Then We Take Berlin (36 page)

Shit, shit, shit.

Wilderness looked back at the greeny-brown eyes. The half-wry smile on his lips. He didn’t look hostile. Perhaps he wasn’t hostile.

“Just a game, mate,” he said. “Just a bit of fun. Seeing how the other half lives. A dressing-up game. No harm in it.”

“Sure. I mean. Why not? Tell you what. Let’s see if we can find a quiet table to ourselves.”

Wilderness decided that if this bloke was going to shop him, he’d have done it by now, and most certainly would not have said, “Run a tab” as they picked their beers and made their way to the far corner of the room.

As they drew back chairs, a huge, soft hand shook his.

“Frank Spoleto, Captain, US Army Intelligence. Been here since ’45. Came in with the 82nd Airborne.”

“Joe Holderness, Corporal, Royal Air Force Intelligence. Came here on the Silk Stocking express this winter.”

“Yeah, I guess you are just a kid at that. Ever see combat?”

“No. I got drafted . . . after.”

“Tough. But . . . but . . . just a kid is as maybe. I hear you’re the man.”

The
man?

“Why not just spit it out, Captain?”

“Nah, it’s tale to be told not a fleck of phlegm to be coughed up. I got here with the first American troops in July ’45, when the Russkis drew back to the line. You think Berlin’s badly off now, but that’s nothing compared to ’45.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Stick with me, kid. In ’45 everything was up for grabs. Everything was up for sale. Stuff we took for granted back home was priceless here.

“Cigarettes, cigarettes were obvious. I mean. They had a whole army of kids picking butts off the ground, begging them off you before you could even flip them onto the sidewalk. Rolling up fresh ones from the dregs was a cottage industry. Even a gasper finished off with toilet paper was worth five reichsmarks back then when the real thing was worth twice that. The places that made them weren’t factories . . .”

“I know all this. I’ve had this lecture.”

“Hear me out . . . they weren’t factories . . . they were the Bank of England, they were the Federal Reserve, they were Fort Knox, because cigarettes were currency. I gave up smoking. I ask you, would you set fire to money and stick it in your mouth? But what really wised me up was a date with a German girl I was sweet on. I’d taken her out a couple of times. Third or fourth date I was hoping to improve my score, maybe get to third base if not a home run. Gave her a box of Fairy soap. Nothing special. Just ordinary soap, some white, some green. She fucked me stupid and sold the box for three hundred marks. I knew then. The guy with the key to the PX was Rockefeller, Carnegie, Pierpont Morgan. Goddammit, he’s Errol fuckin’ Flynn.”

Wilderness said again, “Why are you telling me this? I know all this.”

“Because we could do business.”

“We could?”

“I’m the man with the key to Fort Knox. And from what I hear, you’re the man. The man with a tame Russki in his pocket. The last couple of years have been sweet, but it can get sweeter. In ’45 you could exchange marks for dollars and wire them home. More’n ten million bucks went home that way. Then that got capped, and then stopped altogether. Since then . . . the smart money ain’t been in money at all. It’s been in commodities. Hard stuff. The stuff you and I deal in.”

Wilderness wondered how much he knew, and concluded he probably knew everything. How was another matter.

“I still don’t see where you’re heading with this.”

“Aw, c’mon. You have a network, I know you have a network. Most guys in this room are selling cigarettes and nylons, one to one. Dodging the MPs in the Tiergarten or Alexanderplatz. Penny-ante stuff. You’re not selling on the streets to desperate Krauts, you’re selling in bulk to the Russians. You got the network. I got the supply. I got the PX at Tempelhof sewn up.”

“And I’ve got the NAAFI stores on Adolf-Hitler-Platz sewn up. Why would I need you?”

“What can you steal from the NAAFI? A hundred pounds of coffee at a time.”

Remarkably, this was disturbingly accurate.

“Last week one transport alone, just one, flew in fifteen hundred pounds. And I can make half of it vanish just like that.”

A snap of his finger in the air to make his point.

“How?”

“I pay off the guy who processes the paperwork. They ship fifteen hundred, but who counts, all that matters is the paperwork, and on paper the manifest says seven-fifty so only seven hundred and fifty arrives. The rest . . . well.”

“That must cost.”

“He ain’t greedy.”

“Perhaps I am.”

“We’re businessmen. We’ll come to an arrangement. There’ll be enough for everybody.”

“I have partners.”

“Sure. Three of ’em. We’ll cut ’em in.”

This bloke knew too much. Safer by far to have him on the inside pissing out than on the outside pissing in.

§115

Nell and Wilderness made a point of not arriving at Schlüterstraße at the same time. Undoubtedly Rose Blair, the woman on the ground floor (“matron,” as Wilderness called her behind her back), knew, but Nell was confident no one else did. The one disadvantage of pretending not to know each other was that it eased Wilderness’s disappearing act—some days he would be gone after breakfast and not reappear until past midnight. Knowing about his rackets was a finite fact—it was the sum total of what she wished to know. Detail would not help. He was a
Schieber
—the common condition of life in Berlin in 1947. That much she knew, that much she accepted. If she could accept
pajoks
from Yuri Myshkin, she could accept Wilderness and all he got up to. Detail did not matter.

But, today, she had not seen him for two nights, and presumed he had slept back at Fasanenstraße. It was not that she worried—he had all the qualities of a survivor—but she missed him. She missed his jokes. She missed his deftness with words and hands. She missed his unguarded affection.

When she got home a teapot was on the landing outside Erno’s door. An agreed sign. He was at home and was inviting her to take tea with him.

“Eh, Lenchen?”

As ever he was at his desk. Conjuring up one of his magical pieces of card and paper, the forger’s origami that put space and freedom between the unfortunate individual and the powers of Occupation. Her “two hundred” souls saved by Erno’s forgeries once the deportation of the Jews had begun was, in all probability, an understatement. Her own papers were Erno fakes. Having added two years to her age to bluff Nicolas Dekker, she had kept them—otherwise she might not even have the job she had.

“You know, lately I have seen more of Herr Schieber than I have of you, my dear.”

She sat by the iron stove, flicked open the door—an orange glow upon her, as far as the hem of her skirt—her legs as disembodied as Erno’s hands under his spotlight.

“His name’s Joe. I call him Wilderness. But . . . read nothing into that. It’s just a rhyme in English. He calls me Breakheart.”

“Ah. And I shall read nothing into that either.”

He wanted to talk. That was why the teapot was there. But he seemed to be saying nothing. The hands moving slowly and delicately across a page she could not see, his face and eyes hidden. They were legs talking to hands. And suddenly it seemed easier that way, a memory of a lapsed Catholic girlhood, of the very few times she had ever confessed to anything . . . or nothing.

Child. Have you sinned?

No. Not this week.

But everyone sins!

Not me. Not this week.

To the hands she said, “He disappears. Just like Yuri, but never for as long.”

“The racket?”

“The racket. But . . . we’re all in a racket. That is Hitler’s legacy. But . . . he says it’s the ‘only game in town’ . . . an English phrase that seems clear enough . . . But . . . there are times I think the game matters more than the end result . . . and that it matters more than me. Then I start to wonder, and so I suppose it all comes down to one question. Why am I with this man?”

The hands did not stop moving, the angle of the head did not shift.

“What was it your mother used to call you?”

“I was her ‘po-faced little angel.’”

“As true today as it was in 1936. Lenchen, yours is a structured life. It was ever thus. At the age of four you would put everything in your doll’s house back in place before you went to bed. Your doll’s house is now your mind, as ordered as your desktop.

“Do you know the old Greek tale of the Hedgehog and the Fox? The hedgehog knows one big thing. The fox knows many smaller things. ‘Πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα.’ You are the hedgehog, Joe is the fox. In your structured life he is the random element your unconscious craves. He is the unpredictability you will not quite surrender. Remember, you told me how you met him? What was he doing?”

“Cardsharping.”

“Exactly. A game of chance.”

“At which I beat him.”

“All the same he personified the random element. It was why you sat down with him in the first place. It was what . . . drew you.”

“In . . . in this tale of yours. Are the hedgehog and the fox always opposed? Do they fight? Does someone lose and someone win? Is there any chance of a happy ending?”

“Ach. To tell you the truth I cannot remember. Let us not make too much of a simple analogy.”

§116

He introduced Frank to Eddie, Spud, and Pie Face in the Marrokkaner
.

Frank said, “This is a dive. Let’s go somewhere better.”

He drove a 1942 Plymouth painted up in drab, a white star on each of the rear doors.

They followed him as far as Gänsefettstraße, in the American Sector, a couple of blocks from the Soviet line.

Eddie said, “Why don’t we make cars with roofs?”

Spud said, “Because the army wants you to freeze yer bollocks off in a jeep.”

Frank had parked opposite a nightclub—Paradies Verlassen. There wasn’t much left of the upper storeys. It didn’t matter, the midnight blue staircase wound down and down. By the time they stopped in front of a pair of quilted and buttoned, pitted and gashed, scarlet velvet doors that looked as though they’d withstood an attack by the SA, Wilderness estimated they were three floors below ground level.

It was deceptive. He knew it would be bigger and better than the Marrokkaner
—he would not contend Frank’s assertion that the Marrokkaner
was a dive—but he’d anticipated nothing so wide, so high, so . . . well preserved—this place had survived the SA, the RAF, and the Russian infantry. It wasn’t a low-ceilinged smoky room, crammed with tables. It was spacious, galleried, with a dance floor that would allow a hundred couples to take to the floor if they so desired. It was a slice of Weimar-era Berlin in aspic.

A waiter greeted Frank like an old friend and showed them to a table two steps up from the dance floor. Frank stuck money in his hand and ordered beers all round.

Eddie was almost spinning on his heels, with his eyes turned up to the star-painted ceiling. Spud gazed around and uttered a simple truth, “Fuck me. The Dog and Duck it ain’t.”

There was a telephone in the centre of the table, and a serpentine network of tubes wound overhead to end in an art nouveau snake’s head, its jaws gaping over a small black net, rather like the ones on the side of a billiard table.

Wilderness picked up the phone, but it was dead.

Frank said, “Before the war they all worked. You could dial anyone at any table. Or if you preferred you could write a message, stick it in the snake’s head, yank on the handle and the pneumatic tube would whisk it up to the top gallery and they’d redirect it to the right table.”

He pointed up to a swirl in the tubing a few feet above their heads, from which dangled an enamelled plate with their table number inscribed on it—a stylised 21 in a familiar, arty font dating back to the 1890s.

“The tubes still work.”

“So . . . it was a . . . pick-up joint?”

“Still is . . . you just can’t whisper your sweet nothings any more. You got to write ’em down.”

“So . . . a single woman at another table . . . ?”

“Not decadent enough, Joe.
Any
woman at
any
table.”

The room was filling up. The noise level was rising.

“Cabaret’s about to start. We’ll talk after.”

A faux maître d’ walked to the front of the stage, a young woman with slicked back hair and a greasepaint moustache applied somewhat more delicately than Groucho Marx’s, clicked her heels in the Prussian style and announced in heavily accented English, clearly knowing only too well who her audience were, “Und now. A liddle diddy entitled ‘I Sold My Heart for a Peanut Budder Cubcake.’”

The song was not great lyrically or musically—what it was was daring. Whoever wrote for these girls had avoided the strictures on not poking fun at the Allies, by holding up a mirror to Germans themselves—and inevitably Britain and America were reflected in it too.