“Then it’s Charlie.”
The frown became a grin. “Not sure what the form is with you chaps ….” He looked down at himself. “Thought mufti was best.” The trouser crease of Jackson’s muted checked suit would have been dangerous to the touch and the man risked severing an artery moving his head too quickly against the stiff collar. The burnished brogues reflected sufficient light to send SOS signals.
“Fine,” said Charlie, aware for the first time that Natalia must have pressed his trousers, too. It still amounted to a before-and-after comparison. “Sorry to barge in like this at the last moment.”
“Glad to have you aboard. Saw the television from Siberia. Can’t have been much fun.”
There’d been a reference from the attache to seeing him on television when they’d spoken from Moscow. Charlie hoped that had been sufficient official identification, without the man feeling it necessary to check with the Defense Ministry in London. If he had-and there’d been objections-Jackson would hardly have kept the suggested meeting or been so amenable. Charlie said, “It was pretty rough.”
“Any idea yet what happened to the poor bastards?”
Open sesame! thought Charlie. “Not a complete picture. What guidance have you got from London?”
“None,” said the other man, apologetically. “Just told to attend, as official military observer.”
Bugger it, thought Charlie. “What’s the setup?”
“Haven’t arranged anything. Waited for you. Got a car outside. Thought you might like to look around.”
“What about the exhumation?”
“There’s a security blackout on it, of course. Ministry insistence. Fortunately the Commonwealth cemetery at Charlottenburg is under military jurisdiction. Makes it easy. The section we want has already been sealed off. The grave itself has been screened. The workmen haven’t been told whose grave it is they’re opening. Apart from them, there’ll just be us, the embassy padre, a medical examiner and someone from the Berlin coroner’s office. There might be someone from the War Graves Commission; they’re not sure yet what to do about the grave marker, now they know it’s not Simon Norrington ….” He paused. “You know what you’re looking for?”
“Not yet,” said Charlie. Hopefully he added, “Anything else London had you do? Don’t want any confusion between the briefings.”
“Little risk of that,” assured Jackson, still apologetic. He’d been told the Gieves and Hawkes customer archive had provided the address of the family seat in Hampshire and Sir Matthew Norrington had produced the War Office’s 1945 notification of his brother’s death and burial in Berlin; having visited it, Sir Matthew had even known the plot number. He had, it seemed, considered it fitting his brother remain in a soldier’s grave rather than be reinterred in the family vault in England.
“Located the grave myself from the plot number,” said Jackson. “Usual inscription: rank, name, unit, date of death.”
“Everything based on what the family supplied?” queried Charlie, disappointed. “What about from the ministry itself?”
“Family told the ministry, the ministry told me,” said the attache.
“Nothing more than that?”
“Afraid not.”
“Was the Provost Company properly established here when Norrington was supposed to have died?” asked Charlie.
“I doubt it, that early. From what I gather no one knew where anybody was in Berlin in April 1945: whole regiments split up, platoons and squadrons fighting on their own. And the Russians were here first, of course.”
“What about wartime archives here?”
“Military police headquarters are at Rheindahlen. You might try there.”
“What about records of stolen art?”
“There’s an art recovery center at the university here. Others atthe universities of Bremen and Dresden, too.” He stopped, thinking. “The grave of the American wouldn’t be here in Berlin. There aren’t any military cemeteries here.”
Charlie felt a sink of further disappointment. “Where are the American dead buried?”
“There are a lot of cemeteries throughout Europe. I wouldn’t even like to guess. Do you have a name?”
“No.”
“A unit?”
“No,” lied Charlie, not wanting any destroying or concealing visits ahead of his own.
“But you do have a photograph of the American body found in Yakutsk? Know what he looks like?”
“Yes,” said Charlie.
“That’s something, perhaps.”
“But not enough,” said Charlie, deciding upon the need for another lie. “Anyway, it’s Norrington I’m interested in, not the American.”
Charlie was surprised, momentarily bewildered, at his feeling of deja vu upon entering the military cemetery, until the comparison came to him between the regimented pattern of so many headstones and crosses and the stunted, number-only wooden markers by the Yakutsk gold mine.
The control office was in the middle of the cemetery, the grave areas radiating out like spokes in a wheel. There were manicured trees bordering the paths. Initially he and Jackson ignored the building, going instead to the grave, Jackson confidently leading the way. Some of the trees would anyway have partially concealed it, but screens more than two meters high completely encircled it. The cross naming Simon Norrington was still in place, but there had been some digging at its base to lift it. About a third of a meter of topsoil had already been dug out. At least, thought Charlie, there weren’t any man-eating mosquitoes.
Jackson said, “What was the Yakutsk grave like?”
“A bomb crater. They used grenades.”
“Whoever this was had a proper burial.”
“But was probably killed to order.”
Jackson regarded him quizzically. “You sure about that?”
“No,” admitted Charlie. “I’m still not sure about anything.”
The duty registration clerk in the control office was a rigidly coiffed, rigid-faced woman who just as tightly demanded the military attache’s identification, despite their having met earlier when she had been informed of the exhumation, and who regarded Charlie with disdain and his Moscow embassy accreditation with suspicion. She insisted on telephoning some unidentified official in another cemetery office before accepting Charlie’s right to examine records, and stood at each man’s shoulder to ensure they fully completed the perforated, hole-punched entry slips with their names and details of their official identity documents.
Considering the outside appearance of hundreds of graves, the archive vaults were surprisingly small, two linked rooms about fifty meters long and half as wide, totally bare except for central tables and row upon row of filing cabinets against every available wall space. On both tables, In Memoriam books were set out in symmetry matching that of the grave markers, in alphabetical order to replace the current page-a-day book displayed in its glass case in the entrance to the British lodge house.
Charlie supposed there was an index system linking name and burial place, but they didn’t need to consult it, already knowing the plot number, which enabled the clerk to lead them at once to a cabinet halfway along the first room. She insisted upon retrieving and finding the Norrington entry herself, not trusting them to handle the paper- aged ledger, and laid it open on the central table, clearly unhappy at disturbing the neat arrangement of the waiting commemorative books.
She said, “The paper’s fragile. I’d appreciate your not touching it.”
The entries were listed in numerical order, by plot allocation. Norrington’s — Plot 442-was a third of the way down a right-hand page, the details occupying just one line, each fact fit into a designated box. There was his army officer’s six-digit serial number-
Charlie said, “KIA? Killed in action?”
“Yes,” sighed the clerk, confirming the obvious.
