Berlin Noir

He blinked crapulously and then stared malevolently at me and my newspaper before snatching it from my hands.

He was a hill-tribesman type, a big stupid Chechen with almond-shaped black eyes, a gnarled jaw as broad as the steppes and a chest like an upturned church-bell: the kind of Ivan we made jokes about – how they didn’t know what lavatories were and how they put their food in the toilet bowls thinking that they were refrigerators (some of these stories were even true).

‘Lzhy (lies),’ he snarled, brandishing the paper in front of him, his open, drooling mouth showing great yellow kerbstones of teeth. Putting his boot on the seat beside me, he leaned closer. ‘Lganyo,’ he repeated in tones lower than the smell of sausage and beer which his breath carried to my helplessly flaring nostrils. He seemed to sense my disgust and rolled the idea of it around in his grizzled head like a boiled sweet. Dropping the Telegraf to the floor he held out his horny hand.

‘ Ya hachoo padarok,’ he said, and then slowly in German,‘… I want present.’

I grinned at him, nodding like an idiot, and realized that I was going to have to kill him or be killed myself. ‘Padarok,’ I repeated. ‘Padarok.’

I stood up slowly and, still grinning and nodding, gently pulled back the sleeve of my left arm to reveal my bare wrist. The Ivan was grinning too by now, thinking he was on to a good thing. I shrugged.

‘Oo menya nyet chasov,’ I said, explaining that I didn’t have a watch to give him.

‘Shto oo vas yest (what have you got)?’

‘Nichto,’ I said, shaking my head and inviting him to search my coat pockets. ‘Nothing.’

‘Shto oo vas yest? he said again, more loudly this time.

It was, I reflected, like me talking to poor Dr Novak, whose wife I had been able to confirm was indeed being held by the MVD. Trying to discover what he could trade.

‘Nichto,’ I repeated.

The grin disappeared from the Ivan’s face. He spat on the carriage floor.

‘Vroon (liar),’ he growled, and pushed me on the arm.

I shook my head and told him that I wasn’t lying.

He reached to push me again, only this time he checked his hand and took hold of the sleeve with his dirty finger and thumb. ‘Doraga (expensive),’ he said, appreciatively, feeling the material.

I shook my head, but the coat was black cashmere – the sort of coat I had no business wearing in the Zone – and it was no use arguing: the Ivan was already unbuckling his belt.

‘Ya hachoo vashi koyt,’ he said, removing his own well-patched greatcoat. Then, stepping to the other side of the carriage, he flung open the door and informed me that either I could hand over the coat or he would throw me off the train.

I had no doubt that he would throw me out whether I gave him my coat or not. It was my turn to spit.

‘Nu, nyelzya (nothing doing),’ I said. ‘You want this coat? You come and get it, you stupid fucking svinya, you ugly, dumb kryestyan’in. Come on, take it from me, you drunken bastard.’

The Ivan snarled angrily and picked up his carbine from the seat where he had left it. That was his first mistake. Having seen him signal to the engine-driver by firing his weapon out of the window, I knew that there could not be a live cartridge in the breech. It was a deductive process he made only a moment behind me, but by the time he was working the bolt action a second time I had buried the toe of my boot in his groin.

The carbine clattered to the floor as the Ivan doubled over painfully, and with one hand reached between his legs: with the other he lashed out hard, catching me an agonizing blow on the thigh that left my leg feeling as dead as mutton.

As he straightened up again I swung with my right, and found my fist caught firmly in his big paw. He snatched at my throat and I headbutted him full in the face, which made him release my fist as he instinctively cupped his turnip-sized nose. I swung again and this time he ducked and seized me by the coat lapels. That was his second mistake, but for a brief, puzzled half-second I did not realize it. Unaccountably he cried out and staggered back from me, his hands raised in the air in front of him like a scrubbed-up surgeon, his lacerated fingertips pouring with blood. It was only then that I remembered the razor-blades I had sewn under my lapels many months before, for just this eventuality.

My flying tackle carried him crashing to the floor and half a torso’s length beyond the open door of the fast- moving train. Lying on his bucking legs I struggled to prevent the Ivan pulling himself back into the carriage. Hands that were sticky with blood clawed at my face and then fastened desperately round my neck. His grip tightened and I heard the air gurgle from my own throat like the sound of an espresso-machine.

I punched him hard under the chin, not once but several times, and then pressed the heel of my hand against it as I sought to push him back into the racing night air. The skin on my forehead tightened as I gasped for breath.

A terrible roaring filled my ears, as if a grenade had burst directly in front of my face, and, for a second his fingers seemed to loosen. I lunged at his head and connected with the empty space that was now mercifully signalled by an abruptly terminated stump of bloody human vertebra. A tree, or perhaps a telegraph pole, had neatly decapitated him.

My chest a heaving sack of rabbits, I collapsed back into the carriage, too exhausted to yield to the wave of nausea that was beginning to overtake me. But after only a few seconds more I could no longer resist it and, summoned forward by the sudden contraction of my stomach, I vomited copiously over the dead soldier’s body.

It was several minutes before I felt strong enough to tip the corpse out of the door, with the carbine quickly following. I picked the Ivan’s malodorous greatcoat off the seat to throw it out as well, but the weight of it made me hesitate. Searching the pockets I found a Czechoslovakian-made.38 automatic, a handful of wristwatches – probably all stolen – and a half-empty bottle of Moscowskaya. After deciding to keep the gun and the watches, I uncorked the vodka, wiped the neck, and raised the bottle to the freezing night-sky.

‘Alia rasi bo sun (God save you),’ I said, and swallowed a generous mouthful. Then I flung the bottle and the greatcoat off the train and closed the door.

Back at the railway station snow floated in the air like fragments of lint and collected in small ski-slopes in the angle between the station wall and the road. It was colder than it had been all week and the sky was heavy with the threat of something worse. A fog lay on the white streets like cigar smoke drifting across a well starched tablecloth. Close by, a streetlight burned with no great intensity, but it was still bright enough to light up my face for the scrutiny of a British soldier staggering home with several bottles of beer in each hand. The bemused grin of intoxication on his face changed to something more circumspect as he caught sight of me, and he swore with what sounded like fright.

I limped quickly past him and heard the sound of a bottle breaking on the road as it slipped from nervous fingers. It suddenly occurred to me that my hands and face were covered with the Ivan’s blood, not to mention my own. I must have looked like Julius Caesar’s last toga.

Ducking into a nearby alley I washed myself with some snow. It seemed to remove not only the blood but the skin as well, and probably left my face looking every bit as red as before. My icy toilette completed, I walked on, as smartly as I was able, and reached home without further adventure.

It had gone midnight by the time I shouldered open my front door – at least it was easier getting in than out. Expecting my wife to be in bed, I was not surprised to find the apartment in darkness, but when I went into the bedroom I saw that she was not there.

I emptied my pockets and prepared for bed.

Laid out on the dressing-table, the Ivan’s watches – a Rolex, a Mickey Mouse, a gold Patek and a Doxas – were all working and adjusted to within a minute or two of each other. But the sight of so much accurate time- keeping seemed only to underline Kirsten’s lateness. I might have been concerned for her but for the suspicion I held as to where she was and what she was doing, and the fact that I was worn through to my tripe.

My hands trembling with fatigue, my cortex aching as if I had been pounded with a meat-tenderizer, I crawled