Then We Take Berlin (24 page)

“One million three hundred thousand!”

“Of course not. Just Hamburg, and just the ones we’re sceptical about. A few hundred at most.”

Wilderness scanned the pages again.

“Who interviews these people in the first place?”

“Straight to the heart as usual . . . yeeees, that’s our problem really. Fluent German speakers, of course . . . many of them former refugees themselves . . . but few of them regular soldiers . . . in fact I’ve not yet met one who saw combat. They tend to be older men, men who were in Civvy Street much of the war.”

“And?”

“And they can be next to useless. On the one hand all the pent-up hatred of chocolate soldiers, Blimps who watched the war from an insurance office in Guildford, on the other Mr. Chips, soft old prep-school Latin masters who think a smack on the wrist and forgive and forget will fix anything and anyone. Even a Nazi. Not a lot in between in my experience.

“We’re re-interviewing. You’ll be working with a Pioneer Corps chap, Captain Yateman.”

The rat loomed larger.

“Twat, is he?”

“Don’t spare the qualifiers, Holderness. He’s a fucking twat, to use your habitual phrase.”

“If he’s so sodding useless, why don’t you replace him?”

“Because I didn’t appoint him. I don’t get to appoint the denazification team. I get to appoint the intelligence officer attached to the denazification team. In this case, you.”

“Me? Leading Aircraftman Holderness?”

“Yes.”

“Then why not make me an officer? How easy is it going to be if I have to contradict an army captain with nothing but an LAC’s rank to stand on?”

“You’d hate it. You’d absolutely hate being an officer. You’ve risen to LAC. Accept that promotion and be content for the time being.”

“Hate it? Give me a half a bloody chance. I’d have been LAC nine months ago if I hadn’t gone to Cambridge.”

“If you hadn’t gone to Cambridge you’d be in a military prison. Where were you when I found you?”

Wilderness said nothing and stared at him. Anger was a waste of time.

“Where were you?”

“In the glasshouse.”

“Quite. In the glasshouse on a charge sheet as long as your arm. Be grateful for small mercies, Joe. Being an LAC is a small mercy. Not being in prison is a big, fat, Technicolor mercy.”

Wilderness said softly, “Sergeant would be good, even corporal, much as I hate corporals.”

“And you’d hate them even more if you were one. Think how happy you’d be in the NCO’s mess surrounded by them. Stick with this, Joe. We’ll talk about promotion in a month or two.”

Wilderness did not believe this. They might never discuss his promotion again.

“OK. Let’s get back to the real question. If Yateman fucks up how do I overrule him with no pips and no scrambled egg?”

“Trust me. You’ll have that authority. You can investigate anyone you think fit, whatever the good captain says. He might rant, he might have steam coming out of his ears and arsehole . . . you just refer him to me.”

§72

This called for a little privacy. Back at the Atlantic. Up in Burne-Jones’s suite. They awaited a man Burne-Jones referred to as the armourer, whom he greeted as Major Weatherill. About Burne-Jones’s age, and in the same Guards regiment.

“Standard procedure. You’re part of the occupying force. You have to carry a gun. King’s regs and all that. You’re lucky. I can give you a pistol. There are plenty of chaps nipping out for a swift stein of lager lugging Bren guns with them. Now, would you kindly remove your blouse, LAC Holderness.”

Wilderness obeyed silently. Somewhat awed by the man’s apparent indifference to his lack of rank. He did not give orders; he made requests. It was like being at the tailor’s. A gentleman was a gentleman—a bloke whose cheques didn’t bounce.

Wilderness held up his arms as Weatherill fitted a shoulder holster under his left armpit.

“Comfortable?”

“Fine.”

When did officers ever care about your comfort?

“Good. Try this.”

Weatherill upended his satchel and took out three automatic pistols.

“The Colt .45.”

It was big and felt like a log inside the holster.

“It’s won’t be easy to get at under my blouse.”

“The point is to have it,” said Burne-Jones. “Not to get at it. Or did you see yourself having to outdraw Wyatt Earp? You can have a button-flap waist holster if you insist but you’ll look like a military policeman.”

“Hmm . . .” said Weatherill, ignoring Burne-Jones. “Perhaps not the Colt.”

Wilderness could almost hear him saying “perhaps something in dark blue.”

He handed the Colt back, wondering at what point he should speak up, and thinking now might not be the moment.

“Try this. Beretta .22.”

It was like a toy, vanishing down the mousehole of his holster, all but weightless.

“No. Not that either. Never really cared for the .22. More of a lady’s gun, alright in a handbag but . . . but . . . we still have the Sauer 38H. Point 32, takes standard 7.65mm ammunition, and God knows Germany is awash with that. We confiscated about twenty-five thousand of these off Jerry. Does the job. And the German coppers seem to like it.”

Wilderness slipped it into the holster, decided he liked the feel of it, hefted the weight of it in his hand. Took a look at it. Small, smaller than his own hand, only about six inches long, black with an elaborate S stamped into the grip.

“Of course some of them have red swastikas inset. We tend not to give those out. Some chaps would simply sell them to souvenir hunters after all. Now, you happy with that?”

“Perfectly, sir. There is just one thing.”

“Yeees?”

“I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”

Burne-Jones looked up from the newspaper he’d been reading.

“What? What? It’s part of basic training.”

“Where was I when you found me? I hadn’t got as far as weapons training when they bunged me in the glasshouse for the last time. The most I’ve done is swing a broom handle around and attempt to slope arms with it.”

“Bugger,” said Burne-Jones.

“Bugger indeed,” said Weatherill. “It might be best if you didn’t try and shoot anyone. At least not just yet.”

§73

After a month Wilderness had come to look forward to his meetings with Major Weatherill.

He spent his days in a clumsily refurbished office, seized from the Hamburg Port Authority, overlooking Planten un Blomen Park. They consisted of repetitive sessions with Captain Yateman.

The first session had not gone well.

“Intelligence Officer? You’re an enlisted man!”

“The English language is prone to creating confusions, sir.”

Burne-Jones had been emphatic about the “sirs.” And when talking to a short, stout, ruddy man who had spent most of the war behind a desk at the Hatfield branch of the Herts and Cambridge Allied Assurance Society, it was as well to P the ps and Q the qs. Yateman puffed up like a bantam cock, and stood on enough dignity to provide a solid footing for the Empire State Building. He sat behind a desk here too—complete with in-tray and out-tray, although there was never anything in either as Wilderness held the files, and Wilderness concluded that the captain could not bear to be parted from them, the symbols of his authority . . . his crook and mitre . . . his helmet and truncheon . . . his inkwell and quill. He’d probably brought them with him from England.

They interviewed Germans together. Tedious beyond belief, and on Burne-Jones’s advice Wilderness intervened only when necessary and as yet necessity had not arisen.

Alle Ihre Dienstverhältnisse seit 1. Januar 1930 bis zum
heutigen Tage sind anzugeben.

And once they had reached that at the top of page three, Wilderness would be listening for what seemed like hours to every job the bloke had ever had and every pfennig he’d ever pocketed.

Some of them were lying, perhaps more out of fear of the tax man than the English man, but it struck Wilderness as trivial. Anyone who lied about their party membership was caught as easily as swatting a fly. They checked against party records. And most who tried that lie had been caught at the first examination not the second.

Yateman’s failing, Wilderness concluded, was that he favoured the
Muss-Nazi
for no better reason than that they tended to be of the same class—searching for a word that bridged the two languages, he coined “burger.” Roger Yateman was a “burger.” The sort of man who was a Rotarian and a pillar of the Chamber of Commerce, who gave generously to selected charities and who despised the poor as feckless and lazy, and who despised the rich as feckless and lazy. The sort of man who had no politics, so he joined the Conservative Party—the sort of man who had no faith, so he joined the Church of England. A “burger.” Most of the selfish, prim, morally vacuous sods arraigned before them were “burgers.” Solid citizens of a bourgeois world that had dissolved around them. Men with no real conviction but enough savvy to have bent to the political wind, and not to have much troubled their consciences these last thirteen years. They too might have been insurance office managers in Hertfordshire. Wilderness agreed with Burne-Jones—the
Muss-Nazis
probably no longer mattered. Yateman no longer mattered, except in his capacity to fuck up.

A
von
or a
zu
affixed to a German surname could drive the man apoplectic. Nazi or anti-Nazi, they seemed to bring out in him a scarcely veiled counter-snobbery.

Again Wilderness did not intervene, any more than he did with the burgers, confining himself to “this way, follow me,” “thank you,” and “good luck.” Whether he intervened or not would depend on what he did with his nights—reading through pile upon pile of
Fragebogen
looking for Burne-Jones’s rocket scientists. And thus far not finding them. The rest, the underwhelming majority of the culpable, the innocent, and indifferent were of no concern. “In denial,” Burne-Jones had said. Germany was a land of ostriches. And heads buried in the sand could bleedin’ well stay in the sand.

But . . . two mornings a week he and Weatherill drove out to the far east of Hamburg, past fragile suburbs, to abandoned farms, and an empty silage pit lined with sandbags. There he learnt how to shoot.

“You know, LAC Holderness . . .”

He was never just Holderness or Joe.

“We have an advantage. Missing out on basic training leaves you nothing to
un
learn. No comparison between a close-quarters weapon like this and a rifle. You were quite right in your summary. Knowing how to swing a Lee Enfield .303 around on the parade ground with occasional cracks at a paper target isn’t knowing how to shoot. After all the bloke with the Lee Enfield isn’t there to shoot. He’s there to die.”

“Eh?”

“Do you know how many bullets from a Lee Enfield it took to kill a Jerry in the First War? I’ll tell you. A quarter of a million. And all but one would miss the bugger. That’s how useful the rifle and the bloke holding it are in the twentieth century. What mattered was that he died doing it. I’m not here to teach you to die, LAC Holderness. I’m sure you’ll manage that very well without me.”

“Then what are you here to teach me, Mr. Weatherill?”

“I’m here to teach you to kill.”

Wilderness did a silent double take at this.

“Ah . . . such innocence. Tell me LAC Holderness, what kind of an organisation did you think you’d joined?”

Wilderness never answered this for fear Wetherill would put him right. He had few illusions, but he much preferred to hang on to them.

By week three, Major Weatherill was complimenting him on his accuracy. It brought a silent, he hoped, invisible pride to Wilderness’s mind. The first thing he’d been really good at since Abner taught him to crack a safe. Russian and German were good things in their way, and his education at Rada’s hands was worth three years in any university . . . but this . . . a Sauer 38H in his fist . . . six inners and two bulls . . . this was . . . physical.

§74

The Atlantic Hotel was a refined version of hell. Wilderness did not fit in anywhere. There was no specific area for “other ranks,” but all the same the white-coated German waiters, all under the supervision of class-and-rank-conscious English batmen, always managed to sequester him several tables apart from any officer by what amounted to a cordon sanitaire. This pattern only altered if Burne-Jones was in town. The officers of the Control Commission ignored him—which had one advantage. He did not have to salute at five-second intervals every time he passed one.

Most evenings he pored over the files Burne-Jones had dumped on him, and he had worked out that the reason—perhaps one of the reasons—he had been billeted here, the fish out of water, was that Burne-Jones wanted none of his files going astray. On the nights he took for himself he usually drifted over to the Victory Club—past the by-now familiar cries of “Fag, Tommy?”, “Chocs, Tommy?”, “Jig-jig, Tommy?”—at least the Victory had “other ranks” in letters a foot high over the door.