The Berlin Crossing (14 page)

Ransom cleared his throat. ‘Our half-Paddy, half-Jerry, sir, a pair of ’em, in fact –’ Fitch-Bellingham, halfway across the
station yard, swung round at Ransom’s words – ‘aren’t you going to have a word?’

‘You’ve got two Germans in custody?’ Fitch-Bellingham came back to the steps; his voice was softer, lower. ‘Nobody said anything
inside.’

‘Nobody knew except Menton and myself, sir.’ Ransom hesitated, wondering if he should have kept his mouth shut. Two Paddies
really, sir, picked up in High Street Ken for GBH.’

‘So what’s all this half-Jerry stuff?’

‘Like I said, sir, a couple of young Paddies, brothers in fact, but their parents, it turns out, are both German and the older
lad tells me he has a degree in German and has notions of going to work there. Anyway,’ Ransom finished lamely, ‘probably
nothing to interest your lot, just a pair of Paddies in trouble on a Saturday night.’

‘Speak German, do they?’

‘So the older fellow claims, sir.’ Ransom shrugged. ‘Not that I’d know, sir, I just bombed the fuckers.’

Fitch-Bellingham smiled. ‘Quite.’ He looked from Ransom to Menton, glanced across the yard at his black Jaguar, then for a
moment he looked up at the London night sky, like an old dog, Menton would say to his shop girl in Putney a few hours later,
like an old dog sniffing the wind – and then, as if he had found a decision written in the distant stars, took the steps in
one long-legged stride and said, ‘Well, since I’m here, and you have been extraordinarily kind enough to bring this matter
to my attention, perhaps I should have a word with these chaps.’

‘
Sie haben ein Problem; vielleicht kann ich Ihnen hilfen
?’ You have a problem: perhaps I can help?

The German words startled Roland, which was exactly what Rupert Fitch-Bellingham intended.

‘
Wie bitte
?’ Pardon? Who was this pinstriped stork, addressing him in impeccable German?

‘I said you seem to be in shtuck,’ Fitch-Bellingham went on in German, ‘and that I might be able to help you out.’

‘
Warum Deutsch
?’ Ronald shook his head, looked around him at the stark surroundings of the interview room in Marylebone police station.
‘
Warum Deutsch hier in England
?
Sind Sie Deutsch
?’

‘
Warum nicht
?’ Why not, Fitch-Bellingham wanted to know, side-stepping Roland’s question as to whether he was German.

He thrust his hand towards Roland, his long head inclined in the faintest of bows.

‘
Ich heisse Ingham,
’ he said, shaking Roland’s hand. ‘
Und Sie
?’ My name is Ingham. You?

‘Feldmann,’ Roland said, rising from the plastic chair, ‘Roland Feldmann.’ Instinctively he gave his name the German pronunciation,
the very pronunciation that made him squirm when his father used it back home.

Fitch-Bellingham motioned for Roland to be seated. Scared, he thought, looking at the younger man, scared and sweaty, shirt
collar open, tie askew, face white with worry and lack of sleep. But intelligence there too, he thought. He could read it
in the way he himself was being measured by the brown eyes; he could see it in the wide forehead, in the cut of the young
fellow’s jaw.

‘They tell me you are in serious trouble.’

‘That’s what they tell me too, Herr Ingham.’

He remembers the name I gave him: at least he’s capable of some kind of thinking under pressure
.

‘I hear your brother struck a man in High Street Kensington. I hear the man is in intensive care and that he may die.’

‘My brother struck no one. It was me.’

And he’s able to lie while looking you in the eye
. At least for a while; everybody gives in, in the end.

‘That’s not what the detectives tell me.’

Roland shrugged. Part of his brain already knew that Terry had buckled under the younger detective’s questioning but he’d
play the hand as long as he could.

Watching him, Fitch-Bellingham was thinking the same thing: it was one more thing to like about this peculiar piece of flotsam
washed up on his Sunday morning shore. But he wouldn’t tell him yet that his kid brother had already cried for his
mutti
and spilled the beans: that might come later.

‘So tell me what happened,’ Fitch-Bellingham said.

‘Why should I tell you? Why are we speaking German?’ Good, Fitch-Bellingham thought, staring back at Roland’s defiant expression:
a touch of spunk always comes in useful. ‘Who are you? Are you a policeman, Herr Ingham?’

‘Just tell me what happened, from the top.’

‘That’s what the detective said.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The detective used exactly the same words: from the top.’

Fitch-Bellingham permitted himself the thinnest of smiles.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, shifting his long frame in the plastic seat, ‘perhaps the vocabulary comes with these august surroundings.’

Roland laughed. ‘And then you’ll let me see Terry – and phone my family – and speak to a lawyer?’

‘One thing at a time, Herr Feldmann.’ The smile was gone now. ‘Just tell me what happened, in your own words, as clearly as
you can recall.’

He watched Roland Feldmann physically gather himself together before launching himself on his lying account of the night’s
events; he watched the slow intake of breath, the equally slow exhalation; he watched the loosening of wide shoulders, as
if in preparation for a long race; he watched the momentary closing of the eyes, as if in meditation. And he watched the half-smile
on the young man’s face, the silent plea for understanding, the false pitch of sincerity. Rupert Fitch-Bellingham watched
it all gravely and he liked what he saw. The situation in Berlin was fraught, he had told Detective Ransom, and truthfully
so, but here in this Irish-German youth, Rupert Fitch-Bellingham was beginning to discern possibilities to relieve that fraughtness.

And as he listened – without interruption – to Roland Feldmann’s tale of mishap, Rupert Fitch-Bellingham could discern even
greater possibilities.

He was impressed by the way this young fellow marshalled his facts – or his version of them; by the way in which he began
at the beginning and told his story in a straight line through to the end. He liked the frank gaze that Roland Feldmann levelled
at him while he lied through his teeth to protect his younger, weaker brother. You could do things with a fellow like this,
Fitch-Bellingham told himself, especially if you knew how and where and when and just how much pressure to apply, and it was
in the application of such dark arts that he himself had spent his life during and since the war.

Most of all, it was the young fellow’s command of the German language that sang its siren song in Fitch-Bellingham’s expert
ear. Roland Feldmann spoke the language in an oddly old-fashioned way that reminded Fitch-Bellingham of the stilted, formal
language he had encountered in Berlin in the immediate postwar years when he had been part of the occupying Allied intelligence
service; to Fitch-Bellingham’s mind, the German he was listening to had been learned in an older, stricter age, before the
excesses of the contemporary economic miracle in Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt and the other great cities of West Germany. Even
the fellow’s pronunciation, Fitch-Bellingham felt, was harsher than the tones of Dusseldorf, Cologne and Bonn: it sounded,
to his approving ears, more like the guttural tones of the separated East, the land of fraughtness, the country behind the
barbed wire and the fucking Wall.

He listened attentively, nodded approvingly, smoked languidly. He watched the boy watching him, measuring the impact of his
words on this mysterious policeman type who spoke only German in Marylebone police station.

Let him go on wondering, let him go on being puzzled; a land without signposts was a land where you got lost, where – finally
– you welcomed any helping hand that was extended to you. But not yet, Fitch-Bellingham thought; this youngster was not at
all lost enough just yet, he still thought he held in his hands the map of his own salvation.

And, in any case, Fitch-Bellingham wasn’t quite sure just how he might use this Gulliver beached on his watch; after the disaster
of the last few days in Berlin, he knew the Service could find a role for Roland Feldmann but that role was still undefined
in Rupert Fitch-Bellingham’s inventive mind. And Yearling would torture himself, of course, no matter what inventiveness was
laid before him: the unlit pipe would perform ever jerkier gyrations
while its owner’s Adam’s apple bobbed so frantically that you feared poor old Yearling would cough it up entirely, such was
his anguish over the security of the state and the disapproval of his Minister at the Service’s demonstrable shortcomings.
Profumo’s shenanigans had got everyone’s knickers in a twist; the process of untwisting them was both tedious and, to Fitch-Bellingham,
a total fucking distraction from the proper concerns of the Service.

The boy was done, his story ended.

He held Fitch-Bellingham’s gaze, searching for a response.

Let him wait, Fitch-Bellingham thought. It was the greatest pressure of all: waiting, not knowing, wondering what next.

‘Can I see my brother now, please?’ Roland asked, still in German. ‘And call my parents?’

Fitch-Bellingham uncoiled himself, stood up on the stone floor.

‘
Bitte warten,
’ he said. Wait. Maybe the waiting would be good for somebody’s soul. He shut the door quietly behind him as he stepped out
of the room.

The doors hung open to all but one of the other interview rooms along the narrow corridor. At the end of the corridor George
was absent-mindedly stroking his great gut with one paw, the folded
News of the World
clutched in the other. This is the civilized world we are saving, Fitch-Bellingham thought: an overweight policeman with
his paper of tits and horses at four o’clock on a September Sunday morning. Well, it wasn’t much but it was better than slitting
throats in the Balkans and watching helpless German
frauen
being raped by the conquering heroes of the Red Army in Berlin.

George started to heave himself from his chair: there was something about Fitch-Bellingham that told you to stand in his presence.

Fitch-Bellingham waved him back to his seat.

‘Never mind that.’ He gestured towards the closed door. ‘The younger fellow still in there?’

‘Yes, sir, still there, still alive, still inclined to blubber – I checked on him a few minutes ago.’

‘Nobody, but nobody, goes in or out, except with my say-so. Understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And the same for the older brother. Got it? I mean,
nobody.
’

‘Yes, sir, I’ve got it, sir, nobody goes in or out of them two rooms.’ George was unnerved by Fitch-Bellingham’s intensity;
the newspaper slid from his ample lap and spread itself in a rustling pile of pages across his polished shoes.

George’s great stomach hindered his effort to stoop and gather up his newspaper; more pages came loose, in a moment the full
width of the corridor was awash with the
News of the World
.

‘Sorry, sir.’ His face the colour of beetroot, George tried to free his feet from the sea of pages.

In a single, flowing movement Fitch-Bellingham bent, retrieved the pile of pages, somehow shook them into a semblance of order
and presented the folded pages to George. His eye lingered on a photo of bare breasts, the incongruous masking black bar across
the anonymous face, as the newspaper demonstrated its own peculiar modesty; at least, he thought, tits made a change from
the killings at the Wall.

‘Thank you, sir,’ George whispered.

‘Where are Detective Ransom and his colleague?’

‘I think they’re having a cuppa in the canteen, sir.’

‘Send them to me,’ Fitch-Bellingham said, pointing at the wall phone behind George’s hand. ‘I shall be outside. And remember—’

‘Yes, sir, nobody goes in or out.’

‘Well done, thank you.’

Thank God he’s gone, George thought, watching Fitch-Bellingham go. Fucking lah-di-dah like Prince fucking Philip but they
said he’d killed men with his bare hands in the war; they said he spoke a dozen languages, but for George’s money he couldn’t
speak the Queen’s fucking English – sometimes you’d feel inclined to send for an interpreter for old Fitch-Bellingham, like
you had to do for those Russians and Poles the lanky geezer loved talking to. George wondered, as he dialled the canteen,
why Rupert Fitch-Bellingham was bothering with a pair of fucking Paddies.

Dawn was breaking over London, the dark sky lightening with shades of amber and pink over the still-sleeping city. Over the
good and the bad, the strong and the weak, the fabulous A-to-Z of humanity that peopled the great metropolis: banker and baker,
pimp and parson, liar and lawyer. Snug in their beds, most of them, Fitch-Bellingham thought, looking up at the streaks of
orange and rose lighting the sky, heedless of the spies and minders who worked through the night hours to ensure the security
of their beds and boudoirs. And heedless was the way they were supposed to be; it was the business of Fitch-Bellingham and
his like to make the darkness safe, to patrol the night borders of Shakespeare’s sceptred isle.

Not that many of them gave a toss these days about the language of the Bard or the security of Her Majesty’s kingdom. Yeah-yeah-yeah
or some such American nonsense for the young ones, to go along with their so-called drainpipe trousers and their daft so-called
Beatles haircuts – and tit-and-arses newspapers for the older ones like George.

And yet we do it, Fitch-Bellingham thought, sucking on the Craven A. We guard the night, we stand sentry at our frontiers,
to
make sure that they can make choices. Make adulterous or uxorious love. We give them the right to say yes or no.

And sometimes, when the land stands in great peril, we do
not
allow them the choice of answering
yes
or
no
. Sometimes only
one
answer is allowed.