Randall was a pilot who had been flying me places since 1945, and felt more like a brother. I couldn’t imagine my life without him being part of it. I’d got him a job with Halton in 1947: he was one of those big Americans who know how to do bad things well, and good things badly. Bloody fine pilot too, unfussy in his flying – I liked that.
‘I don’t like Germany any more,’ he told me. It was nice to be overflying the country without the Russians trying to knock us down, as they did during the Airlift.
‘Why not, Randall?’
‘They’ve mended it. It was better when it was busted.’
I liked Randall. Liked him a lot. The old Airspeed was beginning to show her age, but Randall loved her. I wasn’t looking forward to the day when I would have to tell him that I was replacing her. He was also a mind-reader. He looked over at me, and grinned.
‘When you retire this old cow I’ll give you a Hershey bar for her.’
Randall did a gentle wingover, and she began to rattle a bit. He started the let-down for Berlin. It would be OK if the cops weren’t around.
Tempelhof used to be the US-run airport at the German end of the Berlin Airlift. Now it was a main aviation hub just like any you could find all over the world. But, being German, it was cleaner. It had its military side, but Randall avoided that as well, and taxied us round to the small group of freight sheds used for internal traffic. I kept my eyes skinned as we bumped around the peri-track, but didn’t spot any customs or police cars. Anyway, I was right about the Oxford: she seemed to bounce down to her wheel stops over every crack in the tarmac. It was time the poor old girl was put out to grass.
Bozey Borland was waiting for us in our nice little black Mercedes saloon. He had replaced the little flag posts which had once flown Nazi flags on the top of each wing. Now they carried small French tricolours, and the car had new registration plates since I’d last sat in it. It had been our first acquisition after we opened the Berlin office. Bozey had won it in a card game; he was my local station manager. We did the Hello you, and Hello you back thing, squeezed Randall into the back, and set off for a small side gate used by the domestic companies.
Bozey said, ‘Turn your collar up, boss, and hunch down in the seat. Close your eyes. You’re a bad-tempered French diplomat who’s had a long and nasty flight.’
‘OK. You’re the boss.’
‘I’m not, actually. You are.’
Before I could get in a riposte Randall said, ‘This bloody dog has just pissed all over my trousers.’
Bozey never went anywhere without his incontinent three-legged dog, Spartacus – although I don’t think the choice was his: the dog knew a soft touch when he saw one, and stuck to Bozey like glue. When we reached the gate, with a battered tin sentry box in which a copper was picking his nose, Bozey wound down his car door window, muttered, ‘Diplomatique!’ and scowled.
The cop sprang to attention. His right arm twitched for the old Jawohl Mein Fuehrer salute, but somehow he managed to hold it down. Then he raised the single pole barrier for us . . . and we were in Berlin. Just like that.
A hundred yards down the road I sat up, and asked Borland, ‘Is that a real word, that diplomatique?’
‘Dunno, boss. It always seems to work. Welcome back to Berlin.’
‘Thanks, Bozey. I’m glad to be here.’ I was too; that was a first. ‘Where did you get the diplomatic plates for the car?’
‘Won ’em in a card game.’ I don’t know why I’d bothered to bleeding ask.
If home is truly where the heart is then my heart is still partly in Berlin – which is odd when you consider that I’d spent a decent chunk of my twentieth year bombing the shit out of it. More specifically, my heart was in a little bar called the Leihhaus – a cross between a nightclub and a brothel. It had been started by a couple of my old friends. For those of you who don’t speak the language of oppression, Leihhaus means pawnshop. I owned a quarter of it now, so did Bozey. Halton Air owned another quarter – although the old man tried to overlook that – and I was never quite sure who owned the rest. I think Bozey had parcelled the remainder out in small packets for sleeping investors. Sleeping investors in a brothel: that’s not bad.
I had a room on the first floor, and Bozey lived in a rather palatial flat round the corner, with his girl Irma. Irma owned a bar across town called the Klapperschlange, which she’d inherited from my mate Tommo after he got his in an air crash in 1949. Irma had been Tommo’s last girlfriend – what goes around, comes around. In the forties we learned to pass men and women around like parcels at a party game, but I wouldn’t let it worry you. I ate a bowl of the stew the Leihhaus was famous for, in the kitchen with Marthe and Otto who ran the place for us, then I went upstairs, and crashed.
When I woke up mid-evening Pete was sitting on the end of my bed, smoking a cheroot.
That was very difficult for me, because Pete was dead.
In fact he’d been dead a few times. The first time he died was when he was blown out of the rear turret of our Lancaster by our own dozy Anti-Aircraft gunners in 1944. Then he turned up in Holland in 1945 with a tale of a miracle escape. Then Tommo told me he had
