The Berlin Crossing (19 page)

He pretended to sleep on the plane but it really wasn’t necessary: the pinstriped fellow beside him was engrossed in his
Times
. Or maybe he, too, was merely playing a role. Even the mirrors in Ingham’s world didn’t reflect a true image.

And then the stilted voice of the air hostess was announcing that they were beginning their descent and he drew his belt tighter,
wondering what kind of world awaited him in Berlin.

AUTUMN–WINTER 1962

He knew he was being watched as he made his way through Tempelhof terminal. Ingham wasn’t the kind of fellow who would unleash
you without some kind of reins; only trusting fools did that and Ingham was neither foolish nor trusting.

The terminal was a hive of busyness: passengers coming and going, ground crew bustling with baggage and tickets, everyone
competing for space in the crowded confines. The noise from outside, from an aircraft taking off or landing, was overwhelming,
as if you’d landed an aeroplane in a small schoolyard. Roland shouldered his way through the din, scanning the crowd. It was
impossible to tell who was watching. Maybe everybody watched everybody in this heaving place.

He made his way past the cream-coloured taxis at the entrance and headed up the slope to the underground station. For now,
at least, he would follow the directions he had been given in Highfield. The U-bahn. The bus. The Zoo station was packed,
the air heavy with the smell of
wurst
and
backfisch
, the counters and standing tables crammed with Berliners eating and drinking their way through another day. He ordered a
coffee and a hot dog, found a space at a table where he could watch and listen. There was no obvious watcher among the crowd
of diners. But then Ingham’s watchers would not be obvious.

Roland finished his frankfurter and went into the newsagent’s.
For a divided city, marooned in hostile surroundings, it seemed to him that Berlin was more than well supplied with guidebooks
and maps for visitors. He picked up a streetfinder, searched quickly in the index, thumbed his way to the relevant page. He
bent over the book, shielding the page from any prying eyes as he memorized the location he wanted and his route. For a few
minutes, like any proper postgrad student, he lingered at the adult magazines corner. He turned the pages of tits and bums
slowly, keeping an eye on both entrances to the shop, but no insight came to him. Whoever was watching him was indistinguishable
among the heads bent over beers and snacks and newspapers on the tables beyond the shop windows.

So. Continue as per instructions. To the Ku’damm
. The great shopping street at the heart of West Berlin. He looked in windows but found no suspicious watchers among the reflected
images. He stopped to read menus beside doorposts. He waited at traffic lights. He watched and listened. And he was alone
in the sea of humanity that was the pulsing heart of a great city at work and play, buying and selling, eating and drinking.
And spying
, Roland told himself.

He allowed the crowd to swing him along into a department store, the air thick with perfume, the floor bright with glass cases
and costume jewellery. He followed the sign for the elevators and stood beside an elderly couple and a young mother with a
baby in a pushchair. When the elevator arrived, the elderly couple politely waved the mother and child ahead of them; Roland
stepped into the shiny, metal interior behind the old man and his parchment-skinned wife. The doors were closing when a brown-shoed
foot was stuck between the doors, prising them apart.

‘
Entschuldigung.
’ Apologies. The fellow who stepped into the lift was fortyish, sandy-haired.

‘
Welche Etage
?’ Which floor? The old German, finger poised above the control buttons, waited politely for the newcomer’s answer.

‘I’m not sure.’

Roland watched the sandy-haired fellow’s eyes dart towards the controls, checking to see which buttons were already lit.

‘
Was suchen Sie
?’ What are you looking for? The older German woman smiled, anxious to help.

Me
, Roland thought, staring straight ahead.

‘Music, records,’ the fellow said.

‘Top floor,’ the German woman told her husband. A regular, Roland thought. My father would approve of her, her understated
elegance, the dark-green loden coat, the stylish hat with its peacock feather, her husband’s obvious affluence.

‘
Danke,
’ the sandy-haired fellow said.

‘Next floor, please,’ Roland said.

The German woman looked at Roland, at her husband.

The elevator doors closed.

They pinged open at the next floor.

He felt the German lady’s eyes upon him as he stepped out of the elevator.

Into a sea of corsets. Bras and knickers. Ladies’ underwear.

He hurried between the counters, past the sales assistants with silver brooches on their ample bosoms and metallic perms above
their painted faces. Ingham would never rely on just a single watcher. He made for the back of the store, pushed open double
doors marked
Nur Für Personnel
. For Staff Only. But nobody stood in his way as he hurried down the tiled staircase. At the bottom of the stairs, he waited
for a moment in front of an emergency exit, listening to his own heart. He held his breath as he pushed the iron bar, easing
the door open, but no alarm bell sounded as
he stepped out into a street of delivery bays and warehouse-style entrances. The elegance of the Ku’damm was remote from this
delivery street, and so were its crowds.

There was no pavement here. Roland edged his way between a pair of trucks, skirted a couple of wheeled cages being pushed
by two men in green overalls. He stood still at the corner. No sign of Herr Sandyhair, or of anybody else searching for John
Carter, postgraduate student. For the next couple of hours, Ingham could piss into the wind. The street map from the station
newsagent’s was clear in his mind as he rounded the corner and headed towards the anonymity of the crowded streets.

The terrace of four-storey houses, almost regal with their ornamental pediments and decorative window frames, seemed familiar
to him. Doors and windows on these elegant buildings were closed in the chilly afternoon but Roland was familiar also with
their high-ceilinged interiors. With their dark sideboards, arrays of family photographs, tiled ovens. More than once, at
home in Ireland, his father had walked him through these rooms, the third-floor home of
Familie Feldmann
. Number 31, Paulusstrasse, in the district of Neukolln. His father’s voice, harsh as ever, stubbornly unsentimental as he
reminded his Irish, English-speaking children of their roots in the imperial city of Berlin. Unsentimental yet determined
that his sons and daughters should be aware of their origins.
But ambivalent too
. ‘Why can’t I go to Berlin then?’
Because you can’t. Because that’s the why
. And so Roland had been dispatched for a student summer to the safe confines of a middle-class family in the safe confines
of boring, antiseptic Monchengladbach. His summer in the wide grey streets of anonymous houses and gardens had seemed like
a sentence.
I could have been at home here
, he thought, cradling his coffee cup in the cafe opposite Number 31, committing to memory the golden
image of the street, its long canyon bathed in the pale glow of a watery sun.

And yet his father had been adamant. Berlin was not where his student son would be sent to discover his Germanic roots. For
all the sun-dappled glory of Paulusstrasse, he felt that now he could at last begin to fathom his father’s ambivalence. Windows
had smashed on these streets, red and black banners had unfurled their swastikas above pyres of burning books. It seemed to
Roland, musing about the quiet street, that perhaps the jackboots still echoed on the cobbled roadway. The little corporal
with his toothbrush moustache and madman’s eyes was gone, but there were other corporals present, or nearly so, with their
maps and instructions and reminders that life was both short and cheap.

The sense of bravado that had warmed him in Paulusstrasse was gone. He was just a little scared now: scared of Ingham’s indignation
and Adams’ temper.

Corporal Adams could go piss against the wind along with Ingham
.

He looked at his watch, the cheap replacement for the handcrafted work of the House of Feldmann. Almost two hours since he’d
left Herr Sandyhair being elevated to the top floor for Music and Records. Ingham would have made music about that little
excursion. As he would about Roland’s excursion: Ingham didn’t seem like the kind of fellow who was interested in personal
pilgrimages to your personal
heimat
.

He’d like to stay longer, sitting there in the window of the little cafe opposite the house where his father had grown up,
but he had promises to keep. To himself. To Terry. To his father. ‘You’ll take good care of your brother, won’t you?’

And to Herr fucking Ingham. He tipped the middle-aged waitress generously and stepped out into Paulusstrasse. The weak sun
was low, the shadows lengthening on the narrow street. He looked across at his father’s old house, wondering who would
greet him if he rang the bell, introduced himself and asked to be allowed to see the apartment. There would be another day,
surely, a better day, to go searching for his past.

He shrugged his shoulders in his second-hand jacket and started to make his way to the safe house.

It was part of an ugly cement-and-glass structure, north of Bismarckstrasse. The ground floor of the building was shared with
a ladies’ hairdressing salon to the left and, on the right, a prosthetics supplier, whose large plate-glass window displayed
a range of artificial arms and legs, together with an array of rubber underpants and adult incontinence products. Roland wondered
idly if he’d be needing any of these aids after facing Ingham: he was almost two hours behind schedule.

On the right of the prosthetics suppliers was a frosted-glass door, recessed from the pavement. The steel plate on one wall
beside the door read OMEGA LOGISTICS. Push buttons and names for half a dozen flats faced him on the opposite wall. Roland
was studying the choice of buttons when the door swung open. Adams stood there, his face dark with anger.

He yanked Roland inside and shut the door.

‘Up. Now.’

He pushed Roland ahead of him up the narrow staircase. The first landing gave on to a long corridor of offices. Through a
glass panel in the white door nearest to the stairs he had a glimpse of a man and a woman, about his own age, smoking and
smiling at each other. It was no more than a glimpse as Adams prodded him up the next flight of stairs.

Neither glass walls nor smokers on this floor, just doors closed on a narrow corridor that reminded him of the budget-priced
hotel where he’d stayed off High Street Ken with Terry. Adams knocked on the first door and, without waiting for an answer,
opened it and propelled Roland ahead of him into a large featureless sitting room. The room held a couple of armchairs, a
sofa and a table. It looked about as permanent as a bus shelter.

Ingham was standing with his back to them, looking out through the slats of white Venetian blinds that covered the window.
Cigarette smoke curled back over his shoulder. Apart from that, the stork-like figure gave no sign of life. Roland moved towards
the wall map but Adams clamped his arm in a bony grip and held him in the centre of the office.

Ingham took his time about turning round. He looked exhausted, Roland thought, drawing on the cigarette as if it might feed
him. Maybe he’d walked from London, you couldn’t tell with this lot.

‘So you decided to show up.’ Even the voice sounded knackered. ‘Two hours late.’

‘I’m here.’

‘Why are you late?’

‘Personal stuff. None of your business.’

Ingham shook his head like a disappointed headmaster facing a truculent pupil.

‘
None of my business?
’

‘No.’

Adams cleared his throat. ‘Sir?’

‘Yes, Corporal.’

‘Permission to teach this little shit some manners, sir?’

The stork nodded.

He hadn’t finished nodding when Adams dealt Roland a stinging back-hander across the face followed by a hard slap across the
other cheek. Instinctively, Roland raised his fists to protect his face. Adams punched him viciously in his unprotected stomach.
He was doubled up, gasping, when he felt another fist in his midriff.

He couldn’t stop himself crumpling to the floor in agony. He lay on the dark carpet clutching his stomach, knowing that he
had never been hit so hard in any rugby match.

He felt his back poked by a shoe.

‘Get up.’ Ingham’s voice was muffled by the ringing in his ears. ‘Get him a chair.’

Adams dragged him upright by the neck of his jacket and dropped him into a straight-backed chair.

Ingham tossed him a handkerchief and he coughed bile and spittle, and the coffee from Paulusstrasse, into it. He blinked and
lifted his head, trying to focus. He wondered if Adams would try to hit him again.

‘Everything you do here is my business.
Everything
. Understood?’ Ingham was standing over him with folded arms. ‘
Verstanden
?’

Roland nodded, swallowing, wiping his mouth.

‘Why did you go to Paulusstrasse?’

He couldn’t keep the surprise, the puzzlement, out of his face.

Ingham snorted. ‘Did you really think that you’d lost us after that nonsense in the elevator? This is not a game, my fine
young fellow. We play with our lives over here. And better men than you have tried to lose us. Or to betray us.’ Ingham paused,
as if to let his words sink in. ‘So. What were you doing in Paulusstrasse?’

He told them then. There was no alternative but he hated himself for doing so. It seemed like betrayal – of his father, of
the Feldmanns he had never known, grandparents and uncles and aunts who had grown up under the high ceilings in Paulusstrasse
and who had perished under the bombs falling from implacable skies. He felt as if he were violating their lives, as if he
had invited the jackboots to stomp all over their most intimate belongings.