Then We Take Berlin (16 page)

“Hello, Mr. Hummel. I was hoping you’d be here. I got a bit of a job for you. I mean, a paying job.”

“No problem. I long ago gave up any notion of a Sabbath. Indeed, I have been wondering for a while now which of you street urchins would be the first to knock at our door in search of their first bespoke suit. I am glad it is you, Johnnie. It is a significant
rite de passage
.”

“That’s not quite what I meant, Mr. Hummel.”

Wilderness unwrapped the demob suit. Laid it out on the cutting table.

“Could you tailor this to fit me?”

Hummel turned the suit over in hands, rubbed the fabric between finger and thumb, turned down his mouth at the corners.

“Is it worth the effort?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I never owned a suit.”

“That’s no reason to look like a
shlump
. How much money you got?”

“Enough I reckon.”

“Spoken like a cockney miser. Follow me.”

Hummel led him over to a hanging rail. Took off the cover and pulled out a single-breasted suit in a plain, dark blue.

“This I made for Captain Gibson of the Sherwood Foresters. In the May of ’44. It has hung here in its wrapper these last two years. The poor captain was killed in Normandy before he could collect. Naturally, I wrote to his widow. The suit after all was paid for. But I never received a reply. Captain Gibson was your size. I’d be a poor excuse for a tailor if I could not see that.”

“What even without measuring me?”

“I don’t need a tape measure, Johnnie. Just try the suit.”

Wilderness admired himself in the mirror, his mind juggling clichés . . . a second skin . . . like a glove . . . and comparisons . . . like Cary Grant, like Fred Astaire. The late captain and he had been cast in the same mould.

“How much?”

“Nothing. As I said, the suit is paid for.”

“But . . . but it’s a much better suit than the one I brought in.”

“Such understatement, Johnnie. It is an infinitely better suit than your demob sack. If I ever talk Billy into opening up in the West End this suit would cost . . . forty-five guineas. That’s what Kilgour and French or Henry Poole would charge in Savile Row this very day.”

“Fuck me.”

“
Genau
.”

“Mr. Hummel, if you are, as I think you are, offering to give me this suit, why did you ask how much money I had?”

“Why? Because for two pounds ten shillings I will recut your RAF uniform so that it fits you as well as this suit. You will be the best dressed basher on the square.”

“I don’t do square bashin’ Mr. H. I’m an egghead these days.”

Wilderness left his uniform, strolled into Sidney Street wearing his Gibson suit, looking, as Merle told him, like a million dollars.

Lunchtime Monday, he put on his tailored RAF uniform, felt like two million dollars, paid Hummel, and caught the next train back to Cambridge.

He had not told Merle or Hummel about Harry. It would be more than a year before he would tell anyone.

§43

It was about three months later. Towards the end of October. He let himself into the flat in Cornwall Gardens and called out Rada’s name. It was his intention, his desire, to surprise her. Wearing his Gibson suit rather than his uniform for the first time. The suit the king had not bought.

She did not answer. No “Chust a minute, dollink.” No “Put the kettle on,
ragazzo
.”

She was sitting upright in her armchair, her chin resting on her chest, a book open on her knees, a folded page of unlined paper wedged into the spine. He read her last words, surprised to find they were addressed to him.

Wilderness, chéri —“Quand tu regarderas le ciel, la nuit, puisque j’habiterai dans l’une d’elles, puisque je rirai dans l’une d’elles, alors ce sera pour toi comme si riaient toutes les étoiles.” . . . au revoir, Rada.

He picked up the book to look at the title. What had she chosen to read in the moment of her death? A fairy tale, of sorts:
Le petit prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

He lifted her chin.

She was not yet in rigor, and he smelt the scent of almonds on her lips. He did not know how he knew this meant that Rada had taken cyanide, and could only ascribe it to Hollywood films seen on matinees at the Troxy cinema—but he knew she was dead. He did not know where she might obtain cyanide—but he knew she was dead.

He could see the grey roots to her hair. If he had noticed them before, he had blotted them from sight and from memory. Rada had not been old until now. Rada had been ageless until now. If she’d worn a wig . . . he would have noticed . . . Merle’s atrocious collection of wigs for her nights on the game had made him aware of wigs . . . but now he saw that dead Rada was old Rada. The years had not slipped away, they had accumulated, the twentieth century had fallen on her in a single coup. The Great War, the Russian revolutions, the death and disease that had followed in the wake, the starvation years of the twenties and thirties, the coming of the Nazis . . . death camps, gulags, total war . . . a continent of refugees . . . ragged, battered humanity on the move . . . everything that had wiped out her generation . . . for whom to grow old was a rarity. The survivors were few. Her false teeth had slipped in her jaw.

She was not yet in rigor. He slipped the teeth back into place.

He looked at the wall safe. It was shut. He looked at the rings on her fingers, at the tangle of necklaces trailing out of a drawer in her rolltop desk. He smelt a faint scent of burning. Looked in the fireplace. A cascading pile of fine, feathery ash, as though she had burnt letters or papers. There’d been no crime here but the obvious one. And all his instincts told him not to get involved.

He took out his handkerchief—a linen one, one of half a dozen she had given him on his birthday only a couple of months ago—and wiped everything he thought he had touched. He picked up the book, stuck it in his pocket, closed the door behind him, wiped the doorknob and went back to his digs in Cambridge.

He told no one.

Lying on the bed, he read
Le petit prince
at a single sitting.

He learnt of the forty-four sunsets, and . . .

Quand tu regarderas le ciel, la nuit, puisque j’habiterai dans l’une d’elles, puisque je rirai dans l’une d’elles, alors ce sera pour toi comme si riaient toutes les étoiles
.

He put the book on the shelf with the folders she had given him in ones and twos and half dozens. He had forty-eight. His private university. He would never part with any of them.

He told no one.

Not Eddie.

Eddie had been posted in August.

Not Burne-Jones.

Burne-Jones told him.

The next morning Mrs. Wissit called him to the hall, where the telephone sat in exile from the warmth of the kitchen, as though it might emit rays and curdle the milk or rot the brain.

“Were you due for a session with Rada yesterday?”

“Yes. But, I was coughing fit to bust, so I put it off. I’ll be going up later today instead.”

“You told her this?”

“No. She hated the phone. Always said if I couldn’t make it just to show up the next day.”

He hoped that sounded believable.

“Joe—she died yesterday. Looks like suicide, but you never know.”

“Then I won’t be going.”

“Yes. Come up to town. I’m there now. In her apartment. I need you to do something for me.”

§44

There was a London bobby on the door of the block and another at the door of the flat. Both just said “Mr. Holderness?” and waved him in.

The body had been removed.

Someone had raked through the ashes in the fireplace.

Burne-Jones was sifting through the papers that remained on Rada’s desk.

“Good of you to come,” he said. As if Wilderness had any choice.

The painting in front of the wall safe that had so scarcely disguised it was open. The safe wasn’t.

“Can you open that?”

Wilderness looked at the safe. Then he looked at Burne-Jones.

“Tell me. Is there anything you don’t know about me?”

“Can you do it or not?”

Of course he could do it. It was rather small wall-mounted Cyrus Price, operating on a combination. Half the defence was in its concealment. The door and the tumblers would be simple.

“Yes I can do it. Give me five minutes of silence and I’ll have it open.”

“Good, because —”

“I mean, silence. You have to shut up, and you have to stop rustling papers.”

“Alright.”

Burne-Jones sat down. Folded his arms. A child under sufferance. Instantly bored, he then picked up a book off the nearest pile and began to leaf through it.

Wilderness took a tumbler from the kitchen and pressed it to the safe door with his ear. It took him less than five minutes. As he swung the door open Burne-Jones got up. Snapped the book shut, as though pointedly breaking the silence, and stuffed it in his jacket pocket—just as Wilderness had done only yesterday.

“A souvenir of Rada.
Le rouge et le noir
by Stendhal. Read it when I was about twenty-five. If I’d read it at sixteen I rather think my life would have been utterly different. Now, is there anything in there?”

Wilderness passed him a fat sheaf of papers.

“No jewellery or anything like that?”

“That was all in her desk. She didn’t seem to care much about it. But.”

“But what?”

“But . . . you’re not interested in jewellery in the first place . . . and there’s a false panel at the back. Easy trick on the manufacturer’s part. You get the door open, make off with what you find and don’t think there might be a second compartment.”

Wilderness took out his penknife and prised off the back panel.

“Letters.”

“Letters?”

“See for yourself.”

Wilderness handed over a bundle bound up in black twine. Burne-Jones turned it over in his hands. Riffled the letters like cards and stopped about halfway through.

“Good Lord. Just look at these. Half a dozen of them. The edges of the envelopes, sewn up in cotton like the hem of a dress, and then sealing wax . . . talk about belt and braces. Never seen anything like it. Someone didn’t want these read by anyone but the person they’re addressed to.”

He threw them all back to Wilderness, sat down again, bent over the first pile of papers. Flicking rapidly through them.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“I’ve no idea what I’m looking for. She left no note . . . so . . .”

Wilderness sat down and looked at his much smaller share of the loot. They were all letters, complete with envelopes, stamps and postmarks and all from well before the war. Some more than thirty years old. The foreign stamps were those he had collected as a boy . . . Germany: Weimar stamps in millions of marks, Nazi stamps with Hitler’s face in shitty brown . . . Russia: Tsarist stamps with the imperial eagle, Soviet stamps crudely overprinted to cope with inflation . . . France: stamps with revolutionary maidens in flowing dresses looking as though they had stepped straight from the barricades in a Delacroix painting. It was how he had learnt geography . . . and it was now how he learnt history, as Rada had lived it.

He opened one, delicately sliding his fingers between the slit threads and the paper, watching a brittle flake of red sealing wax break off and fall to the floor.

“Sorrento. November 22, 1924.”
The paper dull, the ink faded, the Cyrillic handwriting precise as its era and devoid of modern scrawl—‘Дорогой Радочкe.’

He opened a second.

“Tripoli. January 10, 1936.” Another precise hand, a geometric regularity, almost a typeface in itself—“Rada, chérie, j’ai tant de choses à te dire . . . le sable, les étoiles . . .”

“Anything?” Burne-Jones said, still not looking up.

“Anything like what?”

“Anything that might explain her death or might tell me one way or the other who Rada really worked for. I said I was never certain. I’d be delighted to find out it was us.”

“So, what am I looking for? An uncashed cheque from Joe Stalin?”

“Cut the flippancy.”

“No,” said Wilderness. “Nothing like that. They’re love letters.”

She had saved the love letters and she had burned what? If Burne-Jones would not utter this, nor would he.

Burne-Jones looked up.

“What? Hidden at the back? Love letters? Love letters from whom?”

Burne-Jones seemed genuinely surprised, almost incredulous, as though an unimagined side of her nature was unfolding before him. Wilderness was not surprised. The facts were new, not the feeling.