like squirrels in a sprawling room under the eaves, freezing in the fuel-starved winters of Berlin’s broken years and sweltering in the summers. On the floor below them had lived, and still lived, Erno Schreiber.

  Wilderness stood on the top floor in the empty room, looking at the scars of past lives, of the lives he and Nell had had together, mentally replacing every stick of furniture. He’d come to Berlin with no expectation of seeing Nell and none that she would want to see him. Seeing her at all just before the Hannah Schneider cock-up had been chance—pure chance and disaster.

  Erno must have heard his feet on the bare boards and shuffled up the stairs, carpet slippers and cardigan, whatever the weather.

  “Eh, Joe.”

  “What have you heard, Erno?”

  “Come downstairs. I have a fire of nicely burning evidence. Come warm yourself at the flames of guilt.”

  Light scarcely penetrated Erno’s room. The seasons never changed. Something always to be concealed from the sun, something always needing to be consumed by fire.

  Erno stuck a mug of black coffee in Wilderness’s hands, flicked open the stove door, raked through the “evidence.” Eulenspiegel the cat wove his way between Wilderness’s legs, motor running.

  “I heard,” Erno began. “That things did not go exactly as planned.”

  “Nell?”

  “Yes. Nell. She came here before breakfast yesterday. I have your gun and your passport—the fake I made you in the name of Schellenberg.”

  “Keep ’em, Erno. Just in case hang on to them.”

  “Will anyone come looking?

  “Doubt it. Burne-Jones is here to bail me out. And Marte Mayerling wants to put it all behind her.”

  “Großer Gott. Why?”

  “I don’t know. What was it you said about masks? About Hannah Schneider being the assumption of innocence on her part?”

  “Not quite. Are you saying she wants to stay as Hannah Schneider? To become Hannah Schneider?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “And how do you know?”

  “I went to see her in hospital, the one on Kantstraße.”

  “Oi, Joe.”

  “She wants a passport in her new name. Austrian, born second of May 1913. I’ll pay. Can you do it? I don’t have a photograph. You’ll just have to bluff your way in there.”

  “Perhaps a bedside visit from her old ‘Uncle Otto’ and his trusty little Minox camera. But I shall have to bite my tongue to avoid asking her a thousand questions. It is most intriguing.”

  “You said it yourself . . . something like ‘it is Freud’s own mask.’”

  “Joe, I say so many things.”

  “Don’t piss on it, Erno. You know what I’m talking about. So why is she doing this? Why is she not screaming it all from the rooftops? Where is your man Freud in all this?”

  Erno shrugged, stared into the fire for a moment.

  “From middle age onwards, and you are not yet there my boy, life is perceived as a series of regrets. I know few middle-aged men who do not have a mental checklist of life’s might-have-beens. I know men to whom you could sell second chances . . . like some goblin in a Grimms’ tale . . . popping up to tell you that every mistake you have ever made can be undone . . . that the second chance is there for the taking. You maybe did not know it, and I am damn sure Frank Spoleto didn’t, but when you dangled the prospect of freedom in front of Marte Mayerling you held up second chances the woman never knew she wanted. After all, regret is such a male notion. But, she is a woman in man’s world . . . beating men at their own game. And on some other level of consciousness, I will not go so far as to say ‘unconscious,’ the freedom she wanted was not to split more atoms, to make more bombs, it was to be Hannah Schneider. Frank chose the plainest of Jewish names and in so doing gave her exactly what she did not know she wanted.”

  “When she came out of the tunnel . . . I didn’t recognise her . . . she was dressed as Hannah Schneider, a dowdy little Jewish hausfrau . . . she looked like . . . like . . .”

  “Like Yuri Myshkin the night he shot you back in ’48?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you shot first?”

  It didn’t need an answer.

  “Speaking of Major Myshkin, I also have . . .”

  Erno reached to the mantelpiece above the stove. Handed Wilderness a rusty key.

  Wilderness looked down at the key to the tunnel’s entrance in the Soviet Sector nestling in the palm of his hand.

  “Nell left it with the gun and the passport.”

  “She must have found it in my pocket. I wonder if she even knows what it is.”

  “Am I to keep this too?”

  “Why not? A souvenir of human folly. As Dr. Mayerling said . . . it was a scheme dreamt up by madmen. I can’t imagine I’ll ever need this again.”

  “Who knows . . . folly is like regret . . . it knows no limits.”

  Wilderness turned the key over in his hand, said, “I need to see Nell. Can you tell me where she lives?”

  “No, Joe, I cannot. She expressly told me not tell you. Joe, she doesn’t want to see you again.”

  The biggest regret in Wilderness’s life, the what-might-have-been, was Nell Burkhardt. Perhaps at thirty-five he was more middle-aged than Erno might ever imagine. To Erno he might seem impossibly young, too young to have regret, too young as yet to be haunted by the ghosts of the living.

  He said nothing. He knew he could con, trick, or cajole Nell’s address out of the old man, but he wouldn’t. He could go round to the mayor’s office in Schöneberg and catch Nell at her work. But he knew he wouldn’t do that either. He would go home. “Home,” a word for him that had so little of the resonance it now seemed to have for “Hannah Schneider.”He stood up, took two hundred dollars from his wallet and put them under a candlestick on the mantelpiece. And noticing a large, square-headed nail protruding from the wall above the candlestick, he hung the key on it.

  “Too many symbols for one day, Erno.”

  He’d go home now.

  §6

  London: July 1

  Few women Wilderness had ever met could do rage like Judy Jones. ­Every year or so he’d make a trip to Petticoat Lane and restock the kitchen with cheap crockery to make up for plates thrown at him in the course of uxorial dispute. Every three months or so he’d slink off to one of the spare bedrooms and give her a fortnight’s cooling off before the inevitable reconciliation, which would begin with “You’re just being silly” or “Can’t we talk about this like grown-ups?” to which Wilderness would reply “We can talk about anything when you stop throwing things.”

  She hugged him on the doorstep. Flung the door open before he could even take his key from the lock. Arms around his neck, head pressed to his chest. And was that a hint of tears in her eyes?

  She drew back, and yes a tear was wiped away.

  “I’ve been so worried. Dad said you were in prison.”

  “Jail not prison.”

  “And then he came back without you.”

  “I’m here now. Any chance I could come in?”

  This made her smile.

  “You’d better. I want to know everything, and I’d rather not broadcast it to the neighbours.”

  Wilderness hefted his bag and followed her upstairs to the living room, but she’d gone up another two flights. He shucked off his jacket, followed the train of discarded clothing, t
o their bedroom on the top floor.

  Judy was in her bra and pants, pulling down the blind on the south-facing roof light.

  Wilderness stood in the doorway while she flung her underwear at him and peeled back the sheets.

  “I . . . I thought you wanted to know everything?”

  “Later, Wilderness, later.”

  She turned, yanked on his tie, dog on a lead, and pulled him on top of her, whispered in his ear.

  “Come on, togs off, you dozy bugger.”

  §7

  Afterwards he was churlish enough to wonder, “What was that about?” and enough of a gentleman not to ask aloud.

  Judy filled the gap, as though she had read his mind. He lay on his side, looking at the wall; she fitted herself spoon-like to the curve of his backside and said, “Never been with an old lag before.”

  “I told you, it was jail not prison.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Yes. And if I’ve suddenly become your bit of rough because I spent a couple of nights in the cells, then you’re forgetting . . . I was in the glasshouse when your dad found me in 1946.”

  “Oh . . . that’s just military prison. They can lock up who they like can’t they? This was the real McCoy. Nicked for a . . . well for whatever it was you did. And you’re not military any more.”

  Of course, Burne-Jones would ration what he told his daughter. Truth and lies were all the currency a spook needed. That he had told her he was in jail in Berlin spoke volumes. There was no necessity to tell her anything. He’d told Judy because he wanted her to know, wanted her to be the one to punish Wilderness. He’d be very surprised at the nature of the sentence. It would never occur to Burne-Jones that danger, jail, and whatever nonsense Judy was piling on to that would prove to be a turn-on, that, for as long as it lasted, Wilderness had entered Judy’s fiction. Her bit of rough.

  “Actually . . .”

  “Yeeees? Actually what, my old lag?”

  “I am military.”

  “Eh?”

  “I signed up. It was Alec’s condition for getting me out.”

  She rolled off him. He could hear her gathering steam. A 4-6-2 at King’s Cross couldn’t sound more pressurized. But then he noticed the calendar tacked to the wall just by her reading lamp, and the red rings around yesterday, today, and tomorrow, 30th, 1st and 2nd, and her explosion vanished into a vacuum. She was letting him have it, and he heard not a word. She stood by the bed, arms raised, breasts shaking, giving him the bollocking of a lifetime and all Wilderness could hear was the ticking of their biological clock.

  He’d been had. She’d had him. All their discussions about family usurped in moment.

  §8

  He awoke, early he thought, but not so early that Judy had not already left for work—or left to avoid the row that was surely brewing.

  He made coffee, went back to bed, flipped on the radio, listened to Jack de Manio on the BBC, waiting for the next dropped brick, verbal gaffe or total lapse of manners.

  An hour or so later, no conclusion reached regarding wife and future family, he heard the crocodile snap of the letter box closing and the yowl the cat sent up to announce new post, which for some reason the animal confused with food—Wilderness had not named him Desperado for nothing.

  It was a letter in a Connaught Hotel envelope on Connaught Hotel paper.

  Sorry kid. No dame no game. Consider this payment in full. Frank.

  Wilderness shook the envelope. A single green dollar bill floated down like the first fallen leaf of autumn, eddying to land in front of the cat, who sniffed in disgust and ran away.

  “Exactly,” thought Wilderness. “What I should have done.”

  The next time he saw Frank Spoleto coming he’d cross to the other side.

  For now, he was down $49,999 . . . but he had a job again. A job he didn’t much want, but then he had always regarded the world as one made up of wolves and doors.

  II

  Alleyn

  For he might have been a Roosian,

  A French, or Turk, or Proosian,

  Or perhaps Itali-an!

  But in spite of all temptations

  To belong to other nations,

  He remains an Englishman!

  —W. S. Gilbert

  H.M.S. Pinafore, 1878

  §9

  Germany: May 1945

  They found Alleyn wandering—somewhere in Lower Saxony. His memory had left him, but the tatty remains of his RAF uniform and the dog tags strung around his neck were enough. They knew who Alleyn was before he did.

  Two days later as bits of memory bobbed flotsam-like to the surface, he said, “Alleyn . . . Bernard Forbes Campbell Alleyn. Squadron leader,” and rattled off his number. The squadron number and base proved more elusive. All the same they knew.

  “Kelstern—625 Squadron. Welcome back, old man.”

  He had to admit, the cover was brilliant. Moscow had really delivered. Not for a moment, it seemed, did they—that is the English—doubt that he was who he appeared to be. Squadron Leader Bernard Forbes Campbell Alleyn, third generation Scots-Canadian from Perth, ­Ontario—sole survivor of half a dozen straying Lancasters blown from skies somewhere east of Dresden in February 1944.

  Alleyn was still alive when the Red Army overran Stalag Luft VIII-B in Silesia on St. Patrick’s Day 1945. Alive, but only just—badly burned and badly patched up, he had succumbed to pneumonia only a fortnight later . . . but by then Liubimov had sat at his bedside for seven days and nights, listened to his mortal ramblings and let the cloak of his identity float down upon him as Alleyn breathed his last.

  The men who’d been interned with Alleyn would make their way home in nine months or a year—shipped back to Blighty via Odessa, the Dardanelles, the Med . . . and a bundle of excuses.

  Those who’d known Alleyn well never would.

  §10

  Liubimov was a fair match. The same height as Alleyn, only a year or so younger, and a recent recipient of plastic surgery after the Riga Offensive. It was the last heroic piece of stupidity he would ever indulge in. He had had no need to be anywhere near the front line, and could have stayed in the rear, “mopping up” with the rest of the NKVD, but curiosity had almost killed him. This new adventure also might kill him, but at least no one was shooting at him. Indeed, some of the English officers who appeared regularly at his bedside didn’t even seem to be carrying weapons.

  “I’m a psychiatrist, old man. No need for a gun. The pen is mightier than the sword, and I rather think that applies to Webley and Smith and Wesson too.”

  “Ah. Do you think I’m mad?”

  “Not at all old man, but you have been through hell.”

  “Haven’t we all?”

  “Not really. I’ve never picked up as much as a scratch these last five years . . . but you . . . the trauma . . . the burns . . . the surgery.”

  “I don’t remember any of that. But I know, I remember, I flew Lancasters, so . . .”

  Alleyn rubbed gently at the tight, shiny skin of his left cheek.

  “So . . . I suppose, burning petrol?”

  “That does seem the most likely explanation. The Jerries seem to have made pretty good job of patching you up.”

  “Ah. Do you have a mirror?”

  “Nurse will bring you one later. Believe me you look fine. Positively handsome. But I’d rather like to shift the conversation back to my field of expertise.”

  “Ah. The mind.”

  “Yes, old man . . . your mind.”

  §11

  The psychiatrist—his name was Hancock, but Alleyn found it convenient to pretend not to remember it from one session to the next—found very little wrong with Alleyn’s mind, and recommended immediate discharge once he was pronounced physically fit.

  “Chances are you’ll remem
ber everything in time,” Hancock told him.

  “I’d rather not,” Alleyn had replied. “If my memory is a jigsaw puzzle and I have some pieces and not others, then I think I’ve seen enough to prefer forgetting.”

  “As though of hemlock I had drunk?”

  “I have been half in love with easeful Death.”

  “Touché, Mr. Alleyn, touché.”

  It would, he realised, pay him to mug up his English literature. At least to mug up beyond the cardboard boundaries of the Oxford Book of English Verse, beyond the Dickens novels and the Kipling stories that had been his prep as a spy.

  They put him in a hospital out in the country, six or seven miles from Hanover—insulated from the wreck that was the Thousand-Year Reich. He found himself in a schloss, barely grazed by British shells, mostly intact, big airy rooms, high ceilings, and walled gardens. It was rather un-German. More than a touch Russian. It felt as though he had his own dacha. Looking back, years later, it seemed to him to have been one of the happiest months of his life. For all the deception and the rehearsal of lies that would be his identity and his modus operandi for years to come, he had felt content, protected, perhaps delighted. A burgeoning Continental summer, long days relaxing in the tangled gardens, dressing gown and pyjamas, patchy neglected lawns, unpruned apple trees, bobbing clusters of marigolds and Michaelmas daisies, sweet milky tea and something called Dundee cake, hidden from his fellow recuperants behind the twin shields of amnesia and psychiatry. The very word “psychiatry” seemed to undermine the English sangfroid. All a bit too Viennese, all rippling with sexual innuendo. They couldn’t even say it—instead they called it the trick-cyclist, as in, “Been under the trick-cyclist, old man, bloody bad luck, eh?”

  He was to have just a weekly psychiatric session. To stimulate the mind and memory. He was to rest the body and recover, to build up the weight he had shed so rapidly in a month of self-imposed starvation, losing thirty-two pounds in a little under five weeks before they dropped him off the back of a Red Army truck just beyond the green border.

  They’d given him a small piece of cordite to swallow.

  “You’ll look grey for while. As though you’d lived on boiled spuds and lacked all the right vitamins. Just like a POW.”