‘What are they typing?’
‘They’re typing up releases for the American press, most of whom are also staying here. Which means that there are Gestapo in the bar. Possibly there are even secret microphones. I don’t know for sure, but this is what I heard. Which is another source of grief for us.’
‘This Dickson fellow. Is he in the hotel right now?’
Willy thought for a moment. ‘I think so.’
‘Don’t mention my name. Just tell him that if he’s interested in a bit of “Life Poetry and Truth”, I’ll be beside the Goethe statue in the Tiergarten.’
‘I know it. Just off Herman Goring Strasse.’
‘I’ll wait fifteen minutes for him. And if he comes he should come alone. No friends. Just him and me and Goethe. I don’t want any witnesses when I speak to him. These days there are plenty of Amis who work for the Gestapo. And I’m not sure about Goethe.’
I hoisted the bread bag onto my back and walked out of the Adlon onto Pariser Platz, where it was already getting dark. One of the only good things about the blackout was that you couldn’t see the Nazi flags, but the brutal outlines of Speer’s partly constructed Foreign Travel Office were still visible in the distance against the purpling night sky, dominating the landscape west of the Brandenburg Gate. Rumour had it that Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, was using Russian POWs to help complete a building that no one other than Hitler seemed to want. Rumour also had it that there was a new network of tunnels under construction connecting government buildings on Wilhelmstrasse with secret bunkers that extended under Herman Goring Strasse as far as the Tiergarten. It was never good to pay too much attention to rumours in Berlin for the simple reason that these were usually true.
I stood by the statue of Goethe and waited. After a while I heard a 109 quite low in the sky as it headed south-east toward the airfield at Tempelhof; and then another. For anyone who’d been in Russia, it was an instantly recognizable and reassuring sound, like an enormous but friendly lion yawning in an empty cave and quite different from the noise of the much slower RAF Whitleys that occasionally ploughed through Berlin skies like tractors of death and destruction.
‘Good evening,’ said the man walking toward me. ‘I’m Paul Dickson. The American from the Adlon.’
He hardly needed the introduction. His Old Spice and Virginia tobacco came ahead of him like a motorcycle outrider with a pennant on his mudguard. Solid footsteps bespoke sturdy wing-tip shoes that could have ferried him across the Delaware. The hand that pumped mine was part of a body that still consumed nutritious food. His sweet and minty breath smelled of real toothpaste and testified to his having access to a dentist with teeth in his head who was still a decade off retirement. And while it was dark I could almost feel his tan. As we exchanged cigarettes and conversational bromides, I wondered if the real reason Berliners disliked Americans was less to do with Roosevelt and his anti-German rhetoric and more to do with their better health, their better hair, their better clothes and their altogether better lives.
‘Willy said you’ve just come back from the front,’ he said, speaking German that was also better than I had expected.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Care to talk about it?’
‘Talking about it is about the only means of committing suicide for which I seem to have the nerve,’ I confessed.
‘I can assure you, sir, I am nothing to do with the Gestapo. If that’s what you’re implying. I dare say that’s exactly what someone who was a Gestapo informer would tell you. But to be quite frank with you there’s nothing they have that I want. Except perhaps a good story. I’d kill for a good story.’
‘Have you killed many?’
‘Frankly, I don’t see how I could have done. As soon as they know I’m an American most Berliners seem to want to hit me. They seem to hold me personally responsible for all the ships we’ve been giving to the British.’
‘Don’t worry; Berliners have never been interested in having a navy,’ I said. ‘That kind of thing matters more in Hamburg and Bremen. In Berlin, you can count yourself lucky that Roosevelt never gave the Tommies any beer or sausage, or you’d be dead by now.’ I pointed toward Potsdamer Platz. ‘Come on. Let’s walk.’
‘Sure,’ he said and followed me south out of the park. ‘Anywhere in particular?’
‘No. But I need a few minutes to address the ball, so to speak.’
‘Golfing man, huh?’
‘I used to play a bit. Before the Nazis. But it’s never really caught on since Hitler. It’s too easy to be bad at it, which is not something Nazis can deal with.’
‘I appreciate your talking to me like this.’
‘I haven’t told you anything yet. Right now I’m still wondering how much I can tell you without feeling like — what was his name? The traitor. Benedict-?’
‘Benedict Arnold?’
‘That’s right.’
We crossed Potsdamer onto Leipziger Platz.
‘I hope we’re not headed for the Press Club,’ said Dickson. ‘I’d feel like a bit of a fool if you took me in there to tell me your story.’ He pointed at a door on the other side of the square where several official-looking cars were parked. ‘I hear all kinds of bullshit in that place.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘Doctor Froehlich, the Propaganda Ministry’s liaison officer for the American media, he is always summoning us in there for special press conferences to announce yet another decisive victory for German forces against the Red Army. Him or one of those other doctors. Brauweiler or Dietrich. The doctors of deceit, that’s what we call them.’
‘Not forgetting the biggest deceiver of them all,’ I said. ‘Doctor Goebbels.’
Dickson laughed bitterly. ‘It’s got so bad that when my own doctor says there’s nothing wrong with me I just don’t believe him.’
‘You can believe him. You’re American. Provided you don’t do anything stupid, like declare war on Russia, most of you should live for ever.’
Dickson followed me across to Wertheim’s department store. In the moonlight you could see the huge map of the Soviet Union that occupied the main window, so that any patriotic German might look at it and follow the heroic progress of our brave armed forces. It wasn’t like there was anything else in the store to put in the window. When the place had been owned and run by Jews it had been the best store in Germany. Now it was little better than a warehouse, and an empty one at that. The shop assistants spent most of their time gossiping and ignoring the spectators — you could hardly call them customers — who wandered around the store in search of merchandise that simply wasn’t there. Even the elevators weren’t working.
There was no one on the sidewalk in front of the window and it seemed as good a place as any to tell the American radio journalist the truth about our great patriotic war against the Russians and the Jews.
‘Give me another one of your cigarettes. If I’m going to cough up the whole story I want something inside me to help it along.’
He handed me an almost full pack of American cigarettes and told me to keep it. I lit one quickly and let the nicotine go and play in my brain. For a moment I felt giddy and light-headed like it was the first time I ever smoked. But that was how it should have been. It wouldn’t have been right to have told Dickson about the police battalions and resettlement and special actions and the Minsk ghetto and pits that were full of dead Jews without feeling a little sick inside.
Which is exactly what I told him.
‘And you saw all of this?’ Now it was Dickson who sounded sick inside.
‘I’m a captain in the SD,’ I said. ‘I saw it all.’
‘Jesus. It’s hard to believe.’
‘You wanted to know. I told you. That’s how it is. Worse than you could possibly imagine. When they don’t let you go somewhere it’s because they can’t boast about what they’re doing. You could have worked it out for yourself. I’d be there right now but for the fact that I’m a bit particular about who I pull the trigger on. They sent me home, in disgrace. I’m lucky they didn’t send me to a punishment battalion.’
‘You were in the SD?’ Dickson sounded just a bit nervous.
‘Correct.’
