Nightfall Berlin

by Jack Grimwood

  Tom was picking at that thought when General Rafikov went on the attack. Although he began slowly enough. ‘I should point out that our Englishman here insists he didn’t kill his countryman.’

  ‘Of course he does,’ Colonel Schneider replied. ‘That’s exactly what you’d expect him to say.’

  ‘But you have evidence of his involvement?’

  ‘He was seen leaving the crime scene.’

  ‘Leaving it,’ General Rafikov said. ‘Not committing the crime. Can you even prove he went into the flat?’

  ‘We found fingerprints,’ Colonel Schneider said crossly.

  ‘On the crowbar?’

  ‘What crowbar?’ It was said too fast.

  ‘The one used to crush Sir Cecil’s chest.’

  ‘Sir Cecil was shot in the head and heart. It’s the English method.’

  ‘This crowbar that doesn’t exist. Do you still have it?’

  Colonel Schneider’s glare was murderous. It was fixed on Tom though. He stepped towards Tom’s chair, blinking when General Rafikov moved to put himself in the way. ‘I’d like to inspect the Englishman’s body,’ Rafikov said. ‘Have someone tell Central Morgue that I’ll be visiting.’

  ‘It’s gone, Comrade General.’

  ‘The English took it?’ General Rafikov sounded shocked.

  ‘His daughter refused custody. She told us he was our responsibility. She suggested we deal with the corpse quickly and quietly.’

  ‘So. No hero’s funeral?’

  ‘He was cremated yesterday.’

  ‘And Evgeny?’ General Rafikov said quietly.

  ‘His body was returned to Moscow, Comrade General.’

  ‘When?’ Rafikov’s voice was so sharp that Colonel Schneider flushed. The German might be elegantly dressed, and important in his own world, but the general had the physical authority and wore his superior rank with ease. Besides, he was KGB, and for all that Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost meant the relationship between the USSR and East Germany was more strained than it had been in decades, that still counted for something.

  ‘When? This morning, I believe. By train.’

  Before the general could say more, Colonel Schneider nodded at his nearest underling and nodded dismissively towards Tom. ‘Have that unshackled. Take it for processing.’

  49

  The stink in the back of the police van was as familiar as static. It had a gritty, dusty, burnt quality. The smell of old vans, powerboats on summer lakes, motorcycles waiting at traffic lights, and something else … Tom fought a memory that hung greasy beneath the surface of his childhood and shied as it rose towards the air. Pushing it down, he held it under until it stilled. When he released it, it hung for a second, bitter and hungry, before sliding into the depths.

  Oxygen starvation, Tom told himself.

  He was alone in the back of a Barkas B1000. From the front, the Barkas was enough like a VW Campervan to be disconcerting. If VW produced a special-issue underpowered model, with a tiny windowless cell fixed to the back.

  Fumes from an exhaust that was either cracked, drilled through or otherwise intentionally altered leaked from a grille in the floor, which was the only source of ventilation for the van’s rear.

  With his escort up front on a bench beside the driver, Tom had the cell to himself. It had no bench, so he sat on the corrugated floor, his wrist handcuffed to a crossbar behind him. The sun was high, his metal cell already hot, and the steady leaking of the exhaust through the grille only made things worse.

  Marshal Milov, the old bastard, had talked about dushegubka and Tom wondered if he was meant to arrive at all. The fascists, as the marshal invariably called the Nazis, had trucks designed to asphyxiate their victims using exhaust fumes. Maybe this van was more for garbage than deliveries.

  Every time the driver braked, Tom slid across the floor, until his wrist brought him up short. Every acceleration slid him into the bar behind. He knew left and right turns from the way his body twisted. They’d left the city almost immediately, heading east, as far as he could tell on a road that required less stopping and turning the longer they were on it.

  Tom tried not to be worried.

  It was fifty miles from Berlin to the Polish border.

  If they took him across, would they take him on? It was less than 400 miles to Russia itself. It might have been quicker to fly him, and simpler to send him by train, but this was discreet, and his chances of getting a message to the world beyond were non-existent. Tom had just decided that this was what was happening when the van turned hard north and kept going.

  And kept going, and kept …

  He woke to find the side door open and his escort and the driver growling at each other. Having prodded him with a rifle butt, his escort said something dismissive to the driver, who shrugged. When Tom begged to be let out to piss, they slammed the door in his face. So he shrugged in turn, pissed himself and watched the acrid puddle find its own way to the grille.

  He wondered what the British had been told, what they knew. Was London making a fuss? He imagined that Caro’s father was. He was a man with power. But how much weight would he carry against Realpolitik?

  There was another round of Strategic Arms Talks coming up. Everyone approved, at least in public, of glasnost and perestroika, this great thaw between East and West, but no one yet quite believed it would happen. If the British government went into battle on Tom’s behalf, the Soviet Bloc might decide it proved he’d been sent to kill Sir Cecil.

  Those days were meant to be over.

  Hunger, car sickness, and the carbon monoxide trickling through the grille reduced Tom’s thoughts to their simplest forms. How long before they let him out? Would he ever get out? The friendship of a Soviet field marshal had been his trump card. When he’d told General Rafikov to talk to Milov, Tom had been convinced he could survive this. He liked the odds much less now.

  When the van lurched to a sudden halt, he kept going and the yank on his wrist almost dislocated his shoulder as he spun into the side of the van. It hurt. Of course it bloody hurt. His right eye was filling with blood when his escort yanked back the side door, swearing at the carbon monoxide.

  He gave Tom’s cell a second or two for the air to clear.

  Then he crawled in, undid Tom’s cuff and dragged him out, dropping him to the tarmac. When Tom struggled to stand, he realized the man knew what he didn’t. Tom’s legs weren’t ready to support him.

  ‘All yours,’ he said.

  Fresh hands dragged Tom upright. They bundled him through a door, with the kind of glass that sandwiched mesh in its middle, into a changing room where they stripped him, spun him in a circle and cavity searched him, before dragging him to a white-tiled shower room, where they tossed him against a wall and used a fire hose to blast him into a little ball in the corner.

  It was entirely casual.

  In some ways he needn’t be there at all. In some ways he wasn’t. He had no idea if they knew he was English, no idea if they knew his name or what he was meant to have done. The prison uniform they gave him was coarse, badly patched and filthy. It saved him the trouble of catching lice by having the lice there already. No one fed him, no one took his name or read him the rules. He was simply pushed into a room containing three double bunks, pointed towards one of them and told to shut up, not make any noise and not cause problems. He’d be processed in the morning.

  Sometime after midnight they came back.

  There’d been a change of plan. He was to be shot.

  50

  Blinding lights picked Tom out.

  They pinned him to the water’s edge, where the surf-tossed grit and gravel of a beach shifted below his heels. At his back was the Baltic; a flat black sea that stretched out for ever. There were no ships to light the darkness. No cities or towns to either side. Only the shuffle of gravel, the scraping of the soldiers’ boots and the glare from the searchlights.

  He wondered if he was meant to turn and swim for it. What his chances mig
ht be of escaping into the darkness before machine-gun bullets began ripping into his back and neck. He stood naked, and unashamedly frightened, in front of six hard-eyed boys, his hands cuffed behind him.

  With their thumbs on pressure points in his shoulders, the boys had steered him out of the camp, down to the stony beach to leave him in the waves. Tom wished the lights would go off. The boys were quite close enough to kill him with a simple sweep of their AK-47s. Burn out the magazines and he’d be no more. They didn’t need lights to pick him out.

  Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

  The only bit of the Lord’s Prayer that really mattered to him, and the bit that worried him the most. Too much of what he’d done was unforgivable. The truth of that filled his eyes with tears and he thought of Charlie trapped in that damn school the boy hated, Caro wondering what had happened to him. And Becca …

  He wanted to believe he’d see her again.

  Lead us not into temptation.

  Tom hadn’t done very well with that one either. Perhaps better than people thought, though. But not good.

  For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory.

  Those words had always moved him. Even now, long after he had begun to worry about what, if anything, they actually meant.

  For ever and ever.

  Naked as the day he was born, blinded by the light, Tom shivered in the cold wind scraping the shingle, and watched the boys holding Kalashnikovs, their fingers already on the triggers.

  They’d arrived that night in the total darkness, kicked open the cell door Tom had thought locked, barked at the men in the other bunks to stay the fuck where they were, not move, not look, not speak, unless they wanted a kicking.

  At the same time, they’d dragged Tom on to the concrete, kicking and stamping. One man went for his groin and caught his thigh, trapping flesh between heel and floor. The flash of pain left Tom gasping. Before he could act, before instinct could even curl him into a tight ball, he was dragged upright and thrown into a wall, then slammed straight back into it when he bounced off. And, as he tottered, wondering why they were avoiding his face, he felt his arms yanked behind him and cuffs locked on his wrists.

  Dragging him from his cell and along a dark passage towards a heavy door, they bundled him downstairs. Tom hoped they lied. That they were taking him to an interrogation room. Perhaps to the cellars. But he found himself outside, frogmarched through the silent camp. Razor-wired gates were dragged back to let his party through.

  The gap between the gate and the Baltic was narrow. The dirt hard and the grass coarse and sharp-bladed. A wind, which blew across what looked like half a lagoon, tasted salt and sharp and primitive. If there were stars, they were beyond the brightness of the searchlights.

  Without being ordered to, the boys dragged him to shore, pushed him to his knees and one of them yanked back the charging handle on a Kalashnikov, stepped back and put the muzzle to Tom’s skull.

  Instinctively, Tom shut his eyes.

  The boy didn’t fire, he simply stood there grinning and waiting for Tom to open them again. At his nod, the others dragged Tom to his feet and began stripping him with a lazy efficiency that was more chilling than the breeze.

  As Tom watched, they stepped back, looked at him with vague interest and turned to watch a young officer, who was buttoning his jacket as he approached. A sergeant walked at his side. The sergeant was scowling.

  ‘Couldn’t this have waited?’ the lieutenant muttered.

  The boy who’d pretended to shoot Tom shook his head. ‘Has to be tonight, Comrade Lieutenant. Don’t ask me why. Orders.’

  The comrade lieutenant grunted.

  ‘I suppose I’d better check if he wants to confess.’

  This is happening, Tom told himself. He looked at the shingle under his feet, wondering why it wasn’t heightened, why he wasn’t seeing it in a way he’d never seen things before. Only, all he really wanted was to piss and be allowed to go back to sleep. The second of those wasn’t going to be a problem much longer and he felt suddenly ashamed that pissing himself was probably the first thing he’d do in death.

  ‘Do you speak Russian?’ Tom asked.

  Behind the lieutenant, the boy in charge of the troop looked suddenly alarmed. The alarm was there, and then it wasn’t as he met Tom’s eyes, shrugged and prepared to carry out his orders anyway.

  ‘I do,’ the sergeant said. Tom had thought he might. His hair was grey and his eyes lined. He looked the right age to have grown up under Soviet occupation.

  ‘Ask the lieutenant if confessing would make a difference.’

  The sergeant did, his mouth twisting sourly as he relayed the reply. ‘Only to your conscience, apparently.’

  Tom snorted. He was proud of that.

  ‘Then I’m glad it was only a technical question. Tell him I didn’t do it. I have no intention of confessing to a murder I didn’t commit.’

  ‘You’re Russian?’

  ‘I have friends in Moscow. Friends in high places.’

  The sergeant shrugged. ‘Not high enough.’

  ‘They come no higher,’ Tom said with feeling. He didn’t know why the commissar had betrayed him, and he didn’t expect his words to save him this time, any more than they’d managed to save him last time, but he wanted them said.

  ‘You really didn’t kill this man?’

  ‘I really didn’t kill him.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  When one of the boys stepped forward with a hood, Tom shook his head. It was the sergeant who told the boy to step back. At his order, the boys set their AK-47s to single fire.

  ‘Ready …’

  Tom made himself meet their gaze.

  ‘Aim …’

  He couldn’t see them against the brightness of the light.

  But he made himself lift his chin and stare as steadily as he could at their silhouettes. He imagined he saw the boys’ trigger fingers whiten as they took up the pressure. And then the lieutenant raised his hand, the lights from the towers snapped off and the Kalashnikovs opened up as he let it fall.

  Pain blossomed across Tom’s chest, the few rounds that missed whistling into watery darkness behind. The force of the rounds threw Tom back and he stumbled, trying to find his balance before falling to his knees. The waves were gentle, the pebbles on the edge of the water gleaming in unexpected moonlight as his face went down to meet them.

  51

  ‘In the beginning there was darkness …’

  The words came out of that darkness and Tom’s body was on fire. It burnt in a band across his chest and even breathing hurt.

  He shouldn’t be breathing.

  He tried to move. He tried to raise one wrist, expecting it to be fastened to the trolley on which he lay, but it lifted away. He tried to turn his head towards where the voice had been.

  ‘Well … I suppose we’d better have the light.’

  Fluorescent tubes flickered into life and Tom realized that he was lying on a steel trolley in a morgue. The man standing by a throw switch that belonged in an old Frankenstein film was wearing a green apron, holding a scalpel and smiling.

  He was also speaking English.

  Touching the scalpel to Tom’s shoulder, he ran it down to Tom’s breastbone, tutting when Tom winced. ‘Barely a scratch,’ he said, lifting the scalpel to the opposite shoulder. He made another equally shallow incision and then ran the blade down towards Tom’s groin. Stepping back, he pretended to open Tom up, as he would do if performing a real autopsy.

  He mimed pulling out Tom’s lungs, cutting them free and dropping them into buckets. In a moment of absurdity, Tom almost asked if he shouldn’t weigh them first but this didn’t look like the sort of morgue where technicians bothered to weigh body parts.

  After the lungs came his stomach, liver and viscera. All lifted invisibly, cut free in mime only and dropped into buckets and trays. The man looked into the empty trays and sucked his teeth, stopping to make a no
te on a pad with a stub of pencil. When he was done, he stepped back and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Well,’ said the man. ‘That was impressively baroque.’

  He put down the cigarette, picked up a round of ammunition and tossed it on to Tom’s naked stomach, then watched Tom grab it before it could roll to the floor. Tom regretted everything about that movement.

  ‘See what I mean?’

  ‘Dummies?’

  ‘You tell me …’

  The round was squat, lacking the right length. Tom squinted, trying to make sense of it through his pain.

  7.62 × 39mm. Standard Eastern Bloc issue.

  Except the case … Not crimped, so not a blank. More … He tried to remember the batten rounds issued in Ulster. They’d replaced rubber bullets, being judged less lethal, lower muzzle velocity too. The rounded projectile here was softer, almost waxy.

  ‘Up you get.’

  Tom gasped. ‘Give me a second.’ He sounded back from the dead.

  ‘Come on,’ the man said. ‘You can do it.’

  Very carefully, Tom slipped one leg over the edge and stopped to catch his breath. Should he swing the other leg over or see if this one would reach the tiles? He doubted if he could stand. The man must know that.

  ‘Take these,’ the man said.

  ‘Painkillers?’

  ‘Opiates. The Huns think you’re dead.’

  ‘Huns?’

  ‘Well, certainly the boys who shot you.’

  Stepping forward, the little man gripped Tom under the arms and turned him so he sat on the edge of the trolley. He gripped Tom’s hips and pulled them towards the trolley’s edge, catching Tom when his feet wouldn’t hold him.

  ‘Perhaps not yet.’

  He sat Tom back and bent to take a closer look at the bruising across his chest and stomach. He sucked his teeth.

  ‘Bloody awful shots.’

  Tom tried to look for himself.

  ‘Keep still for a second or you’ll make yourself sick.’

  ‘You’re a doctor?’

  ‘Once upon a time. Now …’ The man looked round his morgue. ‘Now I work down here. And help a little upstairs. If they want a surgeon there’s one about fifty miles away. Mostly they ask me. Less paperwork.’