the war. It’s quite comprehensive. They’ve got the complete NSDAP membership records, which makes it easy to find out when people lie on their denazification questionnaires. I’ll bet they’ve even got your name there somewhere.’
‘Like I said, I was never a Party member.’
‘No,’ he grinned, ‘of course not.’ Poroshin took the file and returned it to the filing cabinet. ‘You were only obeying orders.’
It was plain he didn’t believe me any more than he believed that I was unable to decipher St Cyril’s Byzantine alphabet: in that at least he would have been justified.
‘And now, if you have no more questions, I really must leave you. I am due at the State Opera in the Admiralspalast in half an hour.’ He took off his belt and, yelling the names of Yeroshka and Jegoroff, slipped into his tunic.
‘Have you ever been to Vienna?’ he asked, fixing the cross belt under his epaulette.
‘No, never.’
“The people are just like the architecture,‘ he said, inspecting his appearance in the window’s reflection. ’They are all front. Everything that’s interesting about them seems to be on the surface. Inside they’re very different. Now there’s a people I could really work with. All Viennese were born to be spies.‘
7
‘You were late again last night,’ I said.
‘I didn’t wake you, did I?’ She slid naked out of bed and went over to the full-length mirror in the corner of our bedroom. ‘Anyway, you were kind of late yourself the other night.’ She started to examine her body. ‘It’s so nice having a warm house again. Where on earth did you find the coal?’
‘A client.’
Watching her standing there, stroking her pubic hair and flattening her stomach with the palm of her hand, lifting her breasts, scrutinizing her tight, finely-lined mouth with its waxy sheen, concave cheeks and shrinking gums, and finally twisting around to assess her gently sagging bottom, her bony hand with the rings on the fingers slightly looser than before, pulling at the flesh of one buttock, I didn’t need to be told what was going through her mind. She was an attractive, mature woman intent on making full use of what time she had left.
Feeling hurt and irritated, I jack-knifed out of bed to find my leg buckling beneath me.
‘You look fine,’ I said wearily, and limped into the kitchen.
‘That sounds a little short for a love sonnet,’ she called out.
There were some more PX goods on the kitchen table: a couple of cans of soup, a bar of real soap, a few saccharine cards and a packet of condoms.
Still naked, Kirsten followed me into the kitchen and watched me examining her haul. Was it just the one American? Or were there more?
‘I see you’ve been busy again,’ I said, picking up the packet of Parisians. ‘How many calories are these?’
She laughed behind her hand. ‘The manager keeps a load under the counter.’ She sat down on a chair. ‘I thought it would be nice. You know, it’s been quite a while since we did anything.’
She let her thighs yawn as if to let me see a little more of her. ‘There’s time now, if you want.’
It was quickly done, expedited with an almost professional nonchalance on her part, as if she had been administering an enema. No sooner had I finished than she was heading towards the bathroom with hardly a blush on her cheek, carrying the used Parisian as if it were a dead mouse she had found under the bed.
Half an hour later, dressed and ready to leave for work, she paused in the sitting-room where I had stoked the ashes in the stove and was now adding some more coal. For a moment she watched me bring the fire to life again.
‘You’re good at that,’ she said. I couldn’t tell whether any sarcasm was intended. Then she gave me a peremptory kiss and went out.
The morning was colder than a mohel’s knife, and I was glad to start the day in a reading library on Hardenbergstrasse. The library assistant was a man with a mouth so badly scarred that it was impossible to say where his lips were until he started to speak.
‘No,’ he said, in a voice that belonged properly to a sea-lion, ‘there are no books about the BDC. But there have been a couple of newspaper articles published in the last few months. One in the
He collected his crutches and shouldered his one-legged way to a cabinet housing a large card-index where, as he had remembered, he found references for both these articles: one, published in the
I thanked the assistant, who told me where to find the library’s copies of both publications.
‘Lucky for you that you came today,’ he said. ‘I’m travelling to Giessen tomorrow, to have my artificial leg fitted.’
Reading the articles I realized that I had never thought the Americans were capable of such efficiency. Admittedly, there had been a certain amount of luck involved in the accumulation of some of the Centre’s documentary collections. For example, troops of the US Seventh Army had stumbled on the complete Nazi Party membership records at a paper mill near Munich, where they were about to be pulped. But staff at the Centre had set about the creation and organization of the most comprehensive archive, so that it could be determined with complete accuracy exactly who was a Nazi. As well as the NSDAP master files, the Centre included in its collection the NSDAP membership applications, Party correspondence, SS service records, Reich Security Office records, SS racial records, proceedings of the Supreme Party Court and the People’s Court – everything from the membership files of the National Socialist Schoolteachers’ Organization to a file detailing expulsions from the Hitler Youth.
Another thought occurred to me as I left the library and made my way to the railway station. I would never have believed that the Nazis could have been stupid enough to have recorded their own activities in such comprehensive and incriminating detail.
I left the U-Bahn – a stop too early as it turned out – at a station in the American sector which, for no reason to do with their occupation of the city, was called Uncle Tom’s Hut, and walked down Argentinische Allee.
Surrounded by the tall fir trees of the Grunewald, and only a short distance from a small lake, the Berlin Documents Centre stood in well-guarded grounds at the end of Wasserkafersteig, a cobblestoned cul-de-sac. Inside a wire fence the Centre comprised a number of buildings, but the main part of the BDC appeared to be a two-storey affair at the end of a raised pathway, painted white and with green shutters on the windows. It was a nice-looking place, although I soon remembered it as the headquarters of the old Forschungsamt – the Nazis’ telephone-tapping centre.
The soldier at the gatehouse, a big, gap-toothed Negro, eyed me suspiciously as I halted at his checkpoint. He was probably more used to dealing with people in cars, or military vehicles, than with a lone pedestrian.
‘What do you want, Fritzy?’ he said, clapping his woolly gloves together and stamping his boots to keep warm.
‘I was a friend of Captain Linden’s,’ I said in my halting English. ‘I have just heard the terrible news, and I came to say how sorry my wife and I were. He was kind to us both. Gave us PX, you know.’ From my pocket I produced the short letter I had composed on the train. ‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to deliver this to Colonel Helm.’
The soldier’s tone changed immediately.
‘Yes sir, I’ll give it to him.’ He took the letter and regarded it awkwardly. ‘Very kind of you to think of him.’
‘It is just a few marks, for some flowers,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘And a card. My wife and I wanted something on Captain Linden’s grave. We would go to the funeral if it was in Berlin, but we thought that his family would be taking him home.’
‘Well, no, sir,’ he said. ‘The funeral’s in Vienna, this Friday morning. Family wanted it that way. Less trouble
