That night I lay on my bed thinking about Cassells’ request. I’d promised to give him my answer the next day. I felt rushed, pressured. The disclosures about Eve were so totally unexpected that I couldn’t marshal my thoughts. What I couldn’t puzzle out was Cassells’ interest. Why did the British Secret Service want her back if she was the ‘minor agent of a defeated enemy’? He said they didn’t want to punish her; the war was over, she was doing her duty as a German citizen no matter how misplaced her loyalty. But they wanted to know why she was still transmitting to Berlin. And who was on the receiving end. Why did she flee to Berlin? To get away from her pursuers or to join up with her old network? If so, what were they up to? Was this some last-gasp Nazi group that wouldn’t surrender? Cornered SS trying to flee the country?
Cassells had appealed to my sense of duty, without realising that I’d worn my allegiance down to the stub. I was sick of the lot of them. Tired of rationing and restrictions, fed up to the back teeth with secretive bureaucrats meddling in people’s lives. Sickened by wars and their aftermath: refugees and orphans, innocents raped and killed. God help us, we were already talking of the new threat; our former allies had opportunistically stolen half of Europe while we were otherwise engaged. Uncle Joe was beginning to look as bad as Adolf when it came to grabbing land that wasn’t his.
I hated my job: the petty crimes and jealousies, the rages and brutality, the infidelities and lies that made up my daily diet. They didn’t pay me enough to absorb all their frailties and transgressions.
And it seemed I was pretty useless at picking women. Falling for a ghost six months ago, carrying a torch for a snooty accomplice to murder, and now fixating over a German spy. Eve had lied to me; had she been using me too? Had she been faking what I saw in her eyes and the way her body responded? Had I been on the receiving end of the artifices of a consummate Mata Hari? Why pick me? I had nothing to tell her, no secrets to be revealed on her pillow.
A few weeks ago I had found an old map of Scotland sticking out of a pile of rubbish left out for the dustbin men. I dusted it down and bought a cheap glass frame for it. It now hung on my office wall to remind me of my roots. I walked over to it and scoured the empty spaces of the Highlands and the Outer Hebrides.
Maybe I should buy a one-way ticket to the Shetlands and take up poteen-making?
Wrapped in a tartan plaid, striding the glens with my faithful collie bounding over the heather, rounding up my sheep. A hard pure life, living off mutton and tatties, washed down by my own hooch. Bliss.
Who was I kidding? I’d go mad within a fortnight. And what about Eve? Could I forget her that easily? How would I live without knowing what happened to her?
Whether she was dead or alive. Whether she was a spy – and why. And of course, finally and selfishly, whether she loved me. That’s all that really counted. I couldn’t give a toss whose side she was on, as long as it was mine. And I had to find out.
Next day I phoned Cassells and told him I’d do it. He seemed less enthusiastic than I expected. But he agreed to put the wheels in motion to get me into that divided city, to pick among the ruins for my lover, the German spy.
FOURTEEN
Cassells offered me a choice. I could follow Eve by ferry and overnight military train into Charlottenburg station, the rail terminal in the British Sector. But it was faster by air, if they had a spare seat. They were running a shuttle service out of RAF Northolt to Berlin. A brace of Avro Yorks was plying the route. The York was a fairly new passenger plane using the trusty Lancaster’s wings, engines, tail and wheel assembly wrapped round a wider fuselage. There were no nose or tail gun blisters on this craft, just a line of portholes running the length of the plane under each wing. The planes ferried forces mail and senior officers into Germany’s heart.
I spoke to the pilot before we took off. His RAF tunic was plastered with medal ribbons from bombing trips that had stopped only eighteen months ago. He said he still tensed his buttocks as he flew over cities, waiting for flak to erupt through the thin skin of the Lancaster and mess up his bowels. He’d only recently stopped putting an upturned tin hat under his seat. But it was nicer doing the trip in daylight under your own steam, instead of trying to hold position in an armada of two hundred bombers. Nice too, to land and get a cuppa at the other end instead of dropping your stick of incendiaries into the inferno below and going straight back.
The only problem was the Russians, he explained. “The Reds won’t let us fly over their turf. The route we take is an air tunnel. Everything outside the city and for about seventy miles to the west of us is under Russian jurisdiction. Pain in the arse. You wouldn’t think we’d fought on the same side. Thank god the Americans got the south west. At least we have Templehof.”
Besides the pilot, navigator and radio man, there were eight Army brass and two big sacks of mail for our garrison. The racket from the four Merlin engines at take-off was deafening, but dropped to a steady comforting drone after we were airborne. The Army types had documents to read, or kip to catch up on, and left me to it. I had a front seat just behind and below the raised deck where the pilot sat.
As the plane rumbled through the air, I thought of the landfall ahead. My dream back in ’42 – and that of most of the blokes I’d fought with – was to march into Berlin after giving the Germans a bloody good hiding. But weeks before D-Day, my war had been rudely interrupted. As a reluctant guest of the Gestapo I had indeed ended up in Germany, far to the south, the soft south, among the rolling hills of Bavaria. Not that I saw much of the pretty countryside, or rosy-cheeked frauleins and thigh-slapping men in lederhosen. I was tucked away on the outskirts of a dozing village outside Munich, a village that had survived eight hundred years without anything more important happening than a failed cabbage harvest. Until the Nazi master bakers arrived with barbed wire and an unusually large set of ovens.
I was finally going to see Berlin, the pre-war capital of louche, but it left me curiously flat. I’d seen pictures of the city in Pathй News at the Odeon. The streets full of flag-waving loonies saluting a funny-looking bloke with a bad shave. The buildings built to last: heavy stone, four and five storeys high, with balconies sprouting haphazardly. Lots of trees down wide boulevards sprinkled with outdoor cafйs, and an overhead railway. A solid respectable place that just happened to be home to the world’s biggest megalomaniac.
Hitler knew his Berliners. He knew that underneath the stuffy demeanour lay suppressed passions. I’d read Isherwood of course. He’d made Berlin sound racy and degenerate beneath the decorous surface. All those private bars and streets lined with smiling prostitutes, female and male. I wondered how much of it was left after the Russians arrived with vengeance in their heart and lust in their loins.
I whiled away the three hours with a German dictionary and notepad and pencil, trying to fill the many gaps in my language. From time to time I broke off to do further translations of Eve’s notebook – I still couldn’t think of her as Ava – using a teach-yourself guide to Gabelsberger’s shorthand. One phrase cropped up twice in her most recent stuff. She mentioned Berlin and something called a hellish door. Code words? The entrance to somewhere fearful? Or just my bad translation.
The captain announced we were beginning our descent. I peered out of the Perspex window just as we broke through the last of the summer clouds. The city sprawled out below and we could see the destruction on all sides. The RAF had done us proud. It made the Blitz look half-hearted. For a second I almost felt sorry for the poor bastards, then I remembered that it was the same poor bastards who’d set up a thousand concentration camps across Europe. This wasn’t a handful of psychopaths in black uniforms keeping a peaceful citizenry in their thrall; this whole nation had got right behind their Fuehrer with unbounded enthusiasm for getting rid of the untermensch. And their unter women and kids. Still…
I couldn’t see a complete block of buildings intact. There were odd patches of green where the city parks had been, but they were pockmarked and treeless. Only stumps and felled trunks remained to remind Berliners of their shady walks. The roads seemed clear though. The rubble had been bulldozed into neat piles ready for rebuilding. It would keep a few brickies in work for the foreseeable.
We made a last bank over the city and straightened up. Ahead was Templehof airport, a great semi-circle of Doric columns and portals. Very Albert Speer.
Just the thing for those torchlight parades. In front of it, embraced by the arms of the airport buildings, was the runway itself, with parked planes littering the central area.
Templehof was right in the heart of the city. It seemed too small to take our plane. As if we would run out of runway and plough into the streets all round it. I could see some tanks and ack-ack guns along the southern
