The Berlin Crossing (18 page)

‘Not to mention the Irish Ambassador, sir.’

They laughed together at that.

‘I’ll organize the passport, tickets, clothing, money, the usual stuff,’ Fitch-Bellingham said. ‘You’ll have the boy ready
for travel on Tuesday, Corporal?’

‘Count on it, sir.’ Adams stroked his blue-black jaw. ‘Count on it. We’ll get him in, no problem.’

‘We need those maps,’ Fitch-Bellingham said. ‘We have to get the boy
out
as well.’

As soon as Ingham pulled away in his dark Jaguar, Adams produced the large-scale street maps of Berlin, East and West, and
spread them out on the long table in the dining room. The maps pre-dated the Wall: someone had drawn a bold red line that
zigzagged across the city.

Adams’ finger traced the line from north to south across the map.

‘On this side,’ he said, pointing at the left of the map, ‘you’re with us, you’re safe. On the other side,’ his moving finger
pointed to the right of the bold red line, ‘we can’t do much for you. Over there you’re on your own. We’ll tell you where
to go, how to get to your contact – but you’ve got to be ready for the unexpected. That’s when you have to use your wits.
And that’s when you need to know the lie of the land. The trams, the buses, the trains, the streets. So listen up and get
as much of these fucking maps into your head as you can.’ Adams’ face was grim. ‘It’s your skin, Feldmann, not mine, but I
don’t want you to lose it. So let’s get down to it.’

They got down to it.

You’ll cross from the American sector, at the point they call Checkpoint Charlie
.

Walk with confidence. You know where you’re going
.

Yes, of course somebody will be watching you. Everybody gets watched in that fucking place
.

You can walk to Alexanderplatz, get on the train there
.

Yes, to Prenzlauer Allee
.

And from there?

Adams said he’d tell him the contact address later. It wasn’t necessary to know just yet.
Your brain will be cluttered with too much information
.

It was cluttered already.

It grew dark, Adams switched the lights on in the big dining room, drew the curtains. They stopped while he fixed a saucepan
of soup; he showed Roland where the bread and cold cuts of chicken and ham were to make sandwiches.

After they had eaten, Adams rigged up a projector and showed a couple of travelogues on a screen that he set up at one end
of the dining room. The films showed Berlin before the Wall; the narrator had the usual fruity voice that you expected for
travel documentaries: ‘. . . and so we take our leave of this charming city, now being restored to its former glory.’

Adams switched the lights on. Roland looked at the numbers flashing on the white screen and wondered, as the reel of film
clicked on to its end, if he would manage to bid farewell to the charming German city.

Images of streets and cars and trains and trams wound their way through his tired brain as he fell asleep in the cell-like
room.

Next day Adams washed and Roland dried after their breakfast of porridge and toast, tea and boiled eggs in the kitchen. Adams
spread the maps across the dining room table and they started again. Memorizing streets and tramlines. Stations, cafes, bridges,
bars. Questions and answers. Not so different, Roland told himself, to cramming for an exam. Except the stakes were higher.
This was not about honours or fail or pass. More than once Adams reminded him that it was
his
skin.

Lunch was served in the dining room. The middle-aged woman who placed the bowls of beef stew at the other end of the long
table exchanged a brief nod with Adams but she said nothing. Nor did she speak when she came back with two mugs of tea and
took away the empty dishes. Indistinct male voices came from the kitchen below them but even when Roland stood listening on
the stairs, going up to the lavatory, he saw nobody. Later, during the afternoon, voices came from the hallway, footsteps
on the marble floor, the sound of the front door opening and closing. He caught Adams’ eye as he bent over the maps, listening,
but the corporal had nothing to say. Roland and Adams were alone in their strange pursuit, plotting entry and exit from a
divided city.

Around four o’clock the phone rang. The silent house seemed to shiver under the echoes of the jangling noise. Footsteps in
the hall, a muffled female voice as the ringing stopped. More footsteps, the dining-room door opening. When the middle-aged
woman put her dark cropped head around the door, Adams stood up without a word.

While he was gone, Roland strained to hear. The only word he could make out was ‘Goodbye’ as Adams hung up.

‘Change of plan,’ Adams said, when he returned. ‘We have to move faster.’

‘Why? What’s up? Is Terry OK?’

‘My boss will explain.’

Adams’ expression made it plain that further questions were pointless.

Ingham arrived an hour later. A silk handkerchief peeked out of the breast pocket of his bottle-green corduroy jacket; brown
brogues gleamed below his cavalry twill trousers. He looked, Roland thought, like some of his father’s business friends at
Sunday lunch in the golf club. But fitter, leaner, harder. And they wouldn’t be taking a small suitcase to lunch.

Ingham put the suitcase on the table.

He nodded at Roland, turned to Adams.

‘How is our student?’ In German. Roland had neither heard nor spoken English since he had arrived at Highfield.

‘Making progress, sir. But now, with even less time . . .’ Adams shrugged.

‘But he’ll do?’

‘He’ll have to.’ Adams looked at Roland. ‘He’s smart and he has a good memory. But in so short a time . . .’

‘War is always the same, Corporal.’ Once again, the mild tone belied the implacable words. ‘You can only work with what you
are given. You know that.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘To work.’ Ingham snapped open the suitcase. ‘Now,’ he said to Roland, ‘strip.’

Roland stared at him. ‘What for?’

‘Just do as the major says.’

Roland looked at Adams, at Ingham.

He shrugged and began to take off his clothes.
Fuck them, I’m younger than either of them and I’m in better shape
.

He left his shoes on the floor, piled his clothing on a chair. Naked, he stared defiantly at his minders.

‘Socks,’ Ingham said.

Roland removed his socks, let them fall on the floor beside his shoes. The evening was chilly in the room; he hated the goosebumps
rising on his flesh. He could feel the others staring at his naked body.

‘You keep yourself in good shape,’ Ingham said.

‘Fuck off,’ Roland said.

‘Watch it, pal.’

‘Never mind, Corporal.’ Ingham laid a bony hand on Adams’ arm. Then he lifted a pair of cotton underpants and a round-necked
undershirt from the open suitcase. He handed them to Roland.

Roland took the underwear. He looked at the St Michael labels before he put the clothes on.

‘Now the rest.’ Ingham nodded at the suitcase. All the clothes had English or UK labels – the check cotton shirt, the blue
trousers, the navy donkey jacket, the black ankle-high boots with the pointy toes. Everything was clean but everything had
been worn before. Roland felt strange, standing in that high-ceilinged dining room, wearing other people’s clothes, as though
he had stepped into another man’s skin. But it was no surprise to him that everything was a perfect fit.

‘You’re flying to Berlin in the morning,’ Ingham said.

‘And my brother?’

‘He’s fine.’

‘Can I talk to him on the phone?’

‘No.’

‘I’d like to phone my parents – we should be going home tomorrow.’

‘They’ll have a postcard in the morning to say you’ll be home at the weekend.’

‘You think of everything, don’t you?’ Roland couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice.

‘That’s my job,’ Ingham said.

‘Blackmailing people like me and sending postcards full of lies.’

‘No,’ Adams butted in. ‘Just trying to keep fuckers with big mouths like you alive.’

‘Gentlemen.’ Ingham waved a disdainful hand. ‘Why don’t we all calm down and have something to eat?’

Somehow it wasn’t a surprise to Roland that Ingham, secret policeman and fluent linguist, was also an accomplished cook. Ingham
hummed cheerfully as he busied himself at the cooker. He told Roland to set the kitchen table. He dispatched Adams to his
Jaguar to bring in half a dozen bottles of German
weissbier
. With an almost theatrical flourish, Ingham served up man-sized helpings of Wiener schnitzel with a thick mushroom sauce
and
bratkartoffeln
, fried potatoes with chopped onions served hot off the pan.

‘
Guten Appetit,
’ Ingham said as they sat around the oak table in the kitchen.

The schnitzel was good, crispy on the outside, the white veal tender.

‘This is good, sir,’ Adams said.

‘Yes,’ Roland said, ‘it’s nearly as good as what my mother makes at home.’

Ingham’s eyebrows went up. ‘
Nearly
as good?’

Roland smiled. The skinny old git was ruthless, no doubt about that, but he was a likeable enough old flute.

Ingham raised his glass of pale beer.

‘
Prost,
’ he said. ‘And success.’

All of them drank to that.

After eating, it was back to the maps. They showed him the series of moves by which he would make his way from Tempelhof airport
to the ‘safe house’, the flat, in Charlottenburg, in the Western sector of Berlin.
The U-bahn from Tempelhof. The bus from Innsbrucker Platz to the main Zoo station. Look at the newspapers and magazines in
the railway station, have a beer or a coffee. Walk along the Ku’damm, go into the store, come out this entrance here
. . . Ingham’s finger pointed out the way, the twists, the turns, the doubling back; at mid-afternoon he would fetch up in the
apartment in Charlottenburg.

‘Got it?’ Ingham asked.

‘
Ja wohl,
’ Roland said. His mind spun between images of Terry, of his parents, of tomorrow’s flight into the reality of the map on
the table.

Ingham told him to go to bed, that tomorrow would be an early start.

Roland was leaden-footed climbing the staircase. In bed, sleepless, he waited for the locking of his door but nobody came.
It made no difference now, whether the door was locked or unlocked; now there was no place to go, no place except where they
were sending him.

He thought he wouldn’t be able to sleep but he was deep in dreamless slumber when Adams hammered on his door at five thirty
in the morning.

In the kitchen Ingham and Adams edged around him nervously. Like at home, Roland thought, the morning after I’ve been out
late and my father thinks I’m too bleary- eyed to face the fabulous customers of Feldmann, Watchmakers and Jewellers. Nobody
wanted to eat; they drank their tea in silence, standing up, scattered like sentinels around the big kitchen.

‘Sure you won’t eat something?’ Ingham’s face was pale under the naked light tubes.

Roland shook his head. He stared through the high uncurtained windows at the grey darkness of the early morning. He wondered
if Terry was awake, staring at the same darkness.

‘Your watch, Roland.’

He looked at Ingham. ‘What?’

‘Your watch,’ Ingham repeated. ‘It’s not a good idea to take
that
into East Berlin.’

Roland slipped the silver bracelet off his wrist. He stared at the white face, the dark numerals, the tiny hands. He remembered
his father’s hands, the precise fingers manipulating the steel
instruments in the workroom behind the shop. Loneliness seized him, coldness around his heart, and for the first time he wondered
if he would ever live his old life again.

‘Put this on.’ Ingham handed him a black-strapped watch, Made in UK printed on its face. ‘Time we were moving.’

The grey darkness was lightening as they pulled away from the big house. Adams drove, an old black Hillman that had been waiting
at the front steps of Highfield. Fitch-Bellingham sat in the back with Roland, methodically working his way through Roland’s
route along the streets of Berlin to the safe house in Charlottenburg.

Surrendering his watch had disturbed Roland, as though a piece of his life had been taken from him. Sitting in the back of
the Hillman he wanted to look out at the hedges flashing past, at the gathering brightness in the sky; he had the strange
sensation that these, too, were being taken from him. He wanted to sit back against the shiny seat and commit to memory the
shape of passing hedges and walls and clouds. And then he remembered Adams’ taunt: ‘It’s your skin, mate, not mine.’ He straightened
himself in his seat and concentrated on Ingham’s impeccable German words.

‘Almost there, sir.’

Even without Adams’ reminder, he’d have known from the increasing traffic that they were approaching Heathrow. He wondered
if they would escort him to the check-in desk or if they would launch him alone.

Only Adams stepped out of the car when they pulled up at the pavement behind the line of black London cabs. Ingham handed
him a shoulder bag through the open rear window. The bag was small, made of cheap imitation leather.

‘It’s to go with your image.’ Ingham didn’t smile, nor did Roland; he knew that, if asked, he was a postgrad student on a
short trip to Berlin.

‘Have a good trip. See you in Charlottenburg.’

The Hillman pulled away.
He could walk into the airport terminal and present himself at the Aer Lingus desk and talk someone into phoning his father
. And what would he say to his father about Terry?

He swung the bag on to his shoulder and walked into the terminal. Even if Ingham and Adams had driven off, other eyes, he
knew, would be watching him.

Or watching
John Carter
. Standing in the queue at the check-in desk, he fingered the passport he had been given. His own photograph stared back at
him; he remembered the flash in the police station – how long ago? Two days, three days? A flash from another life. He turned
the thick pages of the passport, looked at the stamps.
John Carter
had once been to Vienna for a few days, he’d visited Paris. Now John Carter was on his way to Berlin.