Then We Take Berlin (43 page)

“He’s a smuggler, Andreas,” Nell chipped in.

“Difficult times, Hélène. The man who finds you half a pound of butter today may go down in history as well regarded as any man who fought at Austerlitz or Waterloo. I say again, how may I help you, Herr Holderness?”

“I need a tunnel under Berlin. There are things I need to get from West to East without interference.”

“Things?”

Wilderness tapped the side of his cup gently with a teaspoon.

“Ah . . . I see . . . baccy for the parson, brandy for the clerk, and coffee for the commissar?”

Who would have thought a German aristocrat knew Kipling? All the same it saved Wilderness precious words.

“Nell tells me you know the tunnels better than anyone.”

Jeltsch-Fugger tilted his head slightly, the merest nod, a sip of coffee.

“The Nazis flooded Berlin’s tunnels as the Russians advanced in ’45. Breached the Spree and let the river in. I assume you knew this? So, we are looking at something deeper. Something below the swamp on which my ancestors built Berlin, below the impermeable clay. I believe there is such a tunnel. I was with Max Burkhardt the last time he inspected it in 1939. I didn’t make the descent, but I was there. I cannot vouch for the state of the tunnel after . . . after . . .”

“After what the RAF did to Berlin?”

“Quite. But I know the two entrances.”

“And it crosses the line?”

“Runs under the Spree at the island, from Monbijou Park to the zoo, just by the flak tower. I’d say it crosses the line pretty well under Pariser Platz. About a hundred and fifty feet under Pariser Platz.”

“That’s as deep as the Piccadilly Line.”

“It is indeed. I had the pleasure of inspecting your London Underground in 1932. But this was built without boring shields or machines of any kind. Neither I nor Max were able to find out precisely when it was built. But that in itself made the subject all the more fascinating. One can weave fantasies around such a structure. We think it was built most likely in the reign of Frederick Wilhelm II, which would be the last decade of the 1700s. Certainly no later than 1805. That’s the year Monbijou Palace ceased to be a royal residence for spurned wives and ageing dowagers. After that I cannot think why anyone would have bothered to build it . . . and only royals would have had the money. In fact, even allowing for the folly of kings it’s both amusing and impossible to imagine why it was built. It goes nowhere.”

“I thought you just said it went to the zoo?”

“In 1800 that was nowhere. Just an obscure corner of the Tiergarten. The zoo has been there scarcely a hundred years. It would have made more sense if the tunnel ended at Bellevue. The construction of palace and tunnel would have been undertaken at roughly the same time. An escape route for queens and princes? But who knows? An error in navigation? Unlikely. But there it is, ending nowhere. And since the RAF all but flattened Monbijou in ’43, beginning nowhere.”

“But you can find it?”

“Yes.”

A pause, the kind that might be called pregnant.

“You were kindness itself the last time we met, Herr Holderness, and it pains me to have to ask something of you in return. But—the devil drives.”

Ask away, thought Wilderness. Coffee, butter, sardines in tins. Whatever.

“Ask away,” he said.

“You can still issue
Persilschein
? I need a
Persilschein
for my son.”

“No problem. I’ve met your son. We don’t bother much with people that young.”

“No, Herr Holderness. My other son.”

Nell might have been stung. She swung around to face Jeltsch-Fugger in an instant.

“Andreas! No!”

Jeltsch-Fugger smiled his smile of well-bred tolerance and said to Wilderness, “Might you give us a moment alone?”

“No,” Nell said. “You give us a moment alone. Joe, outside!”

Wilderness said nothing as they scraped back their chairs. Jeltsch-Fugger signalled the waiter for another coffee, unperturbed.

On the pavement, anger made Nell seem suddenly bigger than she was.

“I won’t let you do this, Wilderness.”

“I—”

“Andreas had three sons. Kurt died over England flying for the Luftwaffe. Werner you know. It is Otto he’s talking about now.”

“So . . . we don’t take it out on kids. There’s even a category called youthful indiscretion or some such. God knows, even Hitler’s secretary got off scot-free under that one.”

“Otto isn’t a kid. He’s the eldest. He served throughout the war.”

It was obvious where this was headed.

“So tell me the worst.”

“Andreas wants you to issue a
Persilschein
in the name of SS Obersturmbannführer Otto von Jeltsch-Fugger.”

“Oh shit.”

“He worked for Heydrich in the SD. It’s a miracle he isn’t on trial or in prison already, but he isn’t. And if you give him a
Persilschein
, he’ll get away with everything!”

“Get away with what exactly?”

“I don’t know. Do I need to know? We all know what the SD did. Wilderness I cannot, I will not let you do this.”

Wilderness’s “no” was accepted graciously. They finished their coffee discussing books and music, Wilderness’s fondness for Brahms, Jeltsch-Fugger’s love of English metaphysical poetry. As they parted on the pavement, Jeltsch-Fugger deemed the meeting most enjoyable, hoped they would all have the opportunity to get together under different circumstances soon, and handed Wilderness his card.

He looked at the sky, remarked that it “might come on to rain later,” doffed his hat to Nell and walked away.

“It might come on to rain? How bloody English can a German get?”

“I told you, Wilderness. He’s the most civilised man alive.”

She kissed him.

“Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I know what it cost you. Joe Holderness resists temptation. I should get that chipped in stone.”

§143

That night, in bed, Wilderness said, “If his big brother was in the Gestapo . . . how can Werner go on saying what he says? Talking the kind of bollocks he talks. How can he go on denying what happened?”

“You said it yourself. He’s just a kid.”

“So were you during the war.”

“But I saw Belsen with my own eyes. Werner fought the Russians when he was fourteen in the Volkssturm. He too believes what he saw. That the Russians were a savage enemy. It’s a short hop from that to wanting to believe they faked Auschwitz. Though I flatter myself I’ve knocked that one out of him, he still wrestles with the same question they all do.
Wer sind wir? Was sind wir
? If you were French or Dutch, the Nazis occupied your country. If you were German they occupied your mind. Try to think of Werner that way.”

“So . . . all the same, he’s just a kid?”

“Yep. He’s harmless, as you say of yourself. Only difference is I really believe he is.”

“And you don’t believe I am?”

“Of course not.”

She turned over to sleep, squirmed her backside against his hip.

“
Wer sind wir? Was sind Wir
?”

A whisper and a mantra.

Nell. I’m alive! Where are you? Joe.

A scrawl upon a thousand walls.

§144

He called
Jeltsch-Fugger from the office in Schlüterstraße. Arranged to pick him up in the staff jeep by the Adlon Hotel, opposite the gigantic picture of Josef Stalin, in benign, paternal pose and festooned with medals. The Russian welcome to the Soviet Sector.

It was pouring with rain, the wettest summer in thirty years, battering down on the canvas roof of the jeep, and rivulets that coursed down Stalin’s face—the tears he’d never shed.

“You have the
Persilschein
?”

“You have the map?”

“Indeed. I shall show you the eastern end, Monbijou. I doubt you need me to direct you to the zoo, after all.”

“Just one thing. Nell is never to know.”

“Of course. We are criminals bound together by a dark and dirty secret. Over the Schloss Bridge and left on Burgstraße.”

The S-bahn overground metropolitan railway was no respecter of history or architecture. It sliced the “heart” of Berlin in two at Alexanderplatz, and it clipped the corner of Monbijou Park en route from the Börse station to Friedrichsstraße Station, passing close enough to have detracted from what had been a fairy-tale palace at the time the S-bahn had been built just after the Great War. After the new war it wasn’t quite a ruin, but Wilderness could not think of a single word to describe the state it was in. Once it had fronted the river, much as the Naval College at Greenwich had done, with a garden of topiaried pine trees leading down to a shining white balustrade at the water’s edge. It was an easy leap of imagination to see gilded barges moored at the steps, waiting upon the pleasure of queens and princesses.

At some point during the war, the Germans had bricked up its high windows. At some point during the war the British had caved in much of its roof.

He parked the jeep under the S-bahn between the stilts that propped up the elevated track. It was dark under the S-bahn, illuminated only in flashes—sunlight through the latticework, sparks from the electric line running overhead. It was like looking at an old-fashioned magic lantern show. And what he saw by the light of the lantern was an ornate cast-iron kiosk, rather like a Parisian pissoir—bigger, more elaborate and capped by a small spire that resembled nothing quite so much as the spike on a pickelhaube.

“How did that survive?”

“I would imagine,” Jeltsch-Fugger replied. “That the railway line provided cover. Otherwise it might be in the same state as the palace.”

“You’re a Berliner?”

“Through and through. Apart from summers spent reliving the last shreds of the ancestral-country-house-life to please my parents, I’ve never lived anywhere else.”

“Then you must be appalled by what has happened to the city.”

“I’m an engineer not an architect or an historian. You are asking me to mourn Monbijou? Fine, catch me one night with half a bottle of schnapps inside me and I might. Indeed if the palace appeals to your taste for the rococo, take a good look. The Russians mean to demolish it—the Kaiser’s schloss too. If they stay here ten years I predict they will flatten every structural symbol of imperial Berlin. But what is a flattened city to an engineer but a chance to build? And if you want my professional opinion, the survival of this absurd piece of cast iron under the S-bahn throughout six years of war is less surprising than it making it through the previous hundred and fifty years in one piece.”

“You’d almost think no one had noticed it was there.”

“That’s more true than you could know. I think you’ll find curiosity is not second nature to Germans. Once its purpose had been forgotten it probably never occurred to anyone to ask. It was there. That would be enough for most. What
is
is.”

“Why didn’t they knock it down when the S-bahn was built?”

“They didn’t have ‘permission’ would be my guess—if they had they would have done—permission from God knows who, and in the absence of a god they left things as they found them . . . and as I just said, what is is. Curiosity has no part in it.”

Jeltsch-Fugger produced a ring of oversized keys, some of them six to eight inches long. They approached the kiosk.

“One of these should fit.”

The third key turned the lock. The door swung open, groaning for oil.

“Remarkable,” Jeltsch-Fugger said. “No one has opened this for the best part of ten years. Until Max and I came here just before the war, I doubt anyone had opened it in more than a century. Even then it opened without effort.”

Wilderness looked inside. A wide spiral staircase, winding around a central void.

“A hundred and fifty feet you said?”

“Give or take.”

Jeltsch-Fugger lobbed a pebble down the shaft. It seemed an age before Wilderness heard the clunk.

“Point taken.”

Will you be going down?”

“No. I want to see both ends first.”

Jeltsch-Fugger handed the ring of keys to him.

“You might let me have it back, when you have finished.”

They spread a map across the bonnet of the jeep.

Berlin as it had been in 1938. Five years into The Thousand-Year Reich.
A monument in the making.

A few drops of rain spotted the grey-white paper. Jeltsch-Fugger glanced up at the tracks above and held out a hand. Nothing more fell.

“You will appreciate, the original map on which Max found the tunnel is in a state not unlike confetti, and far too precious to bring out in a storm.”

He took a red crayon and traced the course of the tunnel on the pre-war map.