London Match (11 page)

'What does Frank say?'

'Frank isn't in Berlin. He's gone away for Christmas.'

'He must have left a contact number,' I said desperately.

'He's gone to some relatives in the Scottish Highlands. There have been gales and the phone lines are down. And don't say send the local constabulary to find him because when I track him down, Frank will point out that he has a deputy on duty in Berlin. No, you'll have to go, Bernard. I'm sorry, but there it is. And after all, you're not married.'

'Hell, Dicky. I've got the children with me and the nanny has gone home for Christmas with her parents. I'm not even on standby duty. I've planned all sorts of things over the holiday.'

'With gorgeous Gloria, no doubt. I can imagine what sort of things you planned, Bernard. Bad luck, but this is an emergency.'

'Who I spend my Christmas with is my personal business,' I said huffily.

'Of course, old chap. But let me point out that you introduced the personal note into this conversation. I didn't.'

'I'll phone Werner,' I said.

'By all means. But you'll have to go, Bernard. You are the person the BfV knows. I can't get all the paperwork done to authorize someone else to work with them.'

'I see,' I said. That was the real reason, of course. Dicky was determined that he would not go back into the office for a couple of hours of paperwork and phoning.

'And who else could I send? Tell me who could go and see to it.'

'From what you say, it's only going to be a matter of identifying a corpse.'

'And who else can do that?'

'Any of the BfV men who were in the arrest team.'

'That would look very good on the documentation, wouldn't it,' said Dicky with heavy irony. 'We have to rely on a foreign police service for our certified identification. Even Coordination would query that one.'

'If it's a corpse, Dicky, let it stay in the icebox until after the holiday.'

There was a deep sigh from the other end. 'You can wriggle and wriggle, Bernard, but you're on this hook and you know it. I'm sorry to wreck your cosy little Christmas, but it's nothing of my doing. You have to go and that's that. The ticket is arranged, and cash and so on will be sent round by security messenger tomorrow morning.'

'Okay,' I said.

'Daphne and I will be pleased to entertain the children round here, you know. Gloria can come round too, if she'd like that.'

'Thanks, Dicky,' I said. 'I'll think about it.'

'She'll be safe with me, Bernard,' said Dicky, and did nothing to disguise the smirk with which he said it. He'd always lusted after Gloria. I knew it and he knew I knew it. I think Daphne, his wife, knew it too. I hung up the phone without saying goodbye.

And so it was that, on Christmas Eve, when Gloria was with my children, preparing them for early bed so that Santa Claus could operate undisturbed, I was standing watching the Berlin police trying to winch a wrecked car out of the water. It wasn't exactly the Hohenzollern Canal. Dicky had got that wrong; it was Hakenfelde, that industrialized section of the bank of the Havel River not far from where the Hohenzollern joins it.

Here the Havel widens to become a lake. It was so cold that the police doctor insisted the frogmen must have a couple of hours' rest to thaw out. The police inspector had argued about it, but in the end the doctor's opinion prevailed. Now the boat containing the frogmen had disappeared into the gloom and I was left with only the police inspector for company. The two policemen left to guard the scene had gone behind the generator truck, the noise of which never ceased. The police electricians had put flood lamps along the wharf to make light for the winch crew, so that the whole place was lit with the bright artificiality of a film set.

I stepped through the broken railing at the place where the car had gone into the water. Looking down over the edge of the jetty I could just make out the wobbling outline of the car under the dark oily surface. The winch, and two steadying cables, held it suspended there. For the time being, the car had won the battle. One steel cable had broken, and the first attempts to lift the car had ripped its rear off. That was the trouble with cars, said the inspector - they filled with water, and water weighs a ton per cubic metre. And this was a big car, a Citroen ambulance. To make it worse, its frame was bent enough to prevent the frogmen from getting its doors open.

The inspector was in his mid-fifties, a tall man with a large white moustache, its ends curling in the style of the Kaiser's soldiers. It was the sort of moustache a man grew to make himself look older. 'To think,' said the inspector, 'that I transferred out of the Traffic Department because I thought standing on point duty was too cold.' He stamped his feet. His heavy jackboots made a crunching sound where ice was forming in the cracks between the cobblestones.

'You should have kept to traffic,' I said, 'but transferred to the Nice or Cannes Police Department.'

'Rio,' said the inspector, 'I was offered a job in Rio. There was an agency here recruiting ex-policemen. My wife was all in favour, but I like Berlin. There's no town like it. And I've always been a cop; never wanted to be anything else. I know you from somewhere, don't I? I remember your face. Were you ever a cop?'

'No,' I said. I didn't want to get into a discussion about what I did for a living.

'Right from the time I was a child,' he continued. Tm going back a long time now to the war and even before that. There was a traffic cop, famous all over Berlin. Siegfried they called him; I don't know if that was his real name but everyone knew Siegfried. He was always on duty at the Wilhelmplatz, the beautiful little white palace where Dr Goebbels ran his Propaganda Ministry. There were always crowds of tourists there, watching the well-known faces that went in and out, and if there was any kind of crisis, big crowds would form there to try and guess what was going on. My father always pointed out Siegfried, a tall policeman in a long white coat. And I wanted a big white coat like the traffic police wear. And I wanted to have the ministers and the generals, the journalists and the film stars, say hello to me in that friendly way they always greeted him. There was a kiosk there on the Wilhelmplatz which sold souvenirs and they had postcard photos of all the Nazi bigwigs and I asked my father why there wasn't a photo card of Siegfried on sale there. I wanted to buy one. My father said that maybe next week there would be one of Siegfried, and every week I looked but there wasn't one. I decided that when I grew up I'd be the policeman in the Wilhelmplatz and I'd make sure they had my photo on sale in the kiosk. It's silly, isn't it, how such unimportant things change a man's life?'

'Yes,' I said.

'I know you from somewhere,' he said, looking at my face and frowning. I passed the police inspector my hip flask of brandy. He hesitated and took a look round the desolate yard. 'Doctor's orders,' I joked. He smiled, took a gulp, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

'My God, it's cold,' he said as if to explain his lapse from grace.

'It's cold and it's Christmas Eve,' I said.

'Now I remember,' he said suddenly. 'You were in that football team that played on the rubble behind the Stadium. I used to take my kid brother along. He was ten or eleven; you must have been about the same age.' He chuckled at the recollection and with the satisfaction of remembering where he'd seen me before. 'The football team; yes. It was run by that crazy English colonel — the tall one with glasses. He had no idea about how to play football; he couldn't even kick the ball straight, but he ran round the pitch waving a walking stick and yelling his head off. Remember?'

'I remember,' I said.

'Those were the days. I can see him now, waving that stick in the air and yelling. What a crazy old man he was. After the match he'd give each boy a bar of chocolate and an apple. Most of the kids only went to get the chocolate and apple.'

'You're right,' I said.

'I knew I'd seen you somewhere before.' He stood looking across the water for a long time and then said, 'Who was in the ambulance? One of your people?' He knew I was from London and guessed the rest of it. In Berlin you didn't have to be psychic to guess the rest of it.

'A prisoner,' I said.

It was already getting dark. Daylight doesn't last long on clouded Berlin days like this in December. The warehouse lights made little puff balls in the mist. Around here there were only cranes, sheds, storage tanks, crates stacked as high as tenements, and rusty railway tracks. Facing us far across the water were more of the same. There was no movement except the sluggish current. The great city around us was almost silent and only the generator disturbed the peace. Looking south along the river I could see the island of Eiswerder. Beyond that, swallowed by the mist, was Spandau — world-famous now, not only for its machine guns but for the fortress prison inside which the soldiers of four nations guarded one aged and infirm prisoner: Hitler's deputy.

The police inspector followed my gaze. 'Not Hess,' he joked. 'Don't say the poor old fellow finally escaped?'

I smiled dutifully. 'Bad luck getting Christmas duty,' I said. 'Are you married?'

'I'm married. I live just round the corner from here. My parents lived in the same house. Do you know I've never been out of Berlin in all my life?'

'All through the war too?'

'Yes, all through the war I was living here. I was thinking of that just now when you gave me the drink.' He turned up the collar of his uniform greatcoat. 'You get old and suddenly you find yourself remembering things that you haven't recalled in about forty years. Tonight for instance, suddenly I'm remembering a time just before Christmas in 1944 when I was on duty very near here: the gasworks.'

'You were in the Army?' He didn't look old enough.

'No. Hitler Youth. I was fourteen and I'd only just got my uniform. They said I wasn't strong enough to join a gun crew, so they made me a messenger for the air defence post. I was the youngest kid there. They only let me do that job because Berlin hadn't had an air raid for months and it seemed so safe. There were rumours that Stalin had told the Western powers that Berlin mustn't be bombed so that the Red Army could capture it intact.' He gave a sardonic little smile. 'But the rumours were proved wrong, and on December fifth the Americans came over in daylight. People said they were trying to hit the Siemens factory, but I don't know. Siemensstadt was badly bombed, but bombs hit Spandau, and Pankow and Oranienburg and Weissensee. Our fighters attacked the
Amis
as they came in to bomb — it was a thick overcast but I could hear the machine guns — and I think they just dropped everything as soon as they could and headed home.'

'Why do you remember that particular air raid?'

'I was outside and I was blown off my bicycle by the bomb that dropped in Streitstrasse just along the back of here. The officer at the air-raid post found another bike for me and gave me a swig of schnapps from his flask, like you did just now. I felt very grown up. I'd never tasted schnapps before. Then he sent me off on my bike with a message for our headquarters at Spandau station. Our phones had been knocked out. Be careful, he said, and if another lot of bombers come, you take shelter. When I got back from delivering the message there was nothing left of them. The air defence post was just rubble. They were all dead. It was a delayed action bomb. It must have been right alongside us when he gave me the schnapps, but no one felt the shock of it because of all the racket.'

Suddenly his manner changed, as if he was embarrassed at having told me his war experiences. Perhaps he'd been chafed about his yarns by men who'd come back from the Eastern Front with stories that made his air-raid experiences seem no more than minor troubles.

He tugged at his greatcoat like a man about to go on parade. And then, looking down into the water at the submerged car again, he said, 'If the next go doesn't move it, we'll have to get a big crane. And that will mean waiting until after the holiday; the union man will make sure of that.'

'I'll hang on,' I said. I knew he was trying to provide me with an excuse to leave.

'The frogmen say the car is empty.'

'They wanted to go home,' I said flippantly.

The inspector was offended. 'Oh, no. They are good boys. They wouldn't tell me wrong just to avoid another dive.' He was right, of course. In Germany there was still a work ethic.

I said, 'They can't see much, with the car covered in all that oil and muck. I know what it's like in this sort of water; the underwater lamps just reflect in the car's window glass.'

'Here's your friend,' said the inspector. He strolled off towards the other end of the wharf to give us a chance to talk in private.