London Match (13 page)

'I looked at the docket. An anonymous phone call from a passerby. You think it was a phony?'

'Probably.'

'While the prisoner was taken away somewhere else.'

'It would be a way of getting our attention.'

'And spoiling my Christmas Eve,' he said. 'I'll kill the bastards if I ever get hold of them.'

'Them?'

'At least two people. It wasn't in gear, you notice, it was in neutral. So they must have pushed it in. That needs two people; one to push and one to steer.'

'Three of them, according to what we heard.'

He nodded. 'There's too much crime on television,' said the police inspector. He signalled to the policeman to get another bucket of water for the rest of them to wash with. 'That old English colonel with the kids' football team. . . . he was your father, wasn't he?'

'Yes,' I said.

'I realized that afterwards. I could have bitten my tongue off. No offence. Everyone liked the old man.'

'That's okay,' I said.

'He didn't even enjoy the football. He just did it for the German kids; there wasn't much for them in those days. He probably hated every minute of those games. At the time we didn't see that; we wondered why he took so much trouble about the football when he couldn't even kick the ball straight. He organized lots of things for the kids, didn't he. And he sent you to the neighbourhood school instead of to that fancy school where the other British children went. He must have been an unusual man, your father.'

Washing my hands and arms and face had only got rid of the most obvious dirt. My trench coat was soaked and my shoes squelched. The mud along the banks of the Havel at that point is polluted with a century of industrial waste and effluents. Even my newly washed hands still bore the stench of the riverbed.

The hotel was dark when I let myself in by means of the key that certain privileged guests were permitted to borrow. Lisl Hennig's hotel had once been her grand home, and her parents' home before that. It was just off Kantstrasse, a heavy grey stone building of the sort that abounds in Berlin. The ground floor was an optician's shop and its bright facade partly hid the pockmarked stone that was the result of Red Army artillery fire in 1945. My very earliest memories were of Lisl's house - it was not easy to think of it as a hotel — for I came here as a baby when my father was with the British Army. I'd known the patched brown carpet that led up the grand staircase when it had been bright red.

At the top of the stairs there was the large salon and the bar. It was gloomy. The only illumination came from a tiny Christmas tree positioned on the bar counter. Tiny green and red bulbs flashed on and off in a melancholy attempt to be festive. Intermittent light fell upon the framed photos that covered every wall. Here were some of Berlin's most illustrious residents, from Einstein to Nabokov, Garbo to Dietrich, Max Schmeling to Grand Admiral Donitz, celebrities of a Berlin now gone for ever.

I looked into the breakfast room; it was empty. The bentwood chairs had been put up on the tables so that the floor could be swept. The cruets and cutlery and a tall stack of white plates were ready on the table near the serving hatch. There was no sign of life anywhere. There wasn't even the smell of cooking that usually crept up through the house at night-time.

I tiptoed across the salon to the back stairs. My room was at the top — I always liked to occupy the little garret room that had been my bedroom as a child. But before reaching the stairs I passed the door of Lisl's room. A strip of light along the door confirmed that she was there.

'Who is it?' she called anxiously. 'Who's there?'

'It's Bernd,' I said.

'Come in, you wretched boy.' Her shout was loud enough to wake everyone in the building.

She was propped up in bed; there must have been a dozen lace-edged pillows behind her. She had a scarf tied round her head, and on the side table there was a bottle of sherry and a glass. All over the bed there were newspapers; some of them had come to pieces so that pages had drifted across the room as far as the fireplace.

She'd snatched her glasses off so quickly that her dyed brown hair was disarranged. 'Give me a kiss,' she demanded. I did so and noticed the expensive perfume and the makeup and false eyelashes that she applied only for very special occasions. The
heiliger Abend
with her friends had meant a lot to her. I guessed she'd waited for me to come home before she'd remove the makeup. 'Did you have a nice time?' she asked. There was repressed anger in her voice.

'I've been working,' I said. I didn't want to get into a conversation. I wanted to go to bed and sleep for a long time.

'Who were you with?'

'I told you, I was working.' I tried to assuage her annoyance. 'Did you have dinner with Mr Koch and your friends? What did you serve them — carp?' She liked carp at Christmas; she'd often told me it was the only thing to serve. Even during the war they'd always somehow managed to get carp.

'Lothar Koch couldn't come. He had influenza and the wine people had to go to a trade party.'

'So you were all alone,' I said. I bent over and kissed her again. 'I'm so sorry, Lisl.' She'd been so pretty. I remember as a child feeling guilty for thinking she was more beautiful than my mother. 'I really am sorry.'

'And so you should be.'

'There was no way of avoiding it. I had to be there.'

'Had to be where — Kempinski or the Steigenberger? Don't lie to me,
Liebchen
. When Werner phoned me I could hear the voices and the music in the background. So you don't have to pretend you were working.' She gave a little hoot of laughter, but there was no joy in it.

So she'd been in bed here working herself up into a rage about that. 'I was working,' I repeated. 'I'll explain tomorrow.'

'There's nothing you have to explain,
Liebchen
. You are a free man. You don't have to spend your
heiliger Abend
with an ugly old woman. Go and have fun while you are young. I don't mind.'

'Don't upset yourself, Lisl,' I said. 'Werner was phoning from his apartment because I was working.'

By this time she'd noticed the smell of the mud on my clothes, and now she pushed her glasses into place so that she could see me more clearly. 'You're filthy, Bernd. Whatever have you been doing? 'Where have you been?' From her study there came the loud chimes of the ornate ormolu clock striking two-thirty.

'I keep telling you over and over again, Lisl. I've been with the police on the Havel getting a car from the water.'

'The times I've told you that you drive too fast.'

'It wasn't anything to do with me,' I said.

'So what were you doing there?'

'Working. Can I have a drink?'

'There's a glass on the sideboard. I've only got sherry. The whisky and brandy are locked in the cellar.'

'Sherry will be just right.'

'My God, Bernd, what are you doing? You don't drink sherry by the tumblerful.'

'It's Christmas,' I said.

'Yes. It's Christmas,' she said, and poured herself another small measure. 'There was a phone message, a woman. She said her name was Gloria Kent. She said that everyone sent you their love. She wouldn't leave a phone number. She said you'd understand.' Lisl sniffed.

'Yes, I understand,' I said. 'It's a message from the children.'

'Ah, Bernd. Give me a kiss,
Liebchen
. Why are you so cruel to your Tante Lisl? I bounced you on my knee in this very room, and that was before you could walk.'

'Yes, I know, but I couldn't get away, Lisl. It was work.'

She fluttered her eyelashes like a young actress. 'One day you'll be old, darling. Then you'll know what it's like.'

Christmas morning. West Berlin was like a ghost town; as I stepped into the street the silence was uncanny. The Ku-damm was empty of traffic and, although some of the neon signs and shop lights were still shining, there was no one strolling on its wide pavements. I had the town virtually to myself all the way to Potsdamer Strasse.

Potsdamer Strasse is Sch
ö
neberg's main street, a wide thoroughfare that is called Hauptstrasse at one end and continues north to the Tiergarten. You can find everything you want there and a lot of things you've been trying to avoid. There are smart shops and slums, kebab counters and superb nineteenth-century houses now listed as national monuments. Here is a neobaroque palace — the
Volksgerichtshof
— where Hitler's judges passed death sentences at the rate of two thousand a year, so that citizens found guilty of telling even the most feeble anti-Nazi jokes were executed.

Behind the Volksgerichthof — its rooms now echoing and empty except for those used by the Allied Travel Office and the Allied Air Security Office (where the four powers control the air lanes across East Germany to Berlin) - was the street where Lange lived. His top-floor apartment overlooked one of the seedier side streets. Lange was not his family name, it was not his name at all. 'Lange' — or 'Lofty' — was the descriptive nickname the Germans had given to this very tall American. His real name was John Koby. Of Lithuanian extraction, his grandfather had decided that 'Kubilunas' was not American enough to go over a storefront in Boston.

The street door led to a grim stone staircase. The windows on every landing had been boarded up. It was dark, the stairs illuminated by dim lamps protected against vandals by wire mesh. The walls were bare of any decoration but graffiti. At the top of the house the apartment door was newly painted dark grey and a new plastic bell push was labelled
john koby — journalist.
The door was opened by Mrs Koby and she led me into a brightly lit, well-furnished apartment. 'Lange was so glad you phoned,' she whispered. 'It was wonderful that you could come right away. He gets miserable sometimes. You'll cheer him up.' She was a small thin woman, her face pale like the faces of most Berliners when winter comes. She had dear eyes, a round face, and a fringe that came almost down to her eyebrows.

'I'll try,' I promised.

It was the sort of untidy room in which you'd expect to find a writer or even a 'journalist'. There were crowded bookshelves, a desk with an old manual typewriter, and more books and papers piled on the floor. But Lange had not been a professional writer for many years, and even in his newspaper days he'd never been a man who referred to books except as a last resort. Lange had never been a journalist, Lange had always been a streetwise reporter who got his facts at firsthand and guessed the bits in between. Just as I did.

The furniture was old but not valuable — the random mixture of shapes and styles that's to be found in a saleroom or attic. Obviously a big stove had once stood in the corner, and the wall where it had been was covered in old blue-and-white tiles. Antique tiles like those were valuable now, but these must have been firmly affixed to the wall, for I had the feeling that any valuable thing not firmly attached had already been sold.

He was wearing an old red-and-gold silk dressing gown. Under it there were grey flannel slacks and a heavy cotton button-down shin of the sort that Brooks Brothers made famous. His tie bore the ice-cream colours of the Garrick Club, a London meeting place for actors, advertising men, and lawyers. He was over seventy, but he was thin and tall and somehow that helped to give him a more youthful appearance. His face was drawn and clean-shaven, with a high forehead and grey hair neatly parted. He had a prominent bony nose and teeth that were too yellow and irregular to be anything but his own natural ones.

I remembered in time the sort of greeting that Lange gave to old friends — the
Handschlag
, the hands slapped together in that noisy handshake with which German farmers conclude a sale of pigs.

'A Merry Christmas, Lange,' I said.

'It's good to see you, Bernie,' he said as he released my hand. 'We were in the other house the last time we saw you. The apartment over the baker's shop.' His American accent was strong, as if he'd arrived only yesterday. And yet Lange had lived in Berlin longer than most of his neighbours. He'd come here as a newspaperman even before Hitler took power in 1933, and he'd stayed here right up to the time America got into World War II.

'Coffee, Bernard? It's already made. Or would you prefer a glass of wine?' said Gerda Koby, taking my coat. She was a shy withdrawn woman, and although I'd known her since I was a child, she'd never called me 'Bernie'. I think she would have rather called me 'Herr Samson', but she followed her husband in this matter as in all others.

She was still pretty. Rather younger than Lange, she had once been an opera singer famous throughout Germany. They'd met in Berlin when he returned here as a newspaperman with the US Army in 1945.