Then We Take Berlin (31 page)

“Toast is doing. Won’t be a mo’.”

As Eddie sliced the lid off the pilchards, Wilderness said, “You got a source then?”

“Have I got a source?”

Then he let the short sentence rest as an enigma. Loaded pilchards onto toast, swilled coffee and looked like what he was inside—happy. The miserable exterior, Wilderness had long since concluded, was simply a way of repelling boarders.

Food was good, but Wilderness would never be able to find in it the consummate pleasure that Eddie did. He ate quickly, Eddie savoured.

“Coffee’s good,” he said, hoping to break Eddie’s mealtime self-absorption.

“Yep.”

“Used to sell for a bob or two back in Hamburg.”

“Does here too. Get your hands on a few packets and you’ll make . . . a packet.”

“So, there’s fiddles, then?”

“O’course. Didn’t you have fiddles in Hamburg?”

“Nothing I could get at. All based out at the airfield, and I was in the city. Just like I am now.”

Eddie was shaking his head. Wilderness could almost swear he was grinning.

“No, no, noooo. Sources? Do I have sources? Fiddles? Do I have fiddles. Just sit tight for a minute.”

Again he ducked behind the partition, only to reappear wearing his army greatcoat and humming a daft tune.

“Da da daaa dah. Da da daaa dah.”

And as much as a little fat bloke could this little fat bloke was dancing.

The greatcoat opened and closed on the beat, and Wilderness realised he was doing the Royal Artillery’s version of a fan dance—Eddie’s own
Folies Bergère
.

On the inside of his coat, from buttons to armpit, was a network of string and safety pins from which hung all manner of goodies.

Eddie pulled off a pair of frilly knickers, tossed them over Wilderness’s head and onto the bed.

“Da da daaa dah.”

A matching bra.

“Da da daaa dah.”

A small bottle of Chanel perfume.

“Da da daaa dah.”

A bar of pink Cadum soap.

“Bump, da bump, da bump”—as he turned, stuck his arse out and lobbed half a pound of coffee beans onto the bed without even looking at his aim.

The music stopped, the grin was teetering on girlish giggles.

“Do I have fiddles? Do I have fiddles? My greatcoat is a box of earthly delights, Berlin is our paradise regained, the NAAFI our cornucopia. Joe, we’re going to make a bob or two together.”

Joe grinned back at him, and did not say what he was thinking.

A bob or two might be only the beginning. He and Berlin were made for each other.

§97

Eddie took him to the Marrokkaner Club—a tiny entrance in a side-street cut between Savignyplatz and Uhlandstraße, that opened up into a vast, low-ceilinged cellar, too low ever to disperse the fug of tobacco and the lager-miasma that hung suspended above the tables.

“Tomorrow we’ll go down the Tiergarten. The
Schwarzmarkt
, they call it now. Even the tram conductors call it that. They just yell ‘
Schwarzmarkt
.’”

“An open secret?”

“It’s like Berlin, a secret without a roof and mostly without walls. All out in the open. In all weathers. You could sell gumboots in June, deckchairs in December if someone else thought they could sell ’em on at a profit.”

But tonight, Eddie introduced him to his “partners.”

Pie Face—so called because he had a big round moonface and a flat nose, as though he’d gone a few rounds with Freddie Mills. Pie Face was from southwest Essex, Hornchurch. Once Wilderness had ridden to Hornchurch, at the furthest reach of the District Line on London’s Underground and thought it the edge of the world. It was a county corner that was all but indistinguishable from urban East London, and Pie Face had much the same accent as Wilderness. A corporal, and Royal Army Service Corps clerk, he was attached to the NAAFI/EFI stores on Adolf-Hitler-Platz.

Spud—so called because he looked like a King Edward, his face pockmarked with “eyes”—was from the top end of Essex, a farm boy from the Stour Valley, with a lyrical East Anglian accent—a lance corporal, with the 62nd Transport and Movement Squadron, he worked in the Army’s “garage” and kept countless jeeps running.

Eddie did not need to explain, but did. They were the perfect partners. Pie Face had access to all the stuff in the NAAFI—every fiddle and theft began with him, and Spud had the means to get them around Berlin.

Wilderness was wondering what Eddie’s role might be in this wide-boys’ fraternity, and as if mind-reading Eddie said, “And I’m the brains of the outfit.”

Wilderness smiled even as his heart sank. He liked Eddie, and it was no exaggeration to say that he was probably the best friend he’d ever had. He was a gentle man, bright as a button . . . but a criminal mastermind he wasn’t.

“I do a lot of driving,” Eddie said, with a fingertip tap to the side of his nose.

“I thought you were on Fragebogeys like me?”

“Burne-Jones said I was crap at it. Took me off it. So I drive brass around in me jeep, translate for them and report back to him.”

“You mean you’re a spy?”

Eddie began to grin, the grin became a giggle.

“It’s all bollocks isn’t it? I never hear a damn thing worth remembering let alone reporting. I drop posh blokes off at meetings, pick ’em up again an hour two later, and in the meantime . . .”

“You do yer fan dance.”

“Absolutely. Go out with a full greatcoat, come back with an empty one and pocket full of kraut money.”

“We all do,” Spud chipped in.

“Always room for one more,” said Pie Face.

And Eddie was smiling. And Wilderness realised he had just joined a club he hadn’t even applied to.

§98

Sunday morning in the Tiergarten rewrote Wilderness’s idea of Germany. The Tiergarten in winter was bleak. On a day when an English family would be at home listening to a variety show on the radio or sleeping off Sunday lunch, Berliners were out en masse. It was insect-like, a swarm from the hive. The sky was grey, the buildings were grey, the world was grey. The people were . . . yellow . . . a poxy, wasted, vitamin-deficient yellow.

He and Eddie stood not fifty yards from the hollow shell of the Reichstag—in a sense they were at the heart of Germany, at the urban pulse of Berlin, stamping their feet against the cold where a million jackboots had goose-stepped . . . a patch of bare frozen ground that Berliners had now turned into an allotment to raise vegetables. Someone had planted gooseberry bushes. Goosestep to gooseberry in only twelve years. An imperial city to . . . a madman’s folly. Wilderness wondered if Berlin would leave the Reichstag as it was—a permanent memorial to that folly.

The scale of the
Schwarzmarkt
was almost unbelievable, the number of
Schieber
s
uncountable
.
Everyone sold, everyone bought or bartered, hence everyone was a
Schieber
.

The thing that most struck Wilderness was the number of prams and pushchairs. He reckoned about one in a hundred actually carried an infant—the rest were full of contraband. The odd copper moved among the crowd, but the sudden cessation of trade seemed to him be an act of caution and respect rather than convincing concealment—“let’s not flaunt it, let’s not fling it in his face.”

Eddie said, “Of course most of it’s barter. Kettle, toaster, portrait of Frederick the Great that’s been in the family for a hundred years . . . all up for swapsies. All tradeable for anything you can eat or drink. I don’t know what the German is for junk . . .”

“
Ramsch
.”

“That’ll do nicely. There is no such thing as
Ramsch
any more. Every piece of crap has a value. I met a bloke just before Christmas selling his mother’s false teeth.”

“Did you buy ’em?”

Eddie’s point was being made in terms of tragedy not twenty feet away. A man held a violin in one hand and a cardboard and crayon sign in the other.

Once owned by Adolph Busch. Will trade for shoes.

Busch had been one of Rada’s favourites. She had wound up the gramophone and put on Busch playing Brahms or Schubert and made him listen. Of course it could be a lie . . . he might as readily have written Josef Kreutzer, but the expression on his face and the state of his shoes said otherwise.

“The coppers don’t care much about swapsies. In fact they don’t care much about cash deals until someone back at the nick orders a
Razzia
, and then they’ll round up every man woman, kid, and dog. A show of force, mostly amounts to nothing . . . until the next time.”

“What’s in demand?”

“Right now . . . spuds. Last year’s stocks are running out about now.”

“And we don’t do spuds?”

“Nah . . . we’re in a different league. Follow me.”

Eddie picked his way through the crowd to a van that sold hot drinks and soups. The chalked-up menu announced a choice of potato, parsnip, or pea soup.

The proprietor nodded as he saw Eddie approach and moved to the back of the van.

When they got round the back, the door opened and Eddie said, “
Wie viele willst du heute, Fritzi
?”

And Fritzi replied, “
Zwölf
.”

Eddie opened his greatcoat, like a bat spreading wings and Fritzi unhooked twelve bags of coffee from the cat’s cradle. A fat envelope full of reichsmarks vanished into Eddie’s pocket and they moved on.

“You don’t count it?”

“Nope. Trust matters.”

“So does money.”

“Which is why we agree a price every Wednesday. Price o’coffee changes all the time. And it never gets any cheaper. We agree a price and we stick to it.”

“How many do you have left?”

“Six. We’ll get rid of them between here and home. Not a day to be bothering with frilly knickers and perfume.”

“Is Fritzi your biggest buyer?”

“One of ’em. I’ve three or four blokes who buy big-time.”

Big time was a troublesome phrase. Nothing about the Tiergarten
Schwarzmarkt
struck Wilderness as big time. He thought again of insects.

“I don’t think I can do this, Ed.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t have a greatcoat.”

“What? You lost it?”

“No. I gave it away to a bloke in Hamburg looked like he was about to freeze to death. You’d have done the same.”

A lie. Eddie, he knew, would have given away his shirt and trousers as well.

“’S’OK. Pie Face can get you another out of stores.”

So that was that, he was a
Schieber
. A nickel-and-dime, under-the-greatcoat
Schieber
. An insect.

§99

On the Monday morning, Wilderness reported to 45 Schlüterstraße—with no real idea to whom he was reporting.

No. 45 was a few hundred yards from his digs, in a short stretch of Schlüterstraße, overlooking both the Kurfürstendamm and Lietzenburger Straße. It was a big, turn-of-the-century apartment building in the bourgeois style, five or six storeys high—a boastful, bulging frontage as though the building could not quite contain itself, and had blossomed into bay windows and roof dormers. It looked to have come through the war largely unscathed—a few chips and bullet scars on the columns either side of the row of steps leading up to the door, a street that had not been hard-fought.

In the lobby he was surprised to find an ornate ceiling arcing overhead and a panelled staircase hinting at art nouveau origins. It was the most undamaged piece of Germany he’d yet encountered. Something the RAF had missed.

The office of Information Services Control was on the ground floor.

He knocked at the secretary’s door and walked in.

A good-looking blonde in a severe charcoal grey two-piece was ripping paper from the roller of her typewriter. She paused with the pages mid-air, looked at him, then screwed them into a ball, carbon and all, and lobbed them over her shoulder.

“Butterfingers,” she said.

“No, Holderness.”

“Very witty. You must be the colonel’s bright boy. We’ve been expecting you.”

“Am I going to be Burne-Jones’s bright boy wherever I go?”

“Dunno. There’s not a lot of competition round here at the mo’. But you could always try
not
living up to it.”

She picked up two pages and a carbon and fed them into the typewriter.

“You know I could have stayed at home, done the deb thing and married a Guards officer. I didn’t have to learn to type, and on days like these when I wake up with ten thumbs I wish I hadn’t. But, alas I didn’t know all that many Guards officers. Back down the corridor, second on the left. There’s a desk for you, and a pile of Fraggywotsernames to be going on with. I’ll finish the major’s letters and be with you in about half an hour.”