Then We Take Berlin (47 page)

“Take the coat, Ed. Or you’ll freeze to death.”

He shook the overcoat and helped Eddie into it.

“Meet me at Paradies in an hour. Get a couple of drinks inside you and calm your nerves. I’ll slip my RAF uniform back on in the gents’, and take the car back. You won’t have to do a thing.”

“I’m sorry, Joe.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Our biggest score.”

“It really doesn’t matter.”

He watched Eddie head back towards the bridge, telling himself that no harm could possibly come to a little fat man in an ill-fitting overcoat between here and Paradies Verlassen. He’d just be waved through at the Gate. At most asked to present his ID. And if they knew him, they’d ask about the going rate for a bag of coffee or ladies’ lacy underwear.

As he passed the two coppers, they hid their cigarettes behind their backsides, cupped in the palm of the hand, just like a British Tommy would do, and made a sloppy effort at standing up straight. Wilderness raised a hand to his forehead in semblance of a salute and drove on.

He parked under the S-bahn. Facing out, back to the iron kiosk on top of the shaft. He was only about fifty yards from it, but there was no sign of Yuri, no sign of any other vehicle.

He followed the S-bahn down to the kiosk. A train screeched overhead. Loud enough to drown out Armageddon. The iron door was locked. It made no sense at all for Yuri to be inside, let alone to lock himself in, so Wilderness concluded he was simply late.

As he walked back to the car another train passed, a shower of dust and rust falling, an immersion in noise that felt like drowning.

Then he saw them, slipping out from the cover of the columns that supported the steel lattice of the elevated railway. Half a dozen of them. Young men with guns. Young men with wartime Lugers. And the one aiming straight at him was Werner Fugger.

He still looked sixteen. About as scary as Minnie Mouse armed with a feather duster. But at fourteen this kid had hoisted a
Panzerfaust
, taken out a Russian tank, and had a medal pinned on him by Hitler in person. Wilderness did not so much raise his hands as merely spread them, enough to show he had no gun.

“Open the trunk, Holderness.”

He did as he was told. The waft of coffee was more a blast as the boot door swung down. Kiss . . . pop . . . swish.

The teenagers spread out behind Werner in a semicircle. None of them seemed quite comfortable with their guns. They looked at each other, when they should have been looking at him. Their hands wavered, the guns aimed nowhere. Werner kept his aimed at Wilderness’s midriff. If any of them had it in mind to shoot him it would be Werner—and then the rest would scatter like chaff to the wind.

Werner’s left hand motioned a tall, spotty kid forward. The kid laid his gun on the open boot door, took out a penknife and slit a packet of coffee. The smell of roasted coffee beans even stronger as he held out the packet to Werner.

Werner sniffed and smiled.

“We’ll be taking the car too. You’ll get it back sooner or later.”

But Wilderness was looking past Werner, past the dilatory half-moon of half-attentive kids, to the iron kiosk. The door was open and a ragged
Trümmerfrau
had appeared, her head wrapped in a scarf, her skirt trailing in the mud, moving in and out of the moonlight shadows of the S-bahn, cutting a curious path towards them, clutching a piece of trash she had found—a wooden crutch, or a broken chair leg—almost as though she was circling them but somehow getting closer with every twist and turn.

Then he saw the broken chair leg for what it was. The familiar stunted T shape. A Mark V British Army Sten gun.

The first burst of fire took down five of the kids and Wilderness. The second killed the one kid who had managed to run. Shot in the back before he’d gone a dozen paces.

Wilderness fell against the boot, a bullet in his side. A slow, wet wave, seeping towards his legs. Werner’s dead eyes staring up at him. The spotty kid’s gun lay where he had put it, flat on the boot door, only inches away.

As he reached for it, a hand picked it up.

“Eh, Joe,” Yuri said. “You won’t need that.”

He pulled off the tatty grey wig, tore the ragbag blue dress off his chest, smiled his nicotine smile at Wilderness as Wilderness slid to the ground.

“Does it hurt?”

Such a strange question. But it didn’t.

“It will,” Yuri said. “Here. Take this. For the pain.”

He took the spotty kid’s penknife. Held up a packet of coffee. Showed Wilderness the bottom, with a red sticker slapped across it. Then he slit the packet. No fresh waft of coffee beans. A talcum-trickle of white powder. A hefty pinch of it perched on the end of the knife. He shoved the knife at Wilderness’s mouth. Wilderness opened up and swallowed. A vile, bitter taste.

“Morphine. A little morphine for the pain. Sweet dreams, Joe. Sweet dreams.”

§155

Wilderness was staring at the ceiling. They didn’t want him to move. He asked if he could sit up. They said “tomorrow.” He asked for a book. Any book. They said they’d bring one. They didn’t.

He wondered if there was a guard on the door. He wondered where he was. German nurses who spoke to him in good English. A prefabricated building. The not-too-close, not-so-far sound of planes taking off and landing. A hospital in the British or American zone. One of those they threw together in the summer of ’45. All plywood and tarred felt. Looking shabby now. Out towards Gatow or Tempelhof. At least they hadn’t left him to die in East Berlin.

He closed his eyes. He’d counted every crack in the sagging ceiling.

When he opened them Frank was standing by the bed. Wrapped for winter. Or travel or both. A bulky, lined, green army mackintosh, a Gladstone bag in his gloved hand. A bigger, bursting suitcase at his feet.

“I don’t have long,” he said.

“If I could get out of the fuckin’ bed you wouldn’t have five seconds.”

“I didn’t know, Joe. Honestly.”

“Which bit didn’t you know? That I was smuggling drugs as well as coffee?”

“Well . . . of course I knew that.”

“But you didn’t bother to tell me?”

“Would you have done the job if I had?”

“When exactly did we become dope dealers Frank?”

“In April. You told me not to convert to the new marks and to put everything into commodities. I bought all the coffee I could, and when that ran out I bought morphine. You didn’t want to know. All you cared about was not getting stuck with old marks by the time currency reform came around. I tried telling you. We had US depots all across the sector packed out with penicillin, vaccines, morphine—you name it—Band-Aids, Q-tips, and suppositories to shove up your ass. We’d been stockpiling ever since the day Sokolovsky walked out. And once I’d got Yuri his penicillin, it was a piece of cake to get morphine. All it took was a little paperwork. I tried telling you. You just weren’t listening.”

“And last night?”

“It was three nights ago. You been out for a while. Docs reckon you took enough dope to knock out a Percheron. Yuri said he wanted it all now. I told you that. You know how impulsive he can be. He had a buyer. It was sell it or lose it according to him. The risk seemed low. Bury the dope in the coffee, and then you came up with the idea of using the Rolls. Brilliant. What could go wrong? Except I didn’t figure Yuri for a rat.”

“You’d no idea?”

“Of course I’d no idea. You think I’d of sent you and Eddie into a trap? We none of us knew.”

Frank set the Gladstone bag on the bed.

“I have to be at Tempelhof in less than an hour. Uncle Sam wants me out of here. This is a third of everything we had left. Your cut. I gave Eddie his. It was like I scalded him.”

“Everything?”

“We have slightly less than seventeen thousand dollars. In April you told me to spend all the marks and take only dollars from then on. Seventeen grand is the balance of what we took in dollars since April. The marks are gone with the coffee and the dope. Some of the dollars too. I had to spend to make up the last load. Yuri didn’t pay up front. Yuri didn’t pay at all. Winners keepers.
Siegerrecht,
as the Krauts say
.
”

Good grief, Frank actually knew a word in German.

“How much did we lose?”

“Thousands. About eighty grand.”

“Shit.”

“You still got five and a half. Close to six. That’s two thousand of your quids.”

Wilderness had no idea if Frank was lying. The idea that Frank did exactly what he told him was a novelty. “I was only obeying orders” with a new, comical twist. But . . . he could have kept the eighty grand for himself. And it wasn’t scalding either of them.

“Joe. I gotta fly. Literally. I’m on a flight back to London.”

“Sure. Leave the money and fuck off why don’t you?”

“Joe. Believe me, kid. I didn’t know.”

His head turned as the door opened. Burne-Jones standing in the doorway. Not smiling.

Frank saluted. Burne-Jones returned it without a flicker of expression.

“I was just leaving.”

Frank turned to Wilderness.

“So long, Joe.”

Wilderness hoped it would be long. Right now he didn’t care if he never saw Frank again. And then he was gone.

Burne-Jones lifted the Gladstone bag to the floor, Wilderness praying he did not open it . . . but he showed no curiosity. Just pulled up a chair and faced him.

“Repeat after me . . . I am a total fucking twat.”

“I am a total fucking twat.”

“Good. Glad we got that established. You make a twat of yourself if you want to. But you will not make a twat out of operations run by me and above all you will not make a twat out of me.”

“Can’t be helped now.”

“It’ll have to be. Now . . . what was in the Rolls?”

“Coffee, maybe a thousand pounds of it. And morphine. I don’t know how much.”

“The Russian got it all?”

“Is the car empty?”

“Russians found it about a mile away. Came back to us spotless.”

“Then he got the lot.”

“Any witnesses?”

“They were all dead when I looked. I was only conscious for a few minutes.”

“And him?”

“Who?”

“Captain Spoleto.”

“What are you asking?”

“I’m asking you what he knows.”

“Can’t tell you that.”

“Good. Perhaps you’d care to stick to that line. There are some of Spoleto’s colleagues who’d love to court-martial him. But they’ve no witnesses. Except you that is.”

“Do you want me to testify against Frank?”

“No. I want to save what can be saved.”

“How do we do that?’

“First, I think you know nothing of anyone else’s involvement . . .”

Wilderness thought of Eddie, not Frank.

“Of course, I acted alone.”

“Good . . . good. And you acted under orders.”

“If you say so. What were those orders?”

“No one needs to know. Spoleto’s being posted to England. Your Russian chum has vanished . . . we just need to cook up a cover story . . . you can leave that to me.”

“Why?

“I repeat. You will not make a twat out of me. And to avoid that I have to exonerate you. Right now I’d prefer to lock you in the glasshouse and throw away the key. But that would not be expedient. I need you as spotless as that car.”

“What . . . I get me own
Persilschein
?”

“How aptly you put it, Holderness. Yes . . . in this case a promotion. Don’t even think you’ve earned it. It’s for show. A show we put on to save my arse not yours. And, Joe, there are no second chances. Fuck up again and I’ll let them have you.”

Burne-Jones pushed back the chair, ready to leave.

“Promotion? Lieutenant? Second lieutenant?”

“No, I can’t and won’t make you an officer. I told you a while back that you’d be no use to me as an altruist—you’d be even less use to me as an officer. I need you as you are.”

“You mean as you found me?”

“I was rather hoping for an improved version. I’ll settle for a live one.”

“Eh?”

“Start living in the real world,
Sergeant
. You almost made it into the next one. If it hadn’t been for that woman you’d have bled to death under the S-bahn.”

That woman? What woman? Nell?

§156

Another night and most of a day passed. It was dark by four now. He’d realised that Burne-Jones’s scheme required that there be no guard outside his door—he could leave whenever he liked, except that he couldn’t walk. On the other hand he’d forgotten what day it was . . . for that matter, what month it was.

A woman appeared at his bedside at last. He’d been waiting for the woman. It just wasn’t the right woman.