Brightness split the night.
The boy with the knife and flare gun went down next.
The killing was so swift and brutal that Eddie realized this wasn’t, this couldn’t have been, the first action his friend had seen. The others were running now but Nicolai kept firing. A boy he hit in the shoulder lurched forward and staggered on. Another took a bullet to his leg and fell, lying in a sobbing heap, wailing for his friends to come back for him.
None of them did.
‘Let him live,’ Eddie said.
‘Nyet.’ Nicolai shook his head.
Walking over as casually as if going to post a letter, Nicolai glanced down, shrugged and shot the boy through the head. His pleas for mercy ending mid-word. The aftermath was silence. A silence stripped of the birdsong that had filled the night before their attackers arrived. If the leaves rustled, Eddie Masterton no longer heard them.
‘It’s okay,’ Nicolai said. ‘It’s okay.’
Eddie was hugging himself, he realized. His arms wrapped tight around his own shoulders. The next thing he knew, he was against a tree and Nicolai was kissing him. After a startled second, without even really thinking about it, Eddie began kissing back. That was all he did, that was all they did, but they did it for a long time, and with an intensity that put the stars back in the sky.
‘Now,’ Nicolai said, ‘let’s find this club.’
Eddie hadn’t been but he’d heard rumours.
The club had gambling, drinking, food and working girls; the staples of every cellar bar in Berlin, a city where families sold daughters for food. Only this wasn’t in a cellar, it operated from a hunting lodge.
A place called Reinickendorf-Tegelerforst.
84
Inside the lodge, a small man looked up from behind a leather-topped desk that had once been luxurious but now looked merely ruined. Much like the city really, Eddie decided. The man looked French. At least, he did to Eddie. Brylcreemed hair, a narrow moustache, olive-skinned, bags under his eyes …
‘We haven’t been before.’
‘No,’ said the man, ‘you haven’t.’
English, Eddie realized. He had an accent. Eddie wasn’t good on accents. He thought Manchester, maybe. The man looked them over slowly.
‘I’d remember if you had. Who told you about the club?’
Eddie racked his brains, wondering if it mattered. It would be embarrassing to bring Nicolai here only to discover they couldn’t get in. ‘I can’t remember,’ he said miserably. ‘I was drunk at the time.’
The man smiled. ‘Good answer,’ he said.
Before he could say anything else, a French major stumbled through a pair of velvet curtains and stood there blinking at them. His flies were open and his jacket done up with the wrong buttons. A second later, a blonde woman bustled through. She was bare-chested, the top half of her dress flapping like a skirt around her hips. She grabbed the major and tried to drag him back.
‘If you’d excuse me.’
Whatever the man at the desk said worked; because the French officer settled and the blonde woman stopped wrestling him and they both let themselves be shooed towards the curtains.
Eddie felt Nicolai’s fingers reach for his.
The man was back, his eyes not missing the moment the young men in front of him let go of each other’s hands. He nodded, mostly it seemed to himself. Then he pulled open a drawer, extracted a tiny HMSO notebook and opened it towards the front. ‘It’s five shillings and I’ll need names.’
He looked momentarily apologetic.
‘We take sterling, francs and dollars. We don’t usually take roubles and we definitely don’t take reichsmarks.’
‘I’ll pay for both,’ Eddie said hastily.
‘No need. This time your friend comes in free.’
‘I’m Eddie Masterton,’ Eddie said. He offered his hand and after a moment the man shook it. He looked more amused than ever.
‘Why do you need our names?’
The man’s gaze hardened a little as he turned to Nicolai. ‘Everything that happens here stays here. Your names are our security.’
‘Do you tell us your name?’
‘Tony Wakefield.’
‘You’re Intelligence?’
The man laughed. ‘I’m a medical officer. Now …’ In tiny writing he noted down Eddie’s and Nicolai’s names, took the money that Eddie offered and nodded towards the velvet curtain where a door had once been. ‘Will you find your own way or would you like the tour?’
‘We’ll find our own way,’ Nicolai said.
‘Right you are. Third star to the right and straight on until morning.’
The club had been built as a hunting lodge and replaced a concrete and glass monstrosity designed by a degenerate from the Bauhaus School of Art. Major Kraus, the site’s new owner, had taken great pleasure in having that ripped down and a good, solid German building put in its place.
A Soviet colonel, named Milov, later shot Major Kraus through the head, while Kraus was trying to negotiate free passage for women from a U-bahn station, which he intended to defend to the death with a small group of SS, and a Volkssturm battalion formed from children pulled out of school and old men too sick to have been drafted before. The women, children and old men lived.
Kraus, his ADC and immediate staff didn’t.
None of this was known to the Allied officers who stumbled on the empty building a week or two after the French took Reinickendorf as part of their section of Berlin. At that point, there was free movement between sectors, with Americans visiting the Soviet section, Soviet officers dining with British officers, French officers taking American stenographers as lovers.
The lodge was empty only in the sense that no one official had claimed it. And since this was France’s sector, and the French were embarrassed by the lateness of their arrival in Berlin, they moved quickly to clear the lodge of children who’d found refuge there after the city fell.
There were 53,000 homeless children in Berlin that summer. Most were orphans. Many had seen their mothers, sisters and grandmothers raped in front of them, many had been raped themselves. They survived on scraps, roots grubbed from the dirt and anything they could steal. The French cleared a dozen of them from the lodge with such brutality that, even in the first weeks, when it was still left empty at night, none of the lost children tried to return.
Later still, they learnt to keep well away.
Never having had the honour of visiting Hitler’s house in the Bavarian Alps, Major Kraus had made do with lovingly collected postcards of the Berghof, the holiday home Hitler bought with his royalties from Mein Kampf. He also took inspiration from Homes & Gardens, an English magazine that had several interesting things to say about the aesthetic underlying the Führer’s taste.
The major had insisted on cembra pine for the panelling, since this was what the Führer had. He’d installed a red marble fireplace in the hall, and a collection of majolica cacti pots in the lobby for similar reasons. There was even a sliding window opening on to wooded slopes. Although the trees at Tegelerforst could not compete with the splendour of the Bavarian Alps.
When the Allied officers found the lodge, the marble bust of Minerva just inside the front door was missing a breast, the painting of Frederick the Great in the hall had been slashed from shoulder to hip, and the bearskin rug in the drawing room had a hole from where someone had lit a fire on its back.
By that September, when Lieutenant Masterton introduced Nicolai to the club, Frederick had been crudely repaired, Minerva had acquired a sheet to hide her damage and the rug was long gone.
There were two main rooms to the club.
The great hall was for gambling; this being mostly cards. Although a roulette wheel stood in one corner, it was crooked and favoured Voisins du Zero, the numbers nearest the nought. The house soon stopped taking bets once they realized that. As for the drawing room, this had leather chairs, a chaise longue, and a bar staffed by a Moroccan sergeant who served brandy, whi
sky or vodka from behind his low counter. The working girls, most of them German, with a few Poles, sat on stools along one wall. The Moroccan took the money, keeping careful records of the sums taken.
‘Nothing beyond this,’ an English captain said.
‘We’re just taking a look,’ Eddie replied. ‘Finding our feet.’
‘Suit yourselves.’ The man grabbed a girl half his age and pulled her on to his lap, his hand sliding under her shirt before she was even seated. Her smile was in place by the time she turned her head to his.
‘Are you lost?’
Eddie turned to find a US major behind him. He was dashingly dressed, with a narrow moustache like a film star, his hair just a tiny bit too long. He looked like an American David Niven. ‘No, sir. Just wandering.’
‘Lonely as a cloud, eh?’
Eddie smiled at the joke and the major looked gratified.
‘Talk to Tony, did you?’ he said.
‘Sir?’
‘At the door. Tony Wakefield.’
‘Yes, sir. He took our money and our names.’
‘Our money and our names …’ The man repeated Eddie’s words in a way that suggested he thought they were particularly clever. And Eddie wondered how drunk the major really was. Drunker than he looked from the sound of it. He pointed to a heavy door in the far wall.
‘The room you want is through there.’
‘I thought there was nothing beyond this room.’
The man clapped Eddie on the shoulder. ‘There isn’t,’ he said. ‘Believe me, there isn’t.’ He smiled to himself and headed the way Nicolai and Eddie had just come, without bothering to say goodbye.
A dozen men fixed their gaze on the pair in the doorway, expressions softening when the Russian boy gave them a winning smile. Ushering Eddie in, Nicolai shut the door firmly behind them. This room was smaller than the others, more intimate. Its lights were low, and while the two were looking round, someone turned them lower, had second thoughts and turned them off altogether.
The noises began slowly at first, becoming urgent later. And the darkness … That was warm and welcoming. Warm, welcoming, dark and safely anonymous.
‘I like this,’ Nicolai said.
85
‘It was a gay club?’ Tom asked.
On the other end of the line, Sir Edward Masterton hesitated.
‘Sir …?’
Silence said Sir Edward was battling with himself. ‘Not just a gay club,’ he said finally. ‘It was something for everyone. For most officers it was a brothel and somewhere to get drunk. You have to understand how things were then. I’m not saying that makes it right. It’s just how things were. And you don’t tell Anna. My wife must never know any of this.’
‘Of course not, sir.’
‘Berlin was in ruins. Most of its men were dead. Its children ran wild to be picked off like vermin, at least in the early days. Any girl older than ten had been raped already. They dressed in rags, didn’t wipe themselves, never bathed, smeared their faces with ash. It made no damn difference. In the two months between the city’s surrender and the rest of us arriving, the Soviets did to Berlin what they’d already done to its women.
‘Bank vaults were looted, factories cleared of machinery, art galleries emptied of paintings. If a museum still stood, chances were its collection had been loaded on to a truck and shipped east. The streets were pitted, the metro wrecked. There was no food in the city and precious little left in the countryside beyond.’
Sir Edward fell silent. ‘The Russians had their reasons,’ he said finally. ‘God knows, they had their reasons. But, you have to understand … Most of the Berliners were starving. In a city like that a packet of cigarettes will buy you anything or anyone. I was shocked, Tom. It was like stepping into hell. The problem is, some men like hell. They feel at home there.’
‘Nicolai, sir?’
When he spoke, Sir Edward sounded sad. ‘No, he had his dark side. We all did. Some more than others. Nicolai …’ His voice faltered and the sentence drifted into silence.
‘Sir?’ Tom said.
‘I’m getting there. The girls changed every few weeks. Some were in their twenties, others younger. Fourteen, fifteen. I don’t know where the Moroccan found them. I don’t know where they went afterwards.’
‘And in the other room?’
‘I’m assuming you don’t mean the games room?’
Tom didn’t bother to answer.
‘Gambling was why most officers came, you know. That and those poor women and the drink. We were bored. Absurd as that sounds. Our days were full of admin. Our nights … What do you do at night in a city that’s largely ruins?’
Tom waited to be told.
‘The room Nicolai and I found was private. Entry by invitation only. We should never have been there. But we were, and we came back the next week, and the week after and the week after that. We kept coming back until the day Nicolai didn’t appear when he was meant to …’
The ambassador’s voice faltered.
‘I went to the Hauptbahnhof, which was where we usually met. I waited until dark and then – because I still couldn’t believe he’d stood me up – I waited some more, in a grubby little bar we sometimes used, in a cellar below a clothes shop. Perhaps, because I was more than a little infatuated, I decided I had to find him. I was drunk by the time I left. I had to be to walk through Tegelerforst alone on the wrong side of midnight.
‘It’s a wilderness. Well, it was then. Hills, rivers and even a small lake inside the city boundary. No one troubled me. Maybe no one was there. Maybe they had more sense. I was drunk, I had my revolver drawn, I was perhaps already a little not right in the head. Although I’d considered myself relatively undamaged by war until that night.’
86
Somewhere on his journey between the Hauptbahnhof and Tegelerforst, Eddie convinced himself that Nicolai would be at the lodge. There had obviously been a misunderstanding. Nicolai must have thought Tegelerforst not the Hauptbahnhof was where they were due to meet. The hope that this was true carried Eddie up the hillside and through rustling trees.
The lodge was on a ridge, with hillside rising behind and forest filling the slope below. The curtains were always drawn at night, as if the city was still in blackout against bombing raids. Perhaps it still was inside everybody’s head. Everyone had become so used to navigating darkness.
And yet, and yet …
The curtains at the lodge were never so well drawn that they wouldn’t anger an air raid warden for showing light had that rule still applied. A compromise, maybe, between the habits of war and the prospect of peace.
Wait, Eddie told himself. Not yet.
He wasn’t sure when he’d decided that it might be best if he circled the lodge first. What he was looking for he wasn’t sure. Maybe simply to settle himself, to summon his courage to go inside. Perhaps he could peer through the gaps in the curtains to check if Nicolai was there. As if he’d always known this was where he’d find him.
That was what he needed to do.
At a side window he watched a German girl straddle a pot-bellied man, reach down to position him and lower herself. He just grinned while she rode him and Eddie moved on. It wasn’t that the sight didn’t interest him. It wasn’t that he hadn’t had women. There’d been prostitutes in France. He hadn’t enjoyed it though.
He’d hated the little towns through which they’d had to pass. All those shifty-eyed men and pinch-faced women proving their patriotism by stripping teenage girls and shaving their heads.
In the games room, officers sat in a circle round a table, a bottle of Martell in the middle, cigars in their mouths and cards tight to their chests. American uniforms, British uniforms, French uniforms. A Soviet major sat clutching the ace of spades and a handful of minor cards. They were waiting for him to play. There was even a man in a suit. From the anxious way that he glanced around, Eddie realized he must be German.
As for the room beyond, it was in darkness.
; Eddie could sense rather than see movement. His fingers to the glass sensed a room that was full and trembling. He wondered what those clutching cards or being straddled by prostitutes thought happened in there. Whether they knew the room even existed. It was possible Nicolai was in there.
He realized he rather hoped not.
Taking his fingers from the window as if saying goodbye, Eddie kept going because he’d already decided to walk right round the lodge. And that was how he found himself peering between curtains into a kitchen block at the back.
A boy was being held down.
A man stood at one end of a pine table gripping his wrists, while at the other end … The boy’s ragged shorts were round his ankles and his top bare. There were other officers in there, and other children. A girl barely old enough to have the shadow of breasts was being pushed towards a fat man. He snapped something at her and her struggling stopped.
Eddie looked at the revolver in his hand.
He looked back through the window and the boy was crying. The girl was crying too. There were … He tried to count. Half a dozen children and twice as many adults? He was at the door before he realized it. Already reaching for the handle when it was opened from inside.
‘What are you doing here, Lieutenant?’
‘Looking for someone.’
The major blocking the doorway scowled. A colonel came to stand behind him. ‘Looking for someone, sir,’ the colonel said heavily. ‘Understood?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Eddie said. ‘Sorry, sir.’
‘This is a private party. You won’t find them here.’
‘No, sir. I’d better get back.’
‘Yes, you had,’ he said. ‘Now, put that damn sidearm away before you hurt yourself. And don’t let me see you here again.’
Lowering the hammer on his revolver, Eddie turned away.
87
‘I should have killed them,’ Sir Edward said. ‘My shame is that I didn’t. I never went back to the lodge. That night, I never even went inside. I simply walked back through that forest to my quarters, sat on my bed and cried. I should have reported them. I know that.’
Nightfall Berlin Page 27