smile was hard permafrost. It always amazed me that there were people who referred to this murdering monster as ‘Uncle’ Joe: he seemed to me to be about as avuncular as King Herod.
Poroshin’s car arrived, its engine drowned by the noise of a squadron of YAK 3 fighters passing overhead. I climbed aboard, and rolled helplessly in the back seat as the broad-shouldered, Tatar-faced driver hit the BMW’s accelerator, sending the car speeding east towards Alexanderplatz, and beyond to the Frankfurter Allee and Karlshorst.
‘I always thought that German civilians were forbidden to ride in staff cars,’ I said to the driver in Russian.
‘True,’ he said, ‘but the colonel said that if we are stopped I’m just to say that you’re being arrested.’
The Tatar laughed uproariously at my look of obvious alarm, and I could only console myself with the fact that while we were driving at such a speed, it was unlikely that we could be stopped by anything other than an anti- tank gun.
We reached Karlshorst minutes later.
A villa colony with a steeplechase course, Karlshorst, nick-named ‘the little Kremlin’, was now a completely isolated Russian enclave which Germans could only enter by special permit. Or the kind of pennant on the front of Poroshin’s car. We were waved through several checkpoints and finally drew up alongside the old St Antonius Hospital on Zeppelin Strasse now housing the SMA for Berlin. The car ground to a halt in the shadow of a five- metre-high plinth on top of which was a big red Soviet star. Poroshin’s driver sprang out of his seat, opened my door smartly and, ignoring the sentries, squired me up the steps to the front door. I paused in the doorway for a moment, surveying the shiny new BMW cars and motorcycles in the car park.
‘Someone been shopping?’ I said.
‘From the BMW factory at Eisenbach,’ said my driver proudly. ‘Now Russian.’
With this depressing thought he left me in a waiting-room that smelled strongly of carbolic. The room’s only concession to decoration was another picture of Stalin with a slogan underneath that read: ‘Stalin, the wise teacher and protector of the working people’. Even Lenin, portrayed in a smaller frame alongside the wise one, seemed from his expression to have one or two problems with that particular sentiment.
I met these same two popular faces hanging on the wall of Poroshin’s office on the top floor of the SMA building. The young colonel’s neatly pressed olive-brown tunic was hanging on the back of the glass door, and he was wearing a Circassian-style shirt, belted with a black strap. But for the polish on his soft calf-leather boots he might have passed for a student at Moscow University. He set down his mug and stood up from behind his desk as the Tatar ushered me into his office.
‘Sit down, please, Herr Gunther,’ said Poroshin, pointing at a bentwood chair. The Tatar waited to be dismissed. Poroshin lifted his mug and held it up for my inspection. ‘Would you like some Ovaltine, Herr Gunther?’
‘Ovaltine? No, thanks, I hate the stuff.’
‘Do you?’ He sounded surprised. ‘I love it.’
‘It’s kind of early to be thinking of going to bed, isn’t it?’
Poroshin smiled patiently. ‘Perhaps you would prefer some vodka.’ He pulled open his desk drawer and took out a bottle and a glass, which he placed on the desk in front of me.
I poured myself a large one. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the Tatar rub his thirst with the back of his paw. Poroshin saw it too. He filled another glass and laid it on the filing cabinet so that it was immediately next to the man’s head.
‘You have to train these Cossack bastards like dogs,’ he explained. ‘For them drunkenness is an almost religious ordinance. Isn’t that so, Yeroshka?’
‘Yes, sir,’ he said blankly.
‘He smashed a bar up, assaulted a waitress, punched a sergeant, and but for me he might have been shot. Still might be shot, eh, Yeroshka? The minute you touch that glass without my permission. Understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Poroshin produced a big, heavy revolver and laid it on the desk to emphasize his point. Then he sat down again.
‘I imagine you know quite a lot about discipline with your record, Herr Gunther? Where did you say you served during the war?’
‘I didn’t say.’
He leaned back in his chair and swung his boots on to the desk. The vodka trembled over the edge of my glass as they thudded down on the blotter.
‘No, you didn’t, did you? But I imagine that with your qualifications you would have served in some Intelligence capacity.’
‘What qualifications?’
‘Come now, you’re being too modest. Your spoken Russian, your experience with Kripo. Ah yes, Emil’s lawyer told me about that. I’m told that you and he were once part of the Berlin Murder Commission. And you a Kommissar, too. That’s quite senior, isn’t it?’
I sipped my vodka and tried to keep calm. I told myself that I ought to have expected something like this.
‘I was just an ordinary soldier, obeying orders,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t even a Party member.’
‘So few were, it would now seem. I find that really quite remarkable.’ He smiled and raised a salutary index finger. ‘Be as coy as you like Herr Gunther, but I shall find out about you. Mark my words. If only to satisfy my curiosity.’
‘Sometimes curiosity is a bit like Yeroshka’s thirst,’ I said, ‘ – best left unsatisfied. Unless it’s the disinterested, intellectual kind of curiosity that belongs properly to the philosophers. Answers have a habit of disappointing.’ I finished the glass and laid it on the blotter next to his boots. ‘But I didn’t come here with a cipher in my socks to play your afternoon’s vexed question, Colonel. So how about you feed me with one of those Lucky Strikes you were smoking this morning and satisfy
Poroshin leaned forward and knocked open a silver cigarette box on the desk. ‘Help yourself,’ he said.
I took one and lit it with a fancy silver lighter that was cast in the shape of a field gun; then I looked at it critically, as if judging its value in a pawnshop. He had irritated me and I wanted to kick back at him somehow. ‘You’ve got some nice loot,’ I said. ‘This is a German field gun. Did you buy it, or was there nobody at home when you called?’
Poroshin closed his eyes, snorted a little laugh, then got up and went over to the window. He drew up the sash and unbuttoned his fly. ‘That’s the trouble with drinking all that Ovaltine,’ he said, apparently unperturbed by my attempt to insult him. ‘It goes straight through you.’ When he started to pee, he glanced back across his shoulder at the Tatar who remained standing by the filing cabinet and the glass of vodka which stood on it. ‘Drink it and get out, pig.’
The Tatar didn’t hesitate. He emptied the glass with one jerk of his head and stepped swiftly out of the office, closing the door behind him.
‘If you saw how peasants like him leave the toilets here, you would understand why I prefer to piss out of the window,’ said Poroshin, buttoning himself. He closed the window and resumed his seat. The boots thudded back on to the blotter. ‘My fellow Russians can make life in this sector rather trying at times. Thank God for people like Emil. He is a most amusing man to have around on occasion. And very resourceful too. There is simply nothing that he cannot get hold of. What is the word you have for these black-market types?’
‘Swing Heinis.’
‘Yes, swings. If one wanted entertainment, Emil would be the swing to arrange it.’ He laughed fondly at the thought of him, which was more than I could do. ‘I never met a man who knew so many girls. Of course they are all prostitutes and chocoladies, but that is not such a great crime these days, is it?’
‘It depends on the chocolady,’ I said.
‘Also, Emil is most ingenious at getting things across the border – the Green Frontier you call it, don’t you?’
I nodded. ‘Through the woods.’
‘An accomplished smuggler. He’s made a great deal of money. Until this happened he was living very well in Vienna. A big house, a fine car and an attractive girlfriend.’
