Emerald Decision

face.

'If I kill you, I'll attract their attention, I know that. It just won't do you much good, old friend,' he observed in German. Drink, drink—

It was coming to him. The German's mouth kept slowly popping open and closed, then he began sucking his cheeks to wet his dry throat.

'What's your name?' Puzzlement almost approaching the catatonic. 'Just tell me your name — it might save your life.'

'Willi — Willi Frick.'

'Well done, Willi.' McBride stood up, leaned against the German with a smile, and pressed against the nerve below his ear, just behind the chinstrap. Willi slid against him, gently declining. McBride pulled the rum flask from his pocket, and spilled liquor into Willi's mouth, down his chin and onto his coat. He let Willi lean unconsciously against him as he checked his own papers again — Friedrich Bruckner, and his rank, unit and number.

'Come on, Willi, you're going on a charge, and me with you.'

He slipped Willi's right arm round his neck, hefted him upright, his own arm round Willi's waist, and walked him towards the barrier, making an exaggeratedly slow approach in the shadow of the warehouse, stepping out into the light only at the last minute — but by that time a Kriegsmarine Leutnant was already calling him.

'Soldier, what the devil are you doing? You, there!'

McBride snapped to attention, and Willi began to slide to the ground — McBride grabbed him, straightened the body. Someone laughed behind the officer, who seemed suddenly to consider it all as simply another scheme to make him appear foolish. His face contracted as if he had sucked a lemon and he marched across to McBride, who tried to adopt peasant stupidity as his habitual expression.

'What's going on—' Nose wrinkling, suspicion gleaming in his eye. 'This man's drunk!'

'Sir—'

'No excuses — breathe on me, you dummy!'

McBride exhaled. The Leutnant shook his head in obvious disappointment. The guards behind him had formed a knot of eager spectators — one or two of them trying to make McBride smile or laugh by mimed antics and expressions. They were fifteen yards away — too far to hear his replies, his claims to identity. He kept a rigid face as the officer continued.

'Where did you find him?'

'Heard someone singing behind one of the warehouses, sir!' he snapped out.

'Him?' The Leutnant was disgusted. McBride nodded. 'And now he's passed out — you weren't going to report this, were you?' Again the gleam of realization and superior understanding. McBride looked guilty. 'Trying to sneak him back to his billet, weren't you?' McBride swallowed, nodded. 'What's your name?'

McBride barked out his assumed identity.

'Him?'

'Frick, sir.'

The Leutnant made a note (with a gold-encased pencil) in a little notebook contained in what might have been a slim cigarette-case. He put them away with a quiet triumph.

'Both of you — report to me in the morning. Now, get that disgusting clown out of my sight!'

'Sir.'

McBride grabbed Willi's body more securely, kept his head down as he half-pulled him past the barrier, to the raucous laughter — soon quietened by the Leutnant — of the rest of the guards. He could hear them discussing the likely charges with the Kriegsmarine officer as he moved beyond the cold splash of the light above the barrier and the guard-hut. He heaved and pulled at the unconsciously-resisting Willi, a chill bath of perspiration covering his body from the effort and the bluff. He couldn't control his body's relief, and it irritated him. Eventually, he was in the shadows of a seaman's church opposite the Albert Pier, and he thankfully dropped Willi into the shadows by the wrought-iron gate. He looked up. A chill, unwelcoming little church, the rain like a shiny skin on something gone cold. He shivered, and moved swiftly away, the machine-pistol over his shoulder, the sweat drying on his forehead at the line of the helmet and under his arms. He wasn't quite ready to smile. He hurried up the Quay to the North Esplanade, out of the centre of the town.

October 198-

McBride wondered whether it was courtesy on the part of the attache who met him at Tegel or the habit of security, that the man acquired his papers and ushered him through Customs and passport control in the terminal building. McBride had flown in on a Trident to Tegel, West Berlin's principal airport. He wondered briefly why the Cultural Exchange Committee of the Democratic Republic had bothered to send an escort to the airport, and was more surprised at the deference with which he was treated, and the obvious and studied compliments on his book, Gates of Hell produced like mottoes from Christmas crackers by Herr Lobke. The young man seemed anxious to please, yet almost too aware to be the pleasant, rather naive, person he exuded in McBride's direction.

'Professor Dokter Goessler is, I know, very anxious to meet you, to offer his help — it is a remarkable compliment—' McBride almost sensed the unspoken addition of to someone like you, but opted to accept the enthusiasm, the desire to be merely helpful.

Outside the terminal building, a black Zil saloon drew alongside them almost in the instant that Lobke raised his arm. There was even a uniformed chauffeur — one or two arriving passengers glanced at the little tableau, then disregarded it as if dissatisfied with the size or make of the car. McBride slid across the bench seat at the back, and Lobke climbed in beside him. The chauffeur pulled the sun-visor down, and accelerated away from the terminal doors.

They picked up the autobahn heading south-east into the city through the suburb of Wedding. Lobke seemed impressed and distracted from him by the passage of the numerous Mercedes saloons, the Porsches and Datsun sports cars. McBride indulged the immediate excitement of tall buildings, the neon silent but endlessly boastful. The advertisement of the wirtschafiwunder, a slick, affluent stranger in a peasant economy. West Berlin, he sensed immediately, postured like a glamorous, bejewelled model against the temporary chic of a ghetto or a slum. The city shouted at him, demanded he accept its image as reality.

He had been to Berlin before, researching Gates of Hell, but then the city had evidenced to his tunnel-vision the remnants of its battering in 1945, its German-ness, its foundation of ash rather than its post-war substance. Now, he had no preconceptions — he was there to study documents, follow an old, cold trail, and the city leapt upon his senses.

There was a short delay at the checkpoint. The guards seemed uninterested, in the late afternoon sunshine, in McBride as an American, but they checked Lobke's papers thoroughly, even though he had obviously crossed from East to West earlier in the day. On the East German side, the barrier was up almost immediately, and there was a smart salute for the car from the guards. The grey breeze-blocking of the Wall was almost obscured from the consciousness by the ceremony, the swiftness, of their arrival in East Berlin. Except that the Wall was suddenly high enough to cast a long shadow, out of which only after a few seconds did the car emerge into the slanting sunshine again.

One of the Vopos on the checkpoint telephoned the arrival of McBride and Lobke less than a minute after their crossing.

McBride, ringing from Koblenz, had booked a room at the Hotel Spree, an ugly block of pale concrete on the Rathausstrasse near the river and the Marx-Engels Platz. The porter seemed entirely respectful, the desk staff willing and welcoming. The hotel foyer was modern — polished dark wood, greenery and thick carpet, a coffee-shop open-planned to one side. He could have been in any modern four-star hotel in the world.

Lobke left him in the foyer, shaking his hand with a formal warmth, and promising that Professor Doktor Goessler would be certain to contact him. Lobke watched him get into the lift behind the porter carrying his bag, waiting until the door sighed shut, then placed his ID on the desk in front of the clerk.

'Where's the secure phone?' he said. The clerk seemed unsurprised, nodding to a row of four plastic globes sprouting from the wall alongside the coffee-shop. 'Second from the left,' he said.

Lobke crossed the foyer, watched by a woman in a beige coat and boots who was sitting in the foyer in order