The Berlin Assignment (30 page)

“I'm sorry she remains set against you,” Schwartz said. “I tried to convince her to let bygones be bygones, but some things can't be forced.” They continued talking about Sabine, dissecting her character, treating her like an epic
femme fatale
and thus, in a way, confirming what Müller had claimed – that she was a woman they shared.

Over a beer in the café, Schwartz became interested in Hanbury's background. “Don't mind my questions,” he said disarmingly. “The pursuit of a historian. We love biography. What did your father do?” The consul spread his hands. There wasn't much to say. He talked
about the prairies and the role of a soil scientist whose life was spent in a contest with nature. “I think he won. He certainly received enough awards.” Hanbury then turned Schwartz's question around. What was the professor's family like?

“No award winners on my side,” Schwartz said distantly. “Not in the last few generations. No medals either. Losses only. My father died in Stalingrad when I was in the womb.” The forebears on his mother's side, he claimed, had been more interesting. She had been a
von Pöllnitz
, a family with roots going back to the time when an Elector in the Hohenzollern family declared himself King in Prussia. A certain Oscar Pöllnitz, owner of a brewery at the time, was far-sighted. He gave the young royal house good discounts and in return his name acquired the prefix
von
. This started a dynasty which acquired and developed huge land and industrial holdings all over Prussia. “But it was nationalized by the Russians. All my mother had left at the end of the war was some property in West Berlin, a few paintings and my father's books.” Schwartz's voice had darkened, but he seemed then to dismiss the losing hand which history had dealt his family.

The story caused Hanbury to think of Müller, hard at work, poring over files, untangling the German property mess. He asked if some of the family assets might come back. Schwartz replied there wasn't a chance. “It's because of the spirit of compromise.” Appeasers were in power now, he argued, and sympathy for the fate of the great families such as his mother's had ebbed away long ago. “Today's politics have no backbone. Deterioration is everywhere, from the handling of the great issues of state all the way to the breakdown you see in the streets.” He described Berlin's graffiti plague, the unchecked vandalism and rampant mugging and the daily wave of break-ins, including in his own neighbourhood. “Chaos is everywhere. It's time someone did something about it.” Had such concerns come up in the consul's many meetings?

“It has,” Hanbury confirmed, “one way or another.”

“Tell me about it,” the professor urged. “Tell me with whom you talk about such things. Whom have you got to know?”

Hanbury laughed, as if to say,
whom don't I know
? He rattled off a list. Schwartz listened, both nodding yes and shaking no. He might have been reviewing a stack of doctoral applicants. “An interesting start,” he said.

“The Chief of Protocol was helpful.”

“Von Helmholtz? You've fallen in with him?”

“Does he get a nod or a shake?” the consul playfully inquired.

“He could have been a great man.”

“But…?”

“He's too liberal for most peoples' tastes.”

Hanbury had occasion to think back to this first meeting with Schwartz and how they bantered about Berlin's elites. Schwartz was a rich source of information. Anecdotes on public figures emerged by the bucketfull. Hanbury recalled, when they got up to leave, that Schwartz suggested they had barely scratched the surface of innumerable subjects. Why not get together again? Hanbury had agreed. Already then he reflected on the situation's irony – that the irreparable situation with Sabine was being overtaken by an acquaintanceship with her husband. As for Schwartz's strong opinions on public issues – his flashes of political contempt – the consul saw these as a spillover from too intense an academic life, a mild and not-uninteresting eccentricity. He did not realize – how could he have? – that in consenting to see more of the professor he was reordering his future and tampering with fate.

Albert Müller – provider, competitor, practised non-conformist and sometime father-figure to a member of the Berlin diplomatic corps – died suddenly in his sleep. The direct cause of death, pneumonia, he once vaguely predicted. But it really began with a fall from his bike when he broke three ribs.

Word flashed through the Eagle community and the collective foreboding was immediate. Not a few of them had that late-life habit of calculating when they went to bed what the chances were of getting through the night and seeing the next day. When a comrade doesn't make it, the calculation seems to worsen. The Eagles' mood at that evening's crisis meeting in a Charlottenburger pub was sombre. No wisecracks rippled back and forth across the table. They stared into their glasses. At last, Rudi Metzger, the oldest living Eagle, spoke.

Mensch!
he croaked into the morose stillness.
Was seid Ihr alle für Angsthasen!
He accused them of shivering like scared rabbits in a burrow. “Where's the Eagle spirit?” he demanded. “Do we crash when
it's time to soar? Don't forget, Albert's looking down. I'd say right now he's disgusted, seeing us crying in our beer. I'll tell you what he'd say if he were here.” Rudi's voice changed, suddenly sounding like Albert. Mouths around the table fell open. Had Rudi transcended, had he become a pipeline linking heaven with earth?

Eagles! I always wanted to win. I've done it. I got here first. And I've an early observation: up here all the roads slant down and the wind blows only from the rear. I've got to say it, heaven beats Brandenburg hands down.

As Rudi spoke, his eyes lifted to the dark beams of the ceiling, but now he lowered them and glowered. “That's what he'd say. I'm sure of it. Let's drink to Albert.” His voice was back to being old and raspy. Mugs were raised, but eyes remained trained on the table top. They saw Albert leaning into a curve, full tilt, afterwards berating younger legs for being timid. But, little by little, a murmur started and finally Horst Baumann asked for attention. He believed a delegation should be named to liaise with the next of kin on funeral arrangements. This launched a practical debate which dispersed the sombreness.

Hanbury learned of Müller's death through the weekend paper.

The last time they were in
The Tankard
the old man had been bothered by a rumbling cough that came from deep inside. Since then, shackled to his schedule, Hanbury twice missed the weekly trek to Spandau. He made a mental note to contact Müller, but kept postponing it. On Sunday morning – the stereo was playing – Hanbury paged idly through the paper. His eye passed over the obituary page. He almost didn't notice the announcement:
Albert Müller, Rechtsanwalt
. In fact, he finished turning the page and flipped back only because he thought he had seen something familiar.

Curiosity was his first reaction. Someone with the same name and profession as Müller? Then came alarm. He worried, yet did not fully believe, this was
his
Müller. Then the full truth settled like a huge weight on his chest. He couldn't breathe. He felt hot. He felt cold. His hands rose to his mouth and stuck there.
His
drinking companion,
his
instructor in the finer points of life was
dead
? Hanbury's eyes bulged with horror.

He crumpled the paper, got up, slammed a button to silence the stereo and walked in silent circles. He went to the window to look at the empty street. Finally, no longer able to bear it, Hanbury broke down and sobbed like a child. He had not experienced this depth of feeling any of the other times he encountered death.

Pulling himself together, he returned to the paper. He smoothed it against the floor and read three
In Memoriam
announcements for Müller. The first, an elegantly sized notice, was from the family and carried the names of Sabine, Werner and Nicholas. It said:
He was suddenly taken from us, but in our memory he lives
. A second came from the Legal Association which recalled his high standards as a lawyer. The third was from his club.

ALBERT MÜLLER
Leader Amongst Eagles.
His friendship warmed us.
He soared to heights which others shunned.

Hanbury was looking at the words but was seeing Müller: Müller cussing him for living on the sidelines; Müller at the Olympic Stadium, beet red with effort and in love with physical exhaustion; Müller judging his fellow man, with mischief oozing from every wrinkle on his face; Müller seeing absurdity everywhere he looked and loving absurdity everywhere he saw it. The difference between Müller and most everybody else, Hanbury realized, was the difference between
gazing down from the heights and gaping up from the trenches. Müller took life both seriously and as nonsense. He harboured no ill will; he had no hard feelings; he was never sentimental. He let people be and he – semi-detached, quietly, in his own way – carried on.

Still on the floor, Hanbury had an urge to go to the place where Müller always glittered:
The Tankard
. Make a pilgrimage, sit there, mimic Müller's art of living.

Outside, the day hung in suspense. Light filtered down through pinholes in a celestial pewter sheet. As Hanbury began the march to Spandau, a wind picked up and the pewter fractured into dark inky patches edged with violet. For a while, in the west, as on the day when Müller claimed his thirty-third spot, the light was dramatic, but the sky closed up once more. An intermittent rain began and when Hanbury finally stood on Müller's street a storm was flailing about in earnest. He looked at the dark windows of the house and observed a minute of silence, then doubled back to
The Tankard
. Uwe's son-in-law behind the bar was busy wiping glasses.

Hanbury took off his jacket and with a flapping motion scattered water in a wide perimeter. “Herr Konsul,” Uwe's son-in-law said. “You're the last I expected. The usual?” Hanbury nodded. “I got the news.” Uwe's son-in-law, working the tap, skimming off excess foam, was silent until he had created a tankard with a perfect head which he placed before his customer. “I didn't expect to see you again,” he said once more. “I only ever saw you with Herr Müller. You're welcome anytime naturally. Alone or otherwise.”

“How did you learn he died?”

“Ilse told me. She heard about it at the baker.”

“Do you know how it happened?”

“At first there was an accident, but it couldn't have been too bad. He was alive when he went into the hospital. The hospital did the rest. Hospitals!” Uwe's son-in-law shook his head in disgust. “Ilse and I
kept Uwe out of the hospital. He lived another year because of that. It wasn't much, but it gave him time to think about the end.”

“What kind of accident?”

“Riding in the forest. A blackout. Crashed into a tree. Broke some ribs. You know, you can live with broken ribs. But what do doctors do? They operate!” Uwe's son-in-law made signs of a deeply felt abomination.

“Is that when he died?”

“Not right away, but it was the operation all the same. Those doctors, they work fast. They were cutting into poor Herr Müller before anyone could stop them.” He shook his head thinking how his best customer had fallen into the devil's clutches. “The reason I know this is because his daughter came in, Frau Schwartz. Nice looking lady. No resemblance to her father. Know her?”

Hanbury's heart skipped a beat. He sipped through the foam and with the back of his hand wiped his upper lip. “She was here?” he asked casually. “I used to know her. We sat over there back then, Uwe, Müller, his daughter, myself. Those were good times.”

“Is that how it was? Well, as I was saying, Frau Schwartz came in. She said he'd been well enough to talk about his accident. He told her he was convinced he should have had more speed. The tree he hit wasn't all that big, he said. If he'd gone faster he would have felled the thing, like those karate artists, you know, the ones that smash through bricks. The trick is to have momentum.”

“What did he die of if it wasn't the tree?”

“His lungs filled with water. As if the doctors didn't know that would happen if they operated.” Uwe's son-in-law closed his eyes once more at the satanic goings-on in hospitals, then rustled in a drawer behind the bar. “Frau Schwartz gave me a photo to remember Herr Müller. I appreciated that.” He took out a frame and studied the picture. Suddenly he peered at Hanbury, then back at the picture
and shook his head. “I'm damned,” he said. He beamed and handed Hanbury the photo. “Here. That's you. You're in it.” The bartender looked happy as a cherub that a younger version of his client was now residing in his drawer.

“This can't be. I didn't know this picture existed,” Hanbury said. It was the four of them twenty-five years before. Uwe was pulling a mock angry face; Müller, hair sticking out like Einstein, had puffed up his chest like a prize fighter; Hanbury, half-turned, held up a glass and smirked as if he had a deep love for the camera; and Sabine – how old was she? twenty-one, maybe twenty-two – she looked so fine it took his breath away. “She takes after her mother,” he said, studying the moody veil that hung around her eyes. “In looks, she wasn't like her father.”

“That's what I just said too.”

“Why did she bring it in?”

“She was sorting his things. She said the picture belongs here, that the people in it belonged together when it was taken and they deserve to be together, here in
The Tankard
. Maybe you can hang it on the wall, she said. That got me thinking about history. So we're going to create a picture gallery of our customers on the stairway down to the toilets. I asked Frau Schwartz about the third guy – you. I didn't realize it was you. Who's the clown with the grin? I asked. Anyone that grins like that should wear a headband to prevent his face from cracking open. Sorry, Herr Konsul. It's the truth. Here look at you. You're nearly unrecognizable. Herr Müller would've called you a
Knautschkommode
.”