There had been others, but those are the two deaths which stick out in my mind.
Now he was sitting on the end of my bed, and he didn’t smell like a corpse. I hadn’t heard him come in but that wasn’t surprising, because Pete always moved like a ghost anyway. I had seen dead people before, particularly when I was drunk – at big parties my brain often brings back the dead guys I’ve flown and fought with. My immediate task was to work out if Pete was one of my private spectres, or was back in the flesh so’s to speak. I swallowed hard and said, ‘You’re dead.’
‘No. I am Polish. You’ll never understand the Poles, Charlie.’
‘Go away, Pete. Tommo told me you were dead. We got drunk, and I cried.’
‘I’m flattered, but don’t do it again. Put your clothes on, and we’ll go out and have a party for Tommo.’ Pete was always wizard at drumming up a party.
‘You know that he’s gone, don’t you?’
‘Are you telling me, or am I telling you?’
‘We don’t actually know, do we? I climbed a bloody mountain to the place his aircraft crashed. They gave me his lighter and his watch, and showed me the rock his body had been buried under.’
‘Did you lift it, and look?’
‘No, I didn’t; it was too big.’
‘There you are then. Get a move on. I’ll wait for you downstairs.’ He stood up and walked to the door. The bed moved and creaked, relieved of his weight. He did not walk through the wall the way a ghost is supposed to: he opened the door, stepped into the corridor and closed the door behind him. After he had gone the smell of his cigar smoke hung in the air. That clinched it for the time being; old Pete was probably back.
We called Piotr Paluchowski the Pink Pole. Do you remember those words? They made the first sentence I wrote when I sat down a couple of years ago to tell you my story, and if you haven’t read them already you’ve missed something, haven’t you? Pete had been one of the best rear gunners in the squadron, although he had one serious failing – he was so keen on killing the bad guy, that he sometimes let the Jerry night fighter get too close to our Lancaster before he pressed the tit. He wanted to be sure of a good shot. I remember that our big Canadian pilot had to sort him out after he’d done that once too often, and scared the shit out of us. It’s what I was remembering as I caught up with him at a table in the bar downstairs.
‘The last time I saw you was near the end of the war, Pete. That was eleven bloody years ago. You were a service policeman in a new Polish Army which had materialized from nowhere.’
‘And you were still chasing after that skinny bird – what was her name?’
‘Grace.’
‘Yes, Grace. Catch her?’
‘Several times. She drops in and out of my life like a travelling salesman – I’m the legal guardian of her boy.’
‘When was the last time you saw her?’
‘Three years ago. She was running with an Israeli assassination team, and put a bullet in me.’
‘You shoot back?’
‘Yes.’
‘Get her?’
‘I think so. Leastways she hasn’t reappeared.’
‘Good.’
‘I didn’t mean to – I just shot back at her without thinking about it. Now I miss her more than I’ve ever missed anyone.’
‘You always were a bloddy fool about women, Charlie.’ Bloddy. I suddenly recalled how he always used to say bloddy, and smiled.
I leaned back in my chair. ‘You were a colonel in the Polish Army, right?’
‘Yes, Charlie, I was . . . but I gave it up. No future in being a colonel in Poland: the Russians came back and shot them all again, just like they did at Katyn.’
‘Tommo once told me that he and the Cutter had seen you shot in some small place in Austria, and he’d had difficulty getting the right coffin for you – one made of lime wood.’
‘It was a set-up, a Tommo special. I needed to convince the Reds I was already dead, so that they didn’t send someone after me.’
‘But you’re in the clear now?’
‘I never said that.’
‘Where are you living?’
‘Here, Charlie. I got the room next door to yours. Are we gonna talk all night, or start some drinking?’
I waved Otto over from the bar. He brought us a bowl of pickled peppers to peck at, bottles of beer, and a bottle of schnapps with a couple of shot glasses. Just like old times. Later in the evening, before we were crawling drunk, I asked him, ‘Why didn’t Bozey tell me you were here?’
‘We didn’t want to scare you, Charlie. It’s what friends are for.’
Bozey and Spartacus joined us later. Then Randall turned up. I made the bridge between Pete and Randall without telling them what the connections were. Randall was as big as a bear, and Pete small and ratty, like me – although he was probably in his forties by then, and his black hair was thinning. He still had a straight pencil-thin moustache like the Thin Man. They shook hands across the table; Randall’s big paw wrapped around Pete’s small hand. Randall squinted through the tobacco smoke and asked him, ‘Do I know you?’
‘I don’t believe so,’ Pete told him. ‘I would have remembered. Do I know you?’
‘I don’t believe so either. I would have remembered you too.’ Randall was grinning. That settled it. They’d already met each other before – I just hoped they’d been on the same side when it happened.
‘Can I stay here tonight?’ Randall asked Bozey.
‘If you can afford it. A bed and an A1 broad will cost you thirty DMs. We throw the breakfast in for free.’
I’ve seen Randall
