have answered. We get all sorts of rats round here at night.’ So saying she picked up a large sheet of plywood from off the couch, and for a moment in the gloom of the place I thought she was working on a jigsaw-puzzle. Then I saw the numerous packets of Olleschau cigarette papers, the bags of butts, the piles of salvaged tobacco, and the serried ranks of re-rolls.
I sat down on the couch, took out my Winston and offered her one.
‘Thanks,’ she said grudgingly, and threaded the cigarette behind her ear. ‘I’ll smoke it later.’ But I didn’t doubt that she would sell it with the rest.
‘What’s the going rate for one of those re-cycled nails?’
‘About 5 marks,’ she said. ‘I pay my collectors five US for 150 tips. That rolls about twenty good ones. Sell them for about ten US. What, are you writing an article about it for the
‘Yes, I do.’
‘You may as well know that when the American MPs came to tell me he’d been arrested, I was glad. I could forgive him for deserting me, but not our son.’
There was no telling if Frau Becker had turned witch before or after her husband had jumped his wife’s bail. But on first acquaintance she wasn’t the type to have persuaded me that her absconding husband had made the wrong choice. She had a bitter mouth, prominent lower jaw and small sharp teeth. No sooner had I explained the purpose of my visit than she started to chew the air around my ears. It cost me the rest of my cigarettes to placate her enough to answer my questions.
‘Exactly what happened? Can you tell me?’
‘The MPs said that he shot and killed an American army captain in Vienna. They caught him red-handed apparently. That’s all I was told.’
‘What about this Colonel Poroshin? Do you know anything about him?’
‘You want to know if you can trust him or not. That’s what you want to know. Well, he’s an Ivan,’ she sneered. ‘That’s all you should need to know.’ She shook her head and added, impatiently: ‘Oh, they knew each other here in Berlin because of one of Emil’s rackets. Penicillin, I think it was. Emil said that Poroshin caught syphilis off some girl he was keen on. More like the other way round, I thought. Anyway this was the worst kind of syphilis: the sort that makes you swell up. Salvarsan didn’t seem to work. Emil got them some penicillin. Well, you know how rare that is, the good stuff I mean. That could be one reason why Poroshin’s trying to help Emil. They’re all the same, these Russians. It’s not just their brains that are in their balls. It’s their hearts too. Poroshin’s gratitude comes straight from his scrotum.’
‘And another reason?’
Her brow darkened.
‘You said that could be one reason.’
‘Well of course. It can’t simply be a matter of pulling Poroshin’s tail out of the fire, can it? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Emil had been spying for him.’
‘Got any evidence for that? Did he see much of Poroshin when he was still here in Berlin?’
‘I can’t say he did, I can’t say he didn’t.’
‘But he’s not charged with anything besides murder. He’s not been charged with spying.’
‘What would be the point? They’ve got enough to hang him as it is.’
‘That’s not the way it works. If he had been spying, they would have wanted to know everything. Those American MPs would have asked you a lot of questions about your husband’s associates. Did they?’
She shrugged. ‘Not that I can remember.’
‘If there was any suspicion of spying they would have investigated it, if only to find out what sort of information he might have got hold of. Did they search this place?’
Frau Becker shook her head. ‘Either way, I hope he hangs,’ she said bitterly. ‘You can tell him that if you see him. I certainly won’t.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘A year ago. He came back from a Soviet POW camp in July and he legged it three months later.’
‘And when was he captured?’
‘February 1943, at Briansk.’ Her mouth tightened. ‘To think that I waited three years for that man. All those other men who I turned away. I kept myself for him, and look what happened.’ A thought seemed to occur to her. ‘There’s your evidence for spying, if you need any. How was it that he managed to get himself released, eh? Answer me that. How did he get home when so many others are still there?’
I stood up to leave. Perhaps the situation with my own wife made me more inclined to take Becker’s part. But I had heard enough to realize that he would need all the help he could get -possibly more, if this woman had anything to do with it.
I said: ‘I was in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp myself, Frau Becker. For less time than your husband, as it happens. It didn’t make me a spy. Lucky maybe, but not a spy.’ I went to the door, opened it, and hesitated. ‘Shall I tell you what it did make me? With people like the police, with people like you, Frau Becker, with people like my own wife, who’s hardly let me touch her since I came home. Shall I tell you what it made me? It made me unwelcome.’
6
It is said that a hungry dog will eat a dirty pudding. But hunger doesn’t just affect your standards of hygiene. It also dulls the wits, blunts the memory – not to mention the sex-drive – and generally produces a feeling of listlessness. So it was no surprise to me that there had been a number of occasions during the course of 1947 when, with senses pinched from want of nourishment, I had nearly met with an accident. It was for this very reason I decided to reflect upon my present, rather irrational inclination, which was to take Becker’s case after all, with the benefit of a full stomach.
Formerly Berlin’s finest, most famous hotel, the Adlon was now little more than a ruin. Somehow it remained open to guests, with fifteen available rooms which, because it was in the Soviet sector, were usually taken by Russian officers. A small restaurant not only survived in the basement, but did brisk business too, a result of it being exclusive to Germans with food coupons who might therefore lunch or dine there without fear of being thrown off a table in favour of some more obviously affluent Americans or British, as happened in most other Berlin restaurants.
The Adlon’s improbable entrance was underneath a pile of rubble on Wilhelmstrasse, only a short distance away from the Fuhrerbunker where Hitler had met his death, and which could be toured for the price of a couple of cigarettes in the hand of any one of the policemen who were supposed to keep people out of it. All Berlin’s bulls were doubling as touts since the end of the war.
I ate a late lunch of lentil soup, turnip ‘hamburger’ and tinned fruit; and having sufficiently turned over Becker’s problem in my metabolized mind, I handed over my coupons and went up to what passed for the hotel reception desk to use the telephone.
My call to the Soviet Military Authority, the SMA, in Karlshorst was connected quickly enough, but I seemed to wait forever to be put through to Colonel Poroshin. Nor did speaking in Russian speed the progress of my call; it merely earned me a look of suspicion from the hotel porter. When finally I got through to Poroshin he seemed genuinely pleased that I had changed my mind and told me that I should wait by the picture of Stalin on Unter den Linden, where his staff car would collect me in fifteen minutes.
The afternoon had turned as raw as a boxer’s lip and I stood in the door of the Adlon for ten minutes before heading back up the small service stairs and towards the top of the Wilhelmstrasse. Then, with the Brandenburg Gate at my back, I walked up to the house-sized picture of the Comrade Chairman that dominated the centre of the avenue, flanked by two smaller plinths, each bearing the Soviet hammer and sickle.
As I waited for the car, Stalin seemed to watch me, a sensation which, I supposed, was intended: the eyes were as deep, black and unpleasant as the inside of a postman’s boot, and under the cockroach moustaches the
