‘That’s a lot of dough.’
Pete leaned over and smiled at him. ‘I think you’ll find that the woman is a lot of woman. Just pretend that you owe her to yourself, lie back and think of England.’
Randall was American, which made it kind of an odd thing to say.
I asked, ‘Isn’t that what the girl is supposed to do?’
Bozey shook his head, and poured me another drink. ‘You been away too long, boss.’
The evening finished with the latest entertainment Bozey had come up with – a wheelbarrow race on which he ran a book. The difference was that the four wheelbarrows were all good-looking girls, and they appeared to have left their clothes somewhere else. The men wheeling the wheelbarrows were strapping fellows. It took a few minutes to get the couples connected up, but after that the race went off quite well. Irma had come in to sit on Bozey’s lap. Spartacus, under the table, set up a jealous howl as she did so.
The wheelbarrow who finished last earned the largest round of applause. Irma regarded her seriously, sighed and muttered, ‘She faked it.’
‘But it’s made me feel quite peckish,’ Bozey told her. ‘I think we’ll have to go home.’
Irma leaned over, and touched my face.
‘Peckish,’ she said to me. ‘You English use the oddest words. OK, Charlie?’
‘Yes, love; top hole. I’ve just begun to get undrunk again. I hate it when that happens.’
‘You want someone? That French girl you like is around somewhere. You want her later?’
‘Maybe, Irma. Rather it was you.’
‘All the men say that, but only my Bozey ever means it.’
She’d got us taped, hadn’t she?
I was smoking the last pipe of the night when the French girl, Reimey, walked in. I put the pipe down, crossed the room and kissed her. She pushed my hair from my forehead, and asked, ‘Tired, lover?’ Fatigué, amoureux?
‘Rather – and a bit drunk.’
‘Am I working tonight, or getting a night off?’
‘Tonight you’re sleeping; so am I.’
We did what we always did. What I’d done since I’d first started spending Berlin nights with her: we slept the sleep of the chaste, cuddled into each other like an old married couple. It was a slick deal: she got a night’s uninterrupted sleep out of it, and I went down to breakfast in the morning with my bad reputation intact. It was like being married without the squishy bits.
She slept before I did, and made little snorting noises, like a piglet. I thought about Pete’s vanishing and reappearing tricks. Was it only a week or so earlier that I had lamented that Halton Air was running itself, and that my life was uneventful? Bloody Pete would soon put a stop to that, I guessed.
As usual Pete was down before me, and was shovelling his way through an enormous American-style breakfast. Most of the Leihhaus food stock came out of the back door of the PX. As usual I stuck to black coffee, black coffee and black coffee: no one in Germany can brew tea. Pete mopped the egg stains from his plate with a doorstop of greyish bread, and asked, ‘She any good, the French girl?’
‘A woman’s as good as the man she’s with. You taught me that, Pete.’
‘Then I guess she weren’t much good. Pity.’
‘You’re a bastard, Pete.’
‘No, I’m a Pole. I already tol’ you.’
‘How long are you staying?’
‘Few days. I have a business deal over in the East.’
‘You’ll be careful this time?’
‘I always am, Charlie. You know that.’ Lie. Not only lie, but big lie. Pete was one of the biggest risk takers I’d ever met.
‘And stay in touch this time. The next time I hear that you’re dead I want it to be true.’ Those words didn’t come out in exactly the order I expected them to, but Pete understood. He grinned his shark’s grin.
‘You gonna help that nice couple I took to Bozey for you?’
‘What young couple?’
‘The two Americans – looking for her brother, I think. They paid me a finder’s fee to introduce them to Bozey, an’ for him to hand them on to you.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Pete paused to discharge his breakfast gases with a soft belch. I remembered that he’d always been unselfconscious about things like that.
‘Bozey will tell you. They’re good business – loaded with dosh, like Rockefeller.’
‘How do they know me?’
‘Maybe you been in the paper.’
‘Nearly ten years ago now.’
‘You never know, maybe they keep their old papers.’ Then he switched tracks on me and said, ‘This American couple – the woman’s a real looker, Charlie. Small as you, long, dark brown hair halfway down her shoulders. Face of an angel, legs like the devil. I stretched out my hands as soon as I saw her, and got slapped down pretty damned quickly.’
I leaned forward in my chair. I was interested in spite of myself – I could not remember Pete getting a refusal before.
‘Tell me about them.’
Afterwards – after he’d gone – I realized that although we hadn’t seen each other for eleven years, we’d offered no explanations. He didn’t tell me what he’d been doing; neither did I tell him . . . and that’s exactly what doing a tour with a Lancaster crew in 1944 meant. Some soft bugger used the phrase on a film poster twenty-five years later. The truth is that having flown with men like Pete really did mean never having to say you were sorry.
Bozey suggested a walk in a park. A large statue of a large German in the Imperial Roman toga style dominated a circular gravelled area with a few seats. An old man in a tattered grey Wehrmacht greatcoat sold miniature kites from a makeshift wooden tray. He had neither hair nor teeth. The statue was worse. It had lost its head in the forties – a lot of Jerries lost their heads in the thirties
