Pavel & I (32 page)

And on we talked. Talked about family, parents and wives, and about sports; his love of books, and mine. No matter how far we ranged, we always returned to the present in the end, trying to piece together events best we could. As the day slipped past, Pavel filled me in on much of what had happened to him since Boyd came to visit, from that first telephone call, to his meeting with Sonia, all the way to that final kiss they shared, though here he was coy about the details, other than stating that it had been ‘very nice'. In return for his narrative, I explained to him the nature of Sonia's association with Boyd and the midget, and the parameters of her agreement with the Colonel – in short, the entire network of lies and shady dealings into which he had stumbled by accepting receipt of Boyd's mangled parcel.

How well I remember it all, this time of the telling, when we sat together and traded details, sweat-sodden hair sticking to our brows and always a game board between us, or a deck of cards. I remember his face most of all, the stillness of his face, as his lips formed beautiful, sonorous phrases. The sullen silences that would drop upon him, only to burst into animated talk minutes later: it would
blurt out of him all of a sudden, the words tumbling over one another, preening themselves like cats. My own talk hardly compared: clumsy explanations of the whys and wherefores of my protagonists' actions that I tediously rehearsed until I had convinced myself of their accuracy. Pavel listened to it all with a sort of quiet intensity, never interrupting, though he would bid me repeat certain details afterwards, and point out contradictions. At night, before slipping off to sleep, I occupied myself by taking some notes, crude sketches and snippets of dialogue, alongside some vocabulary that I considered characteristic. Already the thought was growing in me of writing it all up, in the years of my retirement that is, filling in any gaps through the exercise of my imagination. Above all, I felt content, stimulated, happy. Nobody had ever talked to me the way Pavel did.

It was only from time to time that the feeling returned that he was having me on, which is to say that he was humouring me while his mind was animated only by the most prosaic of thoughts: escape. There were moments, when his face emerged out of the semi-dark to rest against the metal bars for a moment's solace, when all my knowledge of him cowered and fled, and left me empty-handed before the blank mirror of his stare. I would turn on him then, walk upstairs to fetch us beer, or some manner of snack, and try to shake off my doubts in the brisk air of the upper storey. Once, when I thought I had caught him staring at my gun over the backgammon board, I confronted him with my suspicion point-blank.

‘You want my gun?' I asked him directly. ‘If I gave it to you, what would you do? Shoot me?'

He did not answer, and his silence hurt me more than an affirmation would have.

A half-hour later, however, I had all but forgotten the incident and sunk back into the grateful contemplation of his words.

Don't think, then, that I was entirely fooled. Of course, he did not fall for me the way I fell for him. Of course, he faked the intimacy that I genuinely experienced; mouthed words informed by strategy rather than a will for truth. He was my prisoner. What choice did he have in the matter? Then again, the human heart is a complex thing. One can play only at so much before it starts to warm to the role. Time boils it tender, like a steak. Believe me: underneath his anger, there grew in him the seed of sympathy, fledgling at first, but fast taking root. And the words he mouthed – they, too, were true; more so, at times, than he himself acknowledged. After all, here was a man encumbered by strong notions of sincerity. Such a man finds himself continually at odds with the very idea of a lie. At best he can censor himself, starve himself of expression. But what were his options down in the heat of my basement, where we sat bartering confidences?

Here is what I told Pavel about the past. Söldmann, I explained, was a German entrepreneur and mobster suspected of selling information to the Russians. He sold all manner of things: the results of Nazi medical research gathered in various concentration camps; the location of underground factories and gold depots; blueprints for an early prototype of the V2. It was unclear how he had come into possession of all this information; either he had spent much of the war cultivating a network of informants, or he must have raided the offices of some very high-level officials in its immediate aftermath. Some maintained he had stumbled upon a whole archive of SS reports in an abandoned warehouse, sealed in boxes and awaiting shipment to the Argentine. More outlandish rumours placed him inside the
Führerbunker.
One Soviet report is said to mention a ‘man-dwarf' rummaging around Hitler's private quarters, and making off with a three-volume diary bound in
calfskin. If so, the diary has yet to surface. I should imagine it would fetch a handsome price.

Colonel Fosko got wind of Söldmann's business venture some time after commencing his quasi-colonial duties as lord and master of his particular patch of German soil, and soon nurtured a desire to learn more about its particulars. Gaining access to the inner workings of the mob-boss's organization and the precise nature of his ‘product' proved remarkably difficult. While he did sell information to the British and Americans on occasion (largely details about illegal Soviet activities outside their sector, about which he seemed remarkably well informed), he had never offered them so much as a scrap of his German material. Undaunted, Fosko made a study of Söldmann's private life and discovered that he frequented a particular brothel in the American sector, owned and run by one Boyd White. As a matter of fact Söldmann had at one time thought about taking over Boyd's modest but profitable operation through a deft blend of money and intimidation. When the two met face to face, however, it quickly became obvious that they were well matched in matters of taste and temperament. Rather than taking away his livelihood, the midget quickly became Boyd's best customer. It gave the Colonel his window of opportunity. What better person to spy on a man than one of the women with whom he shares his pillow?

Now it just so happened that Fosko had recently met a desperate, hungry German girl who sold her labour for food. She had been hired by his driver and sent to clean the Colonel's private residence, which was beginning to show its want of a woman's touch. Fosko emerged from his office one afternoon, bent on the washroom, I gather, only to stumble upon a woman who was cleaning his stairs. More precisely, the woman was on her knees scrubbing the wood with a horsehair brush, her shapely (if somewhat malnourished) bottom turned upward and out, right into the Colonel's line of sight. They exchanged words, it transpired that she was handsome, spoke English, played the
piano and was willing to do pretty much anything to advance her station in life. Fosko put her up in a spacious apartment in the heart of Charlottenburg, evicting a family of seven in the process, and had the place cleaned and furnished with a number of choice antiques. The piano was delivered the day after she moved in; along came a tuner, riddled with ringworm but keen to be of service. The woman made no pretence of loving the Colonel, and he asked for none. There was about him an air of mastery that set her on edge, and his corpulence was a cross to bear during their sexual exertions, but all in all I daresay she thought she had made a splendid bargain in a country where unconditional surrender had become the expected mode of life.

After two or three months of this, Fosko approached her with a proposition. He asked her whether she would accept a commission to spy for him. The task would require her to work as a prostitute for a limited period. In return for her cooperation, Fosko offered to obtain a British passport for her – or an American one, if she preferred – alongside a substantial sum of money.

‘How much?' she asked.

‘Enough so that you won't have to work for a long while.'

They settled on a figure that I estimate at upwards of one thousand pounds. It would not do to think of Sonia as cheap.

She went to Boyd that very same day, asking him for a position in his establishment. He fell for her directly; something about her accent, and the way she held her chin. He rented her a nice little boudoir near Potsdamer Platz and bought her a drawer's worth of silk knickers. This did not, however, keep him from selling her flesh to anyone who could afford her charms – he priced her at a premium rate.

For the first week or so, Söldmann did not seem particularly interested in her. He had formed an attachment to a well-endowed blonde who he swore could do things with her mouth he had never thought imaginable. Sonia placed a call to Fosko, and a few days later
the blonde failed to show up at work. In fact she could not be found anywhere in Berlin, much to Boyd's chagrin. I have it on good authority, however, that she was spotted in Hamburg a few days after her disappearance, with a broken nose, two black eyes, and a wrist she carried in a sling. No doubt she was back on the job before the month was out.

Sonia, meanwhile, moved in on Söldmann. Before long the little man was besotted, and forbade any use of her other than his own. He will have known, in the depth of his heart, that he shared his girl with Boyd, a circumstance that put a certain amount of strain upon their friendship. The two of them showered her with presents and swore holy oaths that, very soon, they would take her out of the whoring business altogether.

It was a difficult time for Sonia. She spent her mornings cooped up in the flat Boyd had arranged for her, seeing to his needs and listening to war stories. After lunch they went down to the brothel. She was cordial with some of the other girls. They swapped stories of copulation, shared bathwater, sat around and sipped on champagne. Dinnertime on weekends a nine-piece band would show up and play for the girls as the first customers came trickling in. They played swing; Boyd had hired them in October that year, and paid them with food, drinks and flesh. The band was a big success. Söldmann never skipped a dance. He would arrive a little after nine, two strongmen in tow, and monopolize Sonia from the first. By eleven or midnight they would be off to her quarters to revisit her body's pleasures. But before that, they danced.

Oh, how they danced! You picture it – Sonia standing at the centre of the dance floor swaying her hips to syncopated beats, one leg thrust from a high-slit dress and thrown over the midget's shoulder. The midget, eye to eye with her gusset; shaven cheek smooth against her upper thigh. He'd had a tuxedo cut from maroon silk; a polka-dot bow tie and a pale, plastic rose in his lapel. One hammy fist thrust
round to nestle in her buttocks' crack; the other clutching her wrist to his lips. Keeping time with his toes, waiting for the music to rouse him. Then – an explosion of movement – he would spin her from an out stretched armand jitterbug across the floor, his feet a whirl of two-tone leather. I swear he moved like Fred Astaire. The band got a real kick out of the dancing midget, until, that is, the cornet player took to calling him ‘Shorty', at which point Söldmann had one of his boys cut a divot out of his lower lip. Boyd never replaced him, though he would come to miss the sound of his wa-wa mute whenever the band launched into some 1920s Ellington. In any case it was a thing of beauty, their dancing. I do not wish to picture their love-making.

While it proved easy to capture Söldmann's crooked little heart, gleaning information about his business dealings was altogether more difficult. The two shared pillow-talk, but the midget seemed more interested in parting with his past than letting Sonia in on the details of his present. Thus Söldmann confided to her, amongst other ‘secrets', the sorry tale of his initial rejection by the Party, the closing of his dance hall over the playing of jazz music (an incident that still visibly riled him) and the sly trick that had obtained him his denazification papers. Only very gradually did he begin to let slip allusions to his present enterprise. Over time, it became clear that he was in the process of compiling, and putting on the market, some highly sensitive information of a broadly technological nature. In his dark allusions he impressed upon her that it was the sort of thing the Soviets were willing to pay a whole lot of gold for – or, alternatively, would kill for, a warning that Sonia passed on to our mutual employer.