She rounded on me, her eyes blazing. “Not nearly enough! Not nearly! Do you think this swine should get away with it? That he should get a nice job and everything is forgiven and forgotten? Is that your morality, Danny?”
Ariel leaned across the table to me, his eyes gleaming through his specs. “Ava – Eve – said you were in Dachau. How can you not want to kill these scum?”
“Because that’s how scum think! That’s what scum do. When does it stop, Ariel?
When the last man’s left standing?”
Eve sat down again. “Do you believe in evil, Danny?”
“As an entity? As some amorphous opposite force to good? No. Do I think some men are evil and are incapable of remorse or contrition? Yes. I’ve seen it.
Experienced it.” I bent my head and parted my hair. They could all see the livid scar that ran through my scalp.
“But you’d let them go on living? Hoping they’ll change, see the light?” she asked.
This was what I still wrestled with. I’d seen humanity at its worst and its best in the camp. Afterwards I’d watched in sickening incomprehension the Pathй News showing the other camps being liberated. My gut reaction was to find every one of the guards and follow up every link in the chain of command and string them up, personally. But in more rational moments, I found myself arguing that enough blood’s been spilt, and revenge leaves an emptiness in the heart. The rational moments were still pretty rare.
I raised my hand to ward off her attack. “No, I don’t think the SS will turn into choir boys. But would shooting him let you sleep easier? I’ve lost my god.
My country has gone to the dogs. And the woman I fell for turns out to be a double agent.” I tried a smile to soften the rhetoric. It came out a grimace.
“The only thing I’m certain about is that there are no certainties. Look where it got Hitler. Eve, I don’t know what’s right and wrong any more. Did I tell you Gambatti offered me a job? I actually gave it serious thought. That’s how far I’ve slid.”
She examined my face for a long time, as though she’d never seen it before, or would never see it again. “You said you were on my side,” she said.
I nodded.
“This is my side.” She put her hands out and touched the nearest shoulders of Joseph and Ariel.
I walked over to the sink and rinsed the cloth. I pressed it on my head. It was beginning to feel easier. I still had questions. Why did Cassells lie to me about Eve? Who’d been following her in London? If it was MI5, were they concerned for Eve or Mulder? Who killed the man I went to meet in the bar? But my poor bashed brain had taken all the news it could absorb for one night. I returned to the table and sat down.
“You know where Mulder is?” I asked. She nodded. “OK, what’s your plan?”
SEVENTEEN
It was too late to try to get back to the British zone. The curfew was in force.
Eve tossed me a blanket and I lay down as best I could on the bare floorboards.
My head hurt no matter how I lay, and I wasn’t ready for sleep. Maybe it was the bad coffee. I listened to the sound of the others’ breathing, easily distinguishing Eve’s in the dark. I wondered what was going through her mind.
Was she wishing we were lying together back at my place? Or had I simply become a nuisance, someone getting in the way of her plans to murder Heinrich Mulder?
Frankly, I wasn’t opposed to his removal. I just didn’t think it would change things. But the repercussions for her could be immense. On the other hand he hadn’t arranged for the death of my parents.
It was a bad night, and a grim morning. I had the world’s worst hangover without any of the pleasure. We made our plans over stale bread and bitter coffee. They gave me back my gun and papers, then Joseph escorted me to the British sector.
The streets were quiet, but it wasn’t the quiet of peace. Mist was clearing from the broken buildings and a wind was stirring the dust and debris. The reek of decay made me gag. There was a feeling that we were only in the lull of battle and that war could break out again at any time.
Vic was waiting for me outside the Tiergarten mess, pacing up and down, smoking like an expectant father. He saw me and came charging over.
“Where the fuck have you been, Danny?” Gone was any pretence at ‘sir’.
I must have looked a sight. My suit was crumpled like a tramp’s, my shirt had blood on it and my tie was in my pocket.
“I had a bit of a run-in with some thugs last night. I’m OK, but that’ll teach me to go out looking for action.”
Vic looked a little mollified. “Looking for a bint, were you? All you had to do was ask old Vic, you know. Any size, any shape. Where did you end up, then? The state of you.”
I tried to look suitably chastened. “Two of them. I got away when a patrol came by. I begged a bed for the night somewhere in the Red zone. An old biddy let me in. Cost me five bucks. I need some breakfast and a wash.”
“The Colonel is waiting for you. But you’d better get cleaned up and fed first.
C’mon.”
Colonel Toby was keen to know what progress I’d made. I expressed disappointment and frustration but vowed to go on trying at least for a few more days. Toby was encouragement personified and urged me to keep my pecker up. I vowed to do so, and left his office wondering how I was going to keep the pretence up and for how long.
“Vic, I need to do this my way. Thanks for your help. I can get around myself now.”
“Sure, Danny. It’s just that I was ordered to look after you. Look what happened when I wasn’t around.”
“My fault. I’ll sign something to get you off the hook if you like. I just want some space. That’s how I work.”
“Tell you what, let’s meet for a drink at the end of each day. That way I can check you’re OK, and maybe I can help too.”
We split up and I went straight back to my room and fell into a coma till early afternoon. I woke a little dazed, but human again. Even the bumps were going down. I dressed and walked out into the hot July sun, feeling amazingly cheerful for someone getting himself involved in an assassination. I was beginning to know my way about, and headed for the entrance to the U-Bahn on Kurfurstendamm.
By the time I found it I was regretting not wearing a hat; my head was frying.
The station gave welcoming shade, but the respite was brief. Beyond expectation, Berlin’s underground was operating again. But because it was one of the few cheap modes of transport left, other than bikes and the rare tram, the station was heaving with sweaty humanity. Strike that; this wasn’t humanity, it was a mob. When the train got in they surged forward and besieged the doors, so that people wanting to get off couldn’t. It was chaos, and every man for himself. I called on my training on the Northern Line and plunged in with elbows and feet.
We shot off into the tunnels, heading east. By the time I fought my way out of the carriage six stops down the line, I was nearly asphyxiated with the stench and heat.
The warm afternoon air was a blessing; I gulped it in hungrily and lit up to get the taste of the journey out of my mouth. I gave uncle Joe a big smile as I left the U- Bahn station and headed towards my rendezvous with Eve in Holzmarktstrasse. I was close to the main station and the river Spree now. The area had taken a lot of hits, but as she promised I found the little cake-house open at the corner of Warschauerstrasse. She was sitting in the cracked window wearing her beret and looking just like the girl I’d left a hundred years ago in the Strand. She even raised a smile for me when I joined her at the table, and we kissed on both cheeks. Berlin suddenly seemed the most welcoming place on earth. All I had to do was talk her out of this mad idea.
“You really speak the language?” she asked in German.
I replied in kind. “Camp Deutsch. I don’t know how it sounds compared to the real stuff.”
