Berlin Noir

He shook his head.

‘Then there’s also the matter of my own fee.’

‘What would you suggest?’

I nodded at his briefcase. ‘What have you got?’

‘Just papers, I’m afraid.’

‘You must have something. Think. Perhaps something at your hotel.’

He lowered his head and uttered another sigh as he tried to recall a possession that might be of some value.

‘Look, Herr Doktor, have you asked yourself what you will do if it turns out your wife is being held by the Russians?’

‘Yes,’ he said gloomily, his eyes glazing over for a moment.

This was sufficiently articulate. Things did not look good for Frau Novak.

‘Wait a moment,’ he said, dipping his hand inside the breast of his coat, and coming up with a gold fountain- pen. ‘There’s this.’

He handed me the pen. ‘It’s a Parker. Eighteen carat.’

I quickly appraised its worth. ‘About fourteen hundred dollars on the black market,’ I said. ‘Yes, that’ll take care of Ivan. They love fountain-pens almost as much as they love watches.’ I raised my eyebrows suggestively.

‘I’m afraid I couldn’t part with my watch,’ said Novak. ‘It was a present – from my wife.’ He smiled thinly as he perceived the irony.

I nodded sympathetically and decided to move things along before guilt got the better of him.

‘Now, as to my own fee. You mentioned metallurgy. You wouldn’t happen to have access to a laboratory, would you?’

‘But of course.’

‘And a smelter?’

He nodded thoughtfully, and then more vigorously as the light dawned. ‘You want some coal, don’t you?’

‘Can you get some?’

‘How much do you want?’

‘Fifty kilos would be about right.’

‘Very well.’

‘Be back here in twenty-four hours,’ I told him. ‘I should have some information by then.’

Thirty minutes later, after leaving a note for my wife, I was out of the apartment and on my way to the railway station.

In late 1947 Berlin still resembled a colossal Acropolis of fallen masonry and ruined edifice, a vast and unequivocal megalith to the waste of war and the power of 75,000 tonnes of high explosive. Unparalleled was the destruction that had been rained on the capital of Hitler’s ambition: devastation on a Wagnerian scale with the Ring come full circle – the final illumination of that twilight of the gods.

In many parts of the city a street map would have been of little more use than a window-cleaner’s leather. Main roads meandered like rivers around high banks of debris. Footpaths wound precipitously over shifting mountains of treacherous rubble which sometimes, in wanner weather, yielded a clue unmistakable to the nostrils that something other than household furniture was buried there.

With compasses in short supply you needed a lot of nerve to find your way along facsimile streets on which only the fronts of shops and hotels remained standing unsteadily like some abandoned film-set; and you needed a good memory for the buildings where people still lived in damp cellars, or more precariously on the lower floors of apartment blocks from which a whole wall had been neatly removed, exposing all the rooms and life inside, like some giant doll’s house: there were few who risked the upper floors, not least because there were so few undamaged roofs and so many dangerous staircases.

Life amidst the wreckage of Germany was frequently as unsafe as it had been in the last days of the war: a collapsing wall here, an unexploded bomb there. It was still a bit of a lottery.

At the railway station I bought what I hoped might just be a winning ticket.

2

That night, on the last train back to Berlin from Potsdam, I sat in a carriage by myself. I ought to have been more careful, only I was feeling pleased with myself for having successfully concluded the doctor’s case: but I was also tired, since this business had taken almost the whole day and a substantial part of the evening.

Not the least part of my time had been taken up in travel. Generally this took two or three times as long as it had done before the war; and what had once been a half-hour’s journey to Potsdam now took nearer two. I was closing my eyes for a nap when the train started to slow, and then juddered to a halt.

Several minutes passed before the carriage-door opened and a large and extremely smelly Russian soldier climbed aboard. He mumbled a greeting at me, to which I nodded politely. But almost immediately I braced myself as, swaying gently on his huge feet, he unslung his Mosin Nagant carbine and operated the bolt action. Instead of pointing it at me, he turned and fired his weapon out of the carriage window, and after a brief pause my lungs started to move again as I realized that he had been signalling to the driver.

The Russian burped, sat down heavily as the train started to move again, swept off his lambskin cap with the back of his filthy hand and, leaning back, closed his eyes.

I pulled a copy of the British-run Telegraf out of my coat-pocket. Keeping one eye on the Ivan, I pretended to read. Most of the news was about crime: rape and robbery in the Eastern Zone were as common as the cheap vodka which, as often as not, occasioned their commission. Sometimes it seemed as if Germany was still in the bloody grip of the Thirty Years’ War.

I knew just a handful of women who could not describe an incident in which they had been raped or molested by a Russian. And even if one makes an allowance for the fantasies of a few neurotics, there was still a staggering number of sex-related crimes. My wife knew several girls who had been attacked only quite recently, on the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. One of these girls, raped by no less than five Red Army soldiers at a police station in Rangsdorff, and infected with syphilis as a result, tried to bring criminal charges, but found herself subjected to a forcible medical examination and charged with prostitution. But there were also some who said that the Ivans merely took by force that which German women were only too willing to sell to the British and the Americans.

Complaints to the Soviet Kommendatura that you had been robbed by Red Army soldiers were equally in vain. You were likely to be informed that ‘all the German people have is a gift from the people of the Soviet Union’. This was sufficient sanction for indiscriminate robbery throughout the Zone, and you were sometimes lucky if you survived to report the matter. The depredations of the Red Army and its many deserters made travel in the Zone only slightly less dangerous than a flight on the Hindenburg. Travellers on the Berlin- Magdeburg railway had been stripped naked and thrown off the train; and the road from Berlin to Leipzig was so dangerous that vehicles often drove in convoy: the Telegraf had reported a robbery in which four boxers, on their way to a fight in Leipzig, had been held up and robbed of everything except their lives. Most notorious of all were the seventy-five robberies committed by the Blue Limousine Gang, which had operated on the Berlin-Michendorf road, and which had included among its leaders the vice-president of the Soviet- controlled Potsdam police.

To people who were thinking of visiting the Eastern Zone, I said ‘don’t’; and then if they still wanted to go, I said ‘Don’t wear a wristwatch – the Ivans like to steal them; don’t wear anything but your oldest coat and shoes – the Ivans like quality; don’t argue or answer back – the Ivans don’t mind shooting you; if you must talk to them speak loudly of American fascists; and don’t read any newspaper except their own Taegliche Rundschau.’

This was all good advice and I would have done well to have taken it myself, for suddenly the Ivan in my carriage was on his feet and standing unsteadily over me.

‘Vi vihodeetye (are you getting off)?’ I asked him.