Kronprinzenallee and Johnny's American Bar where Kirsten worked, less than a kilometre from US Military Headquarters.
It was dark by the time I found Johnny's, a bright, noisy place with steamed-up windows, and several jeeps parked in front. A sign above the cheap-looking entrance declared that the bar was only open to First Three Graders, whatever they were. Outside the door was an old man with a stoop like an igloo one of the city's many thousands of tip-collectors who made a living from picking up cigarette-ends: like prostitutes each tip-collector had his own beat, with the pavements outside American bars and clubs the most coveted of all, where on a good day a man or woman could recover as many as a hundred butts a day: enough for about ten or fifteen whole cigarettes, and worth a total of about five dollars.
'Hey, uncle,' I said to him, 'want to earn yourself four Winston?' I took out the packet I had bought at the Reichstag and tapped four into the palm of my hand. The man's rheumy eyes travelled eagerly from the cigarettes to my face.
'What's the job?'
'Two now, two when you come and tell me when this lady comes out of here.' I gave him the photograph of Kirsten I kept in my wallet.
'Very attractive piece,' he leered.
'Never mind that.' I jerked my thumb at a dirty-looking сafe further up Kronprinzenallee, in the direction of the US Military HQ. 'See that сafe?' He nodded. 'I'll be waiting there.'
The tip-collector saluted with his finger and quickly trousering the photograph and the two Winston, he started to turn back to scan his flagstones. But I held him by the grubby handkerchief he wore tied round his stubbly throat. 'Don't forget now, will you?' I said, twisting it tight. 'This looks like a good beat.
So I'll know where to go looking if you don't remember to come and tell me. Got that?'
The old man seemed to sense my anxiety. He grinned horribly. 'She might have forgotten you, sir, but you can rest assured that I won't.' His face, a garage floor of shiny spots and oily patches, reddened as for a moment I tightened my grip.
'See that you don't,' I said and let him go, feeling a certain amount of guilt for handling him so roughly. I handed him another cigarette by way of compensation and, discounting his exaggerated endorsements of my own good character, I walked up the street to the dingy сafe.
For what felt like hours, but wasn't quite two, I sat silently nursing a large and inferior-tasting brandy, smoking several cigarettes and listening to the voices around me. When the tip-collector came to fetch me his scrofulous features wore a triumphant grin. I followed him outside and back into the street.
'The lady, sir,' he said, pointing urgently towards the railway station. 'She went that way.' He paused as I paid him the balance of his fee, and then added, 'With her schStzi. A captain, I think. Anyway, a handsome young fellow, whoever he is.'
I didn't stay to hear any more and walked as briskly as I was able in the direction which he had indicated.
I soon caught sight of Kirsten and the American officer who accompanied her, his arm wrapped around her shoulders. I followed them at a distance, the full moon affording me a clear view of their leisurely progress, until they came to a bombed-out apartment block, with six layers of flaky-pastry floors collapsed one on top of the other. They disappeared inside. Should I go in after them, I asked myself. Did I need to see everything?
Bitter bile percolated up from my liver to break down the fatty doubt that lay heavy in my gut.
Like mosquitoes I heard them before I saw them. Their English was more fluent than my understanding, but she seemed to be explaining that she could not be late home two nights in a row. A cloud drifted across the moon, darkening the landscape, and I crept behind an enormous pile of scree, where I thought I might get a better view. When the cloud sailed on, and the moonlight shone undiminished through the bare rafters of the roof, I had a clear sight of them, silent now. For a moment they were a facsimile of innocence as she knelt before him while he laid his hands upon her head as if delivering holy benediction. I puzzled as to why Kirsten's head should be rocking on her shoulders, but when he groaned my understanding of what was happening was as swift as the feeling of emptiness which accompanied it.
I stole silently away and drank myself stupid.
Chapter 4
I spent the night on the couch, an occurrence which Kirsten, asleep in bed by the time I finally staggered home, would have wrongly attributed to the drink on my breath. I feigned sleep until I heard her leave the apartment, although I could not escape her kissing me on the forehead before she went. She was whistling as she stepped down the stairs and into the street. I got up and watched her from the window as she walked north up Fasanenstrasse towards Zoo Station and her train to Zehlendorf.
When I lost sight of her I set about trying to salvage some remnant of myself with which I could face the day. My head throbbed like an excited Dobermann, but after a wash with an ice-cold flannel, a couple of cups of the captain's coffee and a cigarette, I started to feel a little better. Still, I was much too preoccupied with the memory of Kirsten frenching the American captain and thoughts of the harm I could bring to him to even remember the harm I had already caused a soldier of the Red Army, and I was not as careful in answering a knock at the door as I should have been.
The Russian was short and yet he stood taller than the tallest man in the Red Army, thanks to the three gold stars and light-blue braid border on his greatcoat's silver epaulettes identifying him as a palkovnik, a colonel, of the MVD the Soviet secret political police.
'Herr Gunther?' he asked politely.
I nodded sullenly, angry with myself for not having been more careful. I wondered where I had left the dead Ivan's gun, and if I dared to make a break for it. Or would he have men waiting at the foot of the stairs for just such an eventuality?
The officer took off his cap, clicked his heels like a Prussian and head-butted the air. 'Palkovnik Poroshin, at your service. May I come in?' He did not wait for an answer. He wasn't the type who was used to waiting for anything other than his own wind.
No more than about thirty years old, the colonel wore his hair long for a soldier. Pushing it clear of his pale blue eyes and back over his narrow head, he rendered the veneer of a smile as he turned to face me in my sitting- room. He was enjoying my discomfort.
'It is Herr Bernhard Gunther, is it not? I have to be sure.'
Knowing my name like that was a bit of a surprise. And so was the handsome gold cigarette-case which he flicked open in front of me. The tan on the ends of his cadaverous fingers suggested that he didn't bother with selling cigarettes as much as smoking them. And the MVD didn't normally bother to share a smoke with a man they were about to arrest. So I took one and owned up to my name.
He fed a cigarette into his lantern jaw and produced a matching Dunhill to light us both.
'And you are a ' he winced as the smoke billowed into his eye ' sh'pek what is the German word ?'
'Private detective,' I said, translating automatically and regretting my alacrity almost at the very same moment.
Poroshin's eyebrows lifted on his high forehead. 'Well, well,' he remarked with a quiet surprise that turned quickly first to interest and then sadistic pleasure, 'you speak Russian.'
I shrugged. 'A little.'
'But that is not a common word. Not for someone who only speaks a little Russian. Sh'pek is also the Russian word for salted pig fat. Did you know that as well?'
'No,' I said. But as a Soviet prisoner of war I had eaten enough of it smeared on coarse black bread to know it only too well. Did he guess that?
'Nye shooti (seriously)?' he grinned. 'I bet you do. Just as I'd bet you know that I'm MVD, eh?' Now he laughed out loud. 'Do you see how good at my job I am?
I haven't been talking to you for five minutes and already I'm able to say that you are keen to conceal that you speak good Russian. But why?'
'Why don't you tell me what you want, Colonel?'
'Come now,' he said. 'As an Intelligence officer it is only natural for me to wonder why. You of all people must understand that kind of curiosity, yes?'
Smoke trailed from his shark's fin of a nose as he pursed his lips in a rictus of apology.
