Spy Line (6 page)

Lisl’s hotel – or perhaps what I should more appropriately call Werner and Ingrid’s hotel – did not run to phones in every room. The next morning at eight o’clock there was a tap at the door. It was Richard, one of Lisl’s employees whom Werner had kept on. ‘Herr Bernd,’ he said. ‘A gentleman phoned, Herr Bernd. Herr Teacher. He comes here. Twelve hours sharply.’ He was a nervous young man who had come to Berlin, as many such German youngsters came, to avoid being drafted into the Bundeswehr. He got a job at Lisl’s and met a girl and now he had no plans to return to his parents in Bremen. Every now and again his father phoned to ask if Richard was ‘keeping out of trouble’. Usually the phone calls came late at night and usually his father sounded drunk.

Sometimes I wished Richard would not persist in using English when speaking to me but he was determined to improve his languages. His ambition was to work on the reception desk of some very big luxury hotel, but he’d asked me not to reveal this to Lisl. So I kept his secret and I answered him in English telling him that I would be having lunch downstairs and that if my visitor Herr Teacher was early he should put him in the bar and invite him to join me for lunch.

Richard said, ‘It is exactly as you say, Herr Bernd.’ He blinked nervously. He had a comprehensive store of phrases
that he could deliver in reasonable English. His problem lay in putting these fragments together so that the joins didn’t show.

‘Thank you, Richard.’

‘You are hotly welcome, Herr Bernd. Have a nice day.’

‘You too, Richard,’ I said.

Once awake I was overcome with a desperate need for a cup of hot strong coffee. So at nine fifteen I was sitting in the dining room – the breakfast room was being completely re-done – with Lisl, who was waving her hand to obtain a pot of coffee from Klara. The faithful Klara wore an old-fashioned starched white apron with lacy edges on the bib. Lisl invariably referred to her as
das Dienstmädchen,
as if she was some newly employed teenage serving-girl, but Klara was amazingly old. She was thin and wiry, a birdlike creature with bright little eyes and grey hair drawn back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, a style in vogue when she was young. She was bent from a lifetime of hard work, having toiled for Lisl since long before the house became a hotel.

‘And this time,’ Lisl told Klara emphatically, ‘put less coffee in the pot.’

‘Some people like strong coffee,’ I told Lisl but Lisl waved a hand to tell Klara to pay no heed to me.

When Klara was out of earshot, Lisl explained in a loud and earnest voice, ‘She wastes coffee. It’s so expensive. Do you know how much I pay for that coffee?’

From the corner of my eye I saw Klara turn her head to hear better what Lisl was saying. I was about to reply that it was time that Lisl stopped thinking about such things, and left the account books to Werner and Ingrid. But the last time I’d said something like that it unleashed upon me an indignant tirade forcefully assuring me that she was not too old to know how the hotel should be run. I suppose Werner and Ingrid had found some way of handling Lisl, for she gave no sign of resenting any of the changes they’d made.

This dining room for instance had been totally refurbished. All the panelling had been stripped back to the natural wood and the nondescript prints had been junked in favour of some contemporary water-colours: Berlin street scenes by a local artist. They went well with a cruel George Grosz drawing which was the only item retained from the former decoration. The picture had always hung beside this table – which was near a window that gave on to the courtyard – and this was where Lisl liked to sit for lunch. One of Lisl’s more spiteful critics once said she was like a George Grosz drawing: black and white, a person of extremes, a jagged caricature of Berlin in the Thirties. And today this obese woman, with her long-sleeved black dress and darkly mascaraed penetrating eyes, did look the part.

The coffee came and Klara poured some into my cup. It was a thin brew with neither aroma nor colour. I didn’t remark on it and Lisl pretended not to notice that it had come at all. Lisl sipped some milk – she wasn’t drinking coffee these days. She was very slowly working her way through a red apple with a piece of Swiss Emmenthal and a slice of black rye bread. Her arthritic old hand – pale and spotted and heavy with diamond rings – held a sharp kitchen knife and cut from the apple a very small piece. She took it between finger and thumb and ate carefully, making sure that she didn’t smudge her bright red lipstick.

‘Werner has his own ideas,’ said Lisl suddenly. She said it as if we’d both been talking about him, as if she was replying to a question. ‘Werner has his own ideas and he is determined.’

‘What ideas?’

‘He has been back through the records, and is using that word process machine to write letters to all the people who have stayed here over the last five years or more. Also he keeps a record of all the guests, their names, their wives’ names and what they liked to eat and any problems we have had with them.’

‘Excellent,’ I said. She pulled a face, so I said, ‘You don’t think that’s the way to do it?’

‘For years I have run the hotel without such things,’ said Lisl. She didn’t say it
wasn’t
the way to do it. Lisl would sit on the fence until Werner’s new ideas were tested. That was Lisl’s way. She didn’t like to be proved wrong.

‘Werner is very clever at business affairs,’ I said.

‘And the bridge evenings,’ said Lisl. ‘Frank Harrington’s people come for the bridge evenings. The British like bridge, don’t they?’

‘Some of them,’ I said.

Lisl laughed grimly. She could usually thrash me at bridge. When she laughed her huge frame wobbled and the glossy satin dress rippled. She reached up and touched the corner of her eye with her little finger. It was a delicate gesture with which she tested the adhesion of her large false eyelashes. ‘Werner is like a son to me.’

‘He’s very fond of you, Lisl,’ I said. I suppose I should have told her that Werner loved her, for the sort of sacrifices Werner was making to run this place left no doubt of that.

‘And loves the house,’ said Lisl. She picked up another little piece of apple and crunched it noisily, looking down at her plate again as if not interested in my response.

‘Yes,’ I said. I’d never thought of that before but Werner had been born here during the war. It was the home in which he grew up as a tiny child. The house must have even more sentimental associations for him than it did for me, and yet in all our conversations he’d never expressed any feelings about the place. But how selfish of me not to see what was now so obvious. ‘And you have your niece here too,’ I said.

‘Ingrid.’ Lisl cleared her throat and nodded. ‘She is my niece.’

‘Yes,’ I said. Since Lisl had repeatedly told anyone who would listen that Ingrid was her sister’s illegitimate daughter, and therefore was
not
her niece, I interpreted this admission as substantial progress for Ingrid.

‘Are you going somewhere?’ she asked truculently. ‘You keep looking at your watch.’

‘I’m going to the bank. There should be money waiting for me and I owe money to Frank.’

‘Frank has plenty of money,’ said Lisl. She shifted about in her chair. It was her way of dismissing both Frank’s generosity as a lender and my integrity in reimbursing him. As I got up to go she said, ‘And I must get you to sort out all that stuff of your father’s some time.’

‘What stuff?’

‘There’s a gun and a uniform full of moth holes – he never wore it except when they ordered him to wear it – and there’s the cot your mother lent to Frau Grieben across the street, and books in English – Dickens, I think – the footstool and a mattress. Then there’s a big bundle of papers: bills and that sort of thing. I would have thrown it all away but I thought you might want to sort through it.’

‘What sort of papers?’

‘They were in that old desk your father used. He forgot to empty it. He left in a hurry. He said he’d be back and collect it but he forgot. You know how absent-minded he could be sometimes. Then I started using that room as storage space and I forgot too.’

‘Where is it all now?’

‘And account books and bundles of correspondence. Nothing important or he would have written and asked me for it. If you don’t want it I’ll just throw it all out, but Werner wants me to clear everything out of the storeroom. It’s going to be made into a bathroom.’

‘I’d like to sort through it.’

‘That’s all he thinks about; bathrooms. You can’t rent a bathroom.’

‘Yes, I’d like to sort through it, Lisl.’

‘He’ll end up with
fewer
bedrooms. So how will that earn more money?’

‘When can I look at it?’

‘Now don’t be a nuisance, Bernd. It’s locked up and quite safe. That room is crammed full of all sorts of junk and there’s nowhere else to put it. Next week…the week after. I don’t know. I just wanted to know if you wanted it all.’

‘Yes, Lisl,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

‘And buy me the
Guide Michelin
for France. The new one! It’s just come out. I don’t want the old one mind.’

‘The Michelin hotel guide to France!’ For years now Lisl had rarely emerged from the hotel except to go to the bank. Since the heart attack she hadn’t even done that. ‘Are you going to France?’ I asked. I wondered if she had some crazy plan to visit her sister Inge who lived there.

‘Why shouldn’t I go to France? Werner’s running things, isn’t he? They keep telling me to go away for a rest.’

Werner was thinking of putting Lisl into a nursing home but I could see no way of explaining that to her. ‘The new Michelin France,’ I said. ‘I’ll get one.’

‘I want to see which are the best restaurants,’ said Lisl blithely. I wondered if she was joking but you couldn’t always be sure.

I spent the rest of the morning strolling along Ku-Damm. The snow had gone and the sunlight was diamond hard. The clouds were torn to shreds to reveal jagged shapes of blue, but under such skies the temperature always remains bitterly cold. Soviet jet fighters were making ear-splitting sonic bangs, part of the systematic harassment that capita l ism’s easternmost outpost was subjected to. After a visit to the bank I browsed in the bookshops and looked round Wertheim’s department store. The food counters in the basement sold all sorts of magnificent snacks. I drank a glass of strong German beer and ate a couple of Bismarck herrings. For an hour the prospect of a lunch meeting that would be discordant, if not to say an outright conflict, was forgotten. My problems vanished. Around me there were the ever cheerful voices of Berliners. To my ears their quips and
curses were unlike any others, for Berlin was home to me. I was again a child, ready to race back along the Ku-Damm to find my mother at the stove and father at the lunch table waiting for me at the top of that funny old house that we called home.

Time passes quickly when such a mood of content settles the mind. I had to hurry to get back to Lisl’s for noon. When I went into the bar there was no sign of Teacher. I sat down and read the paper. At half past twelve a man came in and looked round to find me, but it was not Teacher: it was the Berlin resident, Frank Harrington. He took off his hat. ‘Bernard! How good to see you.’ His manner and his warm greeting gave no clue to the reason for this change of plan and I immediately decided that his presence was in some way connected with the enigmatic exchange that Ingrid had overheard.

Perhaps it was Frank’s paternal attitude to me that made his behaviour so unvarying. I do believe that if I surprised Frank by landing on his side of the moon unexpectedly he would not be startled. Nonchalantly he’d say, ‘Bernard! How good to see you,’ and offer me a drink or tell me I was not getting enough exercise.

‘I heard you were out of town, Frank.’

‘London overnight. Just one of the chores of the job.’

‘Of course.’ I tried to see in his face what might be in store but Frank’s wrinkled face was as genial as ever. ‘I went to the bank this morning,’ I said. ‘I have a draft to repay the thousand pounds you let me have.’ I gave it to him. He folded it and put it in his wallet without reading it.

He wet his lips and said, ‘Do you think your friend Werner could conjure up a drink?’ His feeling that this might be beyond Werner’s abilities, or that Werner might be disposed to prevent him having a drink, was evident in his voice. Coat still on, hat in hand, he looked round the room in a way that was almost furtive. Frank had never been fond of
Lisl or Werner or the hotel. It seemed his unease at being here was increased now that Werner had taken charge.

‘Klara!’ I said. I did not have to speak loudly, for the old woman had positioned herself ready to take Frank’s hat and coat. ‘A double gin and tonic for my guest.’

‘Plymouth gin with Schweppes?’ said Klara, who apparently knew better than I did what Frank drank. She took Frank’s trenchcoat, felt hat and rolled umbrella.

‘Yes, Plymouth with tonic,’ said Frank. ‘No ice.’ He didn’t immediately sit down in the chair I had pulled out for him but stood there, preoccupied, as if unable to remember what he’d come to tell me. He sighed before sinking down on to the newly chintz-covered banquette. ‘Yes, just one of the chores of the job,’ he said. ‘And it’s the sort of task I could be very happy without at this time.’ He looked tired. Frank was somewhere in his middle sixties. Not so old perhaps, but they’d asked him to stay on at a time when he’d got all ready to retire. From that time onwards some of the zeal had gone out of him.

Or perhaps that was just my fancy, for today Frank had the sort of appearance that almost restored my faith in the British public school system. He radiated fidelity, trustworthiness and good breeding. His hair was wavy and greying, but not so wavy that he looked like a ladies’ man and not so grey that he looked like he couldn’t be. Even the wrinkles in his face were the sort of wrinkles that made him look like a good-natured outdoors man. And of course Frank had a valet to press his Savile Row suits and polish his hand-sewn shoes and make sure his Jermyn Street shirts had exactly the right amount of starch in the collars.

‘You heard about my son?’ He was rummaging through his pockets. The question was put in that casual manner and tone of voice that, with a certain sort of Englishman, indicates a matter of vital importance.