The Unfortunate Englishman

by John Lawton

  “Joint with whom?”

  “Your people, my people . . . no names, no pack drill, no cops, no customs.”

  The officer flourished the paperwork.

  “It says ‘diplomatic bag.’ Where is it?”

  Frank pointed to the truck, an open palm, an inclusive sweep of the arm.

  “You’re looking at it.”

  “What? The plumber’s truck?”

  “Sure . . . now if we could just move along—”

  “The truck? You can’t stand there and tell me that that truck is a diplomatic bag?”

  Frank gestured at Wilderness.

  “Joe?”

  “I’m the diplomat. It’s a diplomatic bag. I could bring the Queen Mary through here on a low-loader and declare it a diplomatic bag if I so chose.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Can’t tell you that.”

  “Where’s it going?”

  “Can’t tell you that either.”

  “You do realise that whatever I do or say to ‘expedite,’ that lot . . . ”

  He pointed over his shoulder to the East.

  “That lot will ask you the same bloody questions and won’t be fobbed off by the answers you’re giving me! Try telling them ‘no cops, no customs’!”

  Frank said, “We’ll take our chances. And we are, most sincerely, very grateful for your cooperation.”

  “OK. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  The officer got back into his Land Rover and drove down to the barrier.

  Wilderness said, “What kept you?”

  Frank said, “Does it matter? I’m here now. Hands gladdened. Babies kissed.”

  §152

  Wilderness and Eddie sat in the truck in the no-man’s-land between the Western and Eastern barriers. Helmstedt behind them, Marienborn ahead of them.

  Through the windscreen they could see Frank talking to the DDR border guards. They couldn’t hear him, and Frank’s big gestures seemed all the louder perceived in silence.

  “Y’know,” said Eddie. “Making him earn his keep might be a good thing, but his German was always crap. Right now he could be racking up ten years in a gulag for all three of us or selling his mother into slavery.”

  Frank was heading back to the truck.

  Wilderness got out to meet him.

  “They . . . they need to see inside. Just a formality.”

  “Nothing doing, Frank.”

  “It’s completely kosher. They check the load, then they seal the truck with one of those clip-on tags they have . . . which guarantees no one else will mess with us between here and Berlin. After all, we both know how many times these guys can pull you over on the autobahn and ask for bribes.”

  “Are you sure you got that right?”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “If they get to open the truck, they’ll just help themselves. Do they know what’s in it?”

  “Not yet, but—”

  “But nothing. If they get the truck open they’ll rob us blind.”

  “So, what’s a few cases of wine? We kiss a few babies, we lick a couple of asses . . . we give away a case or two.”

  “You are, against the very grain of your infinitely cynical nature, ­being naïve. They’ll steal half of it and call it a tax. And every VoPo, every Stasi between here and Berlin will be pissed on vintage claret before we even get there.”

  “So what do you want me to do? You’re leaving me fuck all options here, kid.”

  “I want you to earn your keep.”

  “You tell me that more often than Bob Hope sings ‘Thanks for the Memory.’”

  “Get me a phone line to Yuri.”

  “What? Jeezus H. Christ, Joe. There’ve been no phone lines from here to the East since . . . since . . . ”

  “Since 1952. I know. Find a way. Turn the car around. Get back to Helmstedt. Find a hotel for us . . . and find Yuri.”

  §153

  Hotel Öde, Helmstedt

  It was early evening the next day before anything changed.

  Frank came into the bar, grinning—he grinned a lot—as though it was all an adventure, something to make the years roll away.

  “I found him. He’ll call you in five minutes. There’s a phone booth in the lobby just off to the right. It’s a lousy line, but what can you expect? If it had a horse this place might just qualify as a one-horse town. The call’s routed through our embassy in Switzerland . . . then Belgrade and finally reaches our little Russian chum in Berlin. It could be quicker just to stand in the street and yell.”

  Yuri’s first words were, “So, Frank is back. I can imagine how happy that makes you.”

  “I don’t have to live with him for long.”

  “You don’t have to live with him at all. Say the word and he can join Herr Wölk.”

  “No. There’s a queue of people wanting to murder Frank. Let’s not jump it. Besides, we shoot a CIA officer, someone’s bound to come looking for him.”

  “As you wish. I cannot budge those bastards at Marienborn. They’re Germans, after all . . . just a bunch of bandits. No ideology but theft. I could draft Russians in, but it’s very public. It would attract far too much attention. So, I want to move you to another checkpoint. Ellrich.”

  Ellrich was further south, two or three hours away.

  “There’s no road crossing at Ellrich, Yuri. It’s a railway line.”

  “Exactly. Let’s see the Germans argue with an armour-plated Red Army train. Be there at midnight. I’ll have everything in place.”

  §154

  Ellrich

  They’d passed through Bad Harzburg, skirted the Brocken, with dreams of witches in flight. The temperature had plummeted and it was darker than was imaginable. The headlights picked out a solitary British Frontier Service officer, buttoned up in his navy blue greatcoat, waving a lantern at them, less the guardian of an international frontier than a signalman on a branch line in Dorset.

  “Mr. Holderness?”

  Wilderness reached for his ID, but the officer said, “You’re expected,” and waved them on.

  “Expected where?” said Eddie. “Even on full beam I can’t see a sodding thing. There’s nothing out there but a thousand miles of barbed bloody wire. Mehr Licht, mehr Licht!”

  The magic of the word—no sooner had he said it than a bang cut the silence and the darkness lit up with a dozen arc lights, night become day, an island of brilliance in a sea of nothingness, and they found themselves facing a massive steam engine, recumbent on the tracks, purring like a giant cat . . . a gleaming red star on the smokebox door, a chain of armoured coaches coupled behind it, a gun turret at the end of the chain . . . and a miasma of steam curling off it to settle in silky ribbons around the steel wheels.

  “Bloody Norah,” said Eddie. “I reckon we’ve stumbled into the plot of Doctor Zhivago.”

  The British officer waved his lantern again, on into no-man’s-land. As the truck bumped over the railway lines Russian soldiers sprang out of darkness to surround it.

  A uniformed captain leapt onto the running board.

  “We’re transferring everything to the train. Pull up by the second coach, and my men will unload for you. The general is waiting on the other side. Who’s the idiot in the yellow Citroën?”

  §155

  They went through the inner gates into the DDR, walking on the railway sleepers. The watchtowers passed a roving searchlight beam across them. There was little to see. Not so much a place as the remains of a place. Almost everything levelled to dust. The one surviving building, a single-storey brick blockhouse missing its doors and windows, had been sliced in two by the inner frontier fence—and the half in no-man’s-land bulldozed. It stood at the edge of the East, a jagged line of broken brick, presenting its scars to the West. If Wilderness had not known
where they were he would never have guessed from looking at the scene around him. It was a ruin. And Germany was still peppered with so many ruins.

  The Russian captain pointed to the gap in the wall where the door had been.

  “The general will see you now.”

  Frank muttered, “Airs and fuckin’ graces. He’s a KGB spook, not my fuckin’ dentist.”

  Yuri was standing, hands outstretched, in front of a roaring pot-bellied stove, wrapped in a winter overcoat, sable collar drawn up to his chin. The door of the stove was open—yellow flames catching them all in a flickering ribbon of light.

  Frank said, “For Chrissake, Yuri, this place is fucking freezing. Why do we have to meet in here? It may not be my idea of the Chattanooga choo choo, but that looks like a nice, warm train you have out there.”

  Yuri turned to look at them, expressionless, then back to the fire.

  “Do you have any idea where we are?”

  “Yeah—the middle of fuckin’ nowhere.”

  Wilderness said, “We’re in Juliushütte, you idiot. What’s left of it.”

  “So?”

  “It was a concentration camp, Frank. Liberated by the US Army in 1945 . . . or were you looking the other way at the time?”

  “Sure. Fine. Whatever. Is there a point being made here that I’m missing?”

  Yuri moved away from the fire, pulled on his gloves slowly, spoke slowly.

  “The next time one of your politicians decides to call the Berlin Wall a demonstration of the failures of the communist system, the next time he wonders out loud why we call it an anti-fascist barrier, remember this. Twenty thousand people died here. Many of them Russian POWs. Otto Brinkmann, the commandant, was captured by your troops in 1945. In 1947 you sentenced him to life in Landsberg Prison. And in 1958 you freed him. Who knows where he is now? A man in his fifties . . . an executive of Krupp or VW? A man prospering under the new regime in the West? Or perhaps he has gone even further west, to Madison Avenue, to sell us shit for toothpaste?”

  “War’s over, Yuri. The USA stopped fighting it in 1945. As for the ‘new regime’ as you call it. If it had been left to us, we’d’ve put Germany back together long ago. You fucked that up in ’48. I don’t care that a handful of old Nazis are still out there somewhere. If we’d shot them all the West would be in as big a mess as the East. Nothing would work. And thanks for the dig at Madison Avenue—really snide.”

  It was as though Yuri had not heard him.

  “This man, Brinkmann . . . one day, not long before his capture, came across a prisoner so desperate for food he had taken a knife to a corpse. Brinkmann’s response was not to stop him, or to feed him . . . it was to have salt and pepper brought out to the cannibal . . . and he watched as the beast ate the testicles of the dead man.

  “The next time you want to reinstate a Nazi, just remember this.”

  “Oh. I get it. Is this all about Wölk? Is that it? That was twenty years ago.”

  Wilderness said nothing.

  Yuri said, “Let us go now. Too many ghosts among the ashes.”

  §156

  Two o’clock in the morning.

  The train crawled across the DDR. A roar of steam and smoke, steel wheels rattling on steel rails. And, Wilderness guessed, an average speed of less than twenty miles an hour.

  He relished the anachronistic luxury—a 1913 private coach, built, Yuri said, for one grand duke or another, but never used. Plush upholstery in crimson and royal-blue velvet . . . its own dining room . . . its own kitchen . . . its own cook.

  Yuri had served dinner.

  Excused himself with, “I am old boys, I need sleep far more than I need food. Enjoy. Order whatever you wish.”

  Roast chicken. Parsnips. A bottle or two of Château Smith Haut Lafitte ’45.

  “Has he opened the stash already?” Frank asked.

  “Wrong chateau, wrong year.”

  “Thank God for that. I mean . . . Château Smith. Got to be fake.”

  “Frank if you can’t say anything intelligent, try saying nothing.”

  “OK. Check this out for smarts. The man is a hypocrite. They’re all hypocrites. He takes potshots at capitalism . . . and he wines and dines like a fat cat. All the goddamn perks. His own private train? Let me say that again for emphasis. His own private train. Back home only the president has a setup like this. And no one’s used it since Roosevelt.”

  “Perhaps it’s Russian hospitality. And he isn’t wining and dining. We are.”

  “Perhaps it’s Russian greed. Don’t kid yourself. He won’t be donating ten thousand bottles of claret to charity.”

  As the waiter brought dessert, Eddie got up and walked to the back of the coach.

  Wilderness found him on the open-air platform, in front of the gun turret, watching Germany crawl by.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Wishing I smoked.”

  A pause. A deep breath. A portent.

  “You know. I was actually relieved when you and Frank left Berlin in ’48. When you finally got back to England I was happy to know you. When I moved to London in ’56 happy to be friends again. But I tell you, Joe, this is straining our friendship. I’m not sure how much more of life I can take with Mr. Larger-Than-Life.”

  “It’s almost over. When we get to Berlin . . .”

  “At this speed will we ever get to Berlin?”

  “When we get to Berlin. I call London. Tomorrow, they stick Alleyn on a plane. I meet him off it at Gatow. We wait till it’s dark, drive to ­Staaken, do the swap. And it’s over. Frank takes his fifty grand and buggers off back to America.”

  “I’d like to believe you. Joe. Really I would. But he’s the bad penny. He’ll always turn up just when you don’t want him to.”

  Wilderness weighed up Yuri’s offer to kill Frank. Silently. Momentarily. And rejected it again.

  §157

  Wilderness persuaded Eddie to sleep, but shunned sleep himself. He watched the train turn south through Weimar, and around dawn it swung north again to pass Leipzig. And there it sat for four hours. It was two in the afternoon before the train was skirting south Berlin and close to four and by the time it pulled into the old Ost-Güterbahnhof—another semi-derelict site, sprawling between the tracks that led into the Ostbahnhof and the east bank of the Spree.

  Frank looked at his watch.

  “Fourteen hours to travel a hundred and twenty miles. What does that average at?”

  “I don’t care, and nor should you. You didn’t get your hands dirty. As ever someone did the hump and carry for you.”

  “Is he going to pay us now?”

  “That wasn’t the deal. We hand over Liubimov, he hands over Masefield . . . then we get paid.”

  “Meanwhile he gets to keep the stash?”

  “Y’know, Frank. There are times I think you don’t trust Yuri.”

  §158

  RAF Gatow, Berlin

  Wilderness spotted his mistake almost at once. When Nerk from Special Branch led Alleyn down the steps from the Lockheed Hercules handcuffed.

  Three o’clock in the afternoon. A bright, clear winter’s day. Enough light for any paparazzo with a long lens to photograph the two of them arriving “in chains.”

  “Did you board at Brize Norton like this?”

  “Standard procedure, sir.”

  “Bugger procedure. Did it ever occur to you as the shoe leather and knuckle dusters of the Secret Intelligence Service, that this might be a secret? Get the cuffs off now!”

  Alleyn rubbed at his wrist, politely thanked Nerk for his freedom.

  “Please explain the problem, Joe.”

  “Photographers, Bernard. If they spotted the two of you at Brize Norton or if they spotted you here . . . then two and two will readily make four and Staaken will be crawling with the buggers whe
n we hand you back. Not what I want. Not what Bogusnik wants. Not what anyone wants. Come on. Back into Berlin. We’ve taken a suite at the Kempinski. You may have to cool your heels for a bit while I think up Plan B.”

  §159

  “I need the bridge.”

  “What?”

  “Staaken is compromised. The silly sods back in London shipped Alleyn out in handcuffs, in the middle of the day. God knows how many people have worked out what we’re about to do, but most of them will be waiting for us.”

  “So . . . you’re saying I have to ‘earn my keep’ yet again? Don’t mince words, Joe, just spit it out.”

  “OK, Frank, earn your keep. Get on to your people. Tell them we want to do the exchange from the American Sector to Potsdam. Across the bridge, tonight. Minimum military presence. You can tell them who I am, but Alleyn’s name stays secret and so does Masefield’s.”

  “There. Wasn’t so hard was it? All you have to do is ask your Uncle Frank. Consider it done.”

  “Fuck you, Frank.”

  “And you’ll handle General Gutbucket?”

  “I’ll have to go East. Could take a couple of hours. It’s not as if I can just pick up a phone and call him, any more than I could at Helmstedt.”

  “Well, who cut the phone lines? Us or them?”

  “Just do it, Frank.”

  §160

  It was after six when Wilderness left the Kempinski to drive into the Russian Sector. Delves’s assistant Gretchen was coming in as he was ­going out. They met on the pavement.

  “Ah, glad I caught you. You didn’t come into the office today and I think you might want to see this.”

  She handed him a decode.

  “It came for you last night. I’m not allowed to sit on triple p messages.”

  XXXPettiferLON to HoldernessBER.PPP/4772XXX

  YOUR WIFE CALLED. I TRANSCRIBE WITH ALL EXPLETIVES AND PUNCTUATION AS INSTRUCTED. ALICE.

  WHERE THE FUCKING HELL ARE YOU? FOUR DAYS YOU SAID! FOUR FUCKING DAYS! IT’S BEEN TEN FUCKING DAYS ALREADY! I’M BRINGING THE GIRLS UP ON MY OWN! YOU’RE NEVER BLOODY HERE! YOU COMPLETE AND UTTER FUCKING BASTARD, WILDERNESS!

  “Will there be any reply?”

  §161

  Yuri said, “It makes no difference. A shorter trip for me. But it’s over water. I suggest you wrap up well, Joe.”