‘He won’t swindle you, Tante Lisl. Werner owes you more than he can ever repay, and he knows it. But if he loses your money, there is nothing in writing that will get it back for you.’
‘It’s something to do with exports,’ said Lisl, as if a measure of confession would persuade me to help her.
‘I have to come back here,’ I said. ‘I’ll talk to him on my next visit. But you should be more careful with your money, Lisl.’
She blew air through her teeth in a gesture of contempt. ‘Careful? We have some of the oldest, biggest, richest corporations in Germany facing bankruptcy and you tell me to be careful. Where am I to invest my savings?’
‘I’ll do what I can, Lisl.’
‘A woman on her own is helpless in these matters, darling.’
‘I know, Lisl, I know.’ I found myself thinking about Fiona again. I remembered phoning her from Berlin on the previous trip. I’d phoned her three or four times in the middle of the night and got no reply. She said the phone was out of order, but I went on wondering.
Watery sunshine trickled over the Persian carpet and made a golden buttress in the dusty air. Lisl stopped talking to chew her bread roll; the phone rang. It was for me: Frank Harrington. ‘Bernard? I’m glad I caught you. I’m sending a car to take you to the airport this afternoon. What time do you want to leave Frau Hennig’s? Do you want to stop off anywhere?’
‘I’ve fixed up a car, Frank. Thanks all the same.’
‘No, no, no. I insist.’
‘I can’t cancel it now, Frank.’
There was a pause at the other end before Frank said, ‘It was like old times, seeing you again last night.’
‘I should have thanked you,’ I said, although I had already arranged for Mrs Harrington to receive a bunch of flowers.
‘That conversation we had…about you know whom…I hope you won’t be putting any of that in writing in London.’
So that was it. ‘I’ll be discreet, Frank,’ I said.
‘I know you will, old boy. Well, if you won’t let me arrange a car…’
I knew ‘the car’ would turn out to be Frank, who would ‘just happen to be going that way’ and would bend my ear until takeoff time. So I made regret noises and rang off.
‘Frank Harrington?’ said Lisl. ‘Wanting some favour, no doubt.’
‘Frank’s always been a worrier. You know that.’
‘He’s not trying to borrow money, is he?’
‘I can’t imagine him being short of it.’
‘He keeps a big house in England and his spectacular place here. He’s always entertaining.’
‘That’s part of the job, Lisl,’ I said. I was long since accustomed to Lisl’s complaints about the wasteful ways of government servants.
‘And the little popsie he’s got tucked away in Lübars – is she part of the job too?’ Lisl’s laugh was more like a splutter of indignation.
‘Frank?’
‘I get to hear everything, darling. People think I am just a stupid old woman safely locked away up here in my little room, rubbing embrocation on my knees, but I get to hear everything.’
‘Frank was in the Army with my father. He must be sixty years old.’
‘That’s the dangerous age, darling. Didn’t you know that? You’ve got the dangerous sixties to look forward to too, Liebchen.’ She spilled coffee trying to get it to her mouth without laughing.
‘You’ve been listening to Werner,’ I said.
Her lashes trembled and she fixed me with her steely eyes. ‘You think you can get me to tell you where I heard it. I know your little tricks, Bernard.’ A waggling finger. ‘But it wasn’t Werner. And I know all about Frank Harrington, who comes in here looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.’ She used the equivalent Berlin expression about looking as if he wouldn’t dirty a stream, and it seemed so apt for the impeccable Frank and his scrubbed-looking son. ‘His wife spends too much time in England, and Frank has found other amusements here in town.’
‘You’re a fund of information, Tante Lisl,’ I said. I kept my voice level to show her that I was not convinced about Frank’s double life, and would not be too concerned even if I was convinced.
‘A man in his line of business should know better. A man with a mistress in an expensive little house in Lübars is a security risk.’
‘I suppose so.’
I thought she was going to change the subject, but she couldn’t resist adding, ‘And Lübars is so near the Wall…You’re damned near the Russkies right up there.’
‘I know where Lübars is, Lisl,’ I said grumpily.
‘Happy birthday, darling,’ she said as I reached the door.
‘Thanks, Lisl,’ I said. She never missed my birthday.
12
From the top of the brightly coloured apartment blocks of Märkisches Viertel, where sixty thousand West Berliners live in what the architects call ‘a planned community’ and its inhabitants call ‘a concrete jungle’, you can see across the nearby border, and well into the Eastern Sector.
‘Some of them like it here,’ said Axel Mauser. ‘At least they say they do.’ Axel had aged a lot over the last few years. He was three months younger than I was, but his pinched white face and large bald patch, and the way his years at desk and filing cabinet had bowed his head, made him look nearer to fifty than forty. ‘They say they like having the shops and the church and the swimming pool and restaurants all built as part of the complex.’
I sipped a little beer and looked around the room. It was a barren place; no books, no pictures, no music, no carpet. Just a TV, a sofa, two armchairs and a coffee table with a vase of plastic flowers. In the corner, a newspaper was laid out to protect the floor against oil. On it were the pieces of a dismantled racing bicycle that was being repaired to make a birthday present for his teenage son. ‘But you don’t?’
‘Finish your beer and have another. No, I hate it. We’ve got twelve schools and fifteen kindergartens here in this complex. Twelve schools! It makes me feel like a damned termite. Some of these kids have never been downtown – they’ve never seen the Berlin we grew up in.’
‘Maybe they are better off without it,’ I said.
There was a snap and hiss as he opened a can of Export Pils. ‘You’re right, Bernd,’ he said. ‘What will kids find down there in the middle of the city except crime and dope and misery?’ He poured half the can for himself and the other half for me. Axel was like that; he was a sharer.
‘Well, you’ve got a view to beat anything.’
‘It’s amazing how far you can see on a really clear day. But I’d happily trade the view to be back in that old slum my grandfather had. I keep hearing about the “German miracle”, but I don’t see any of it. My father gave me a new bicycle for my twelfth birthday. What can I afford to give my eldest son? That damned secondhand one.’
‘Kids don’t think like that, Axel,’ I said. ‘Even I can see it’s a special racing model. He’ll like it all the more because you’ve worked so hard to get it ready for him.’
Axel Mauser had been one of the brightest kids in the school: top of the class at chemistry and mathematics, and so keen at languages that he used to lend me his bicycle in exchange for English conversation practice. Now he was working in the Polizeipräsidium records office as a senior clerk, and living in this cramped apartment with three children and a wife, who – even on a Saturday – worked in the nearby AEG factory to keep their secondhand BMW running and give them their regular package holiday in Ibiza. ‘But where can I afford to move to? Do you know what rents people are paying in Berlin nowadays?’
‘Your dad went back to live in the East.’
Axel smiled grimly. ‘All because of that bloody fool Binder – Max Binder, remember that Spieler?’
Spieler: did he mean actor or gambler, I wondered. Max was a bit of both. ‘I always liked Max,’ I said.
Axel paused as if about to argue with me but then he went on: ‘Max kept writing to Dad saying how much he
was enjoying life over there. My dad believed it all. You know what Dad’s like. He kept complaining about how it was over thirty years since he’d strolled down Unter den Linden. He’d wonder if he’d meet old friends on the Alexanderplatz – he was always on about that damned “Alex” – and he wanted to see the restoration job that’s been done on the cathedral. And he’d get talking to Tante Lisl in that bar of hers when there were no customers in, and they’d be wallowing in nostalgia about seeing President Hindenburg in the Bristol and Lotte Lenya at the Wintergarten…’
‘And talking to Joseph Goebbels at the bar of the Kaiserhof,’ I said. ‘Yes, I’ve heard all those stories. I couldn’t get enough of your dad’s yarns when I was young. I saw a lot of him in those days when he was behind the bar at Lisl’s.’ From the next apartment there came the incessant sound of police sirens, shooting and the joyful shouts of children watching TV. Axel went across to the wall and thumped on it with the flat of his hand. This had no effect other than to make some of the plastic flowers quiver.
Axel shrugged at the continuing noise. ‘And working for your dad too. Suppose they find out that he used to do those jobs for your dad? They’d throw him straight into prison.’
‘Don’t baby him, Axel. Rolf’s a tough old bastard. He can look after himself.’
Axel nodded. ‘So I said, “If you think you’ll recapture your youth by going across the city, Dad, you go. And, take Tante Lisl with you…” When my mother was alive, she wouldn’t listen to all those stories of his. She’d just tell him to shut up.’
‘Well, he found a ready audience at that bar.’
‘He was always complaining about working for Tante Lisl, wasn’t he? But he loved standing behind the bar talking about “the real Berlin”, in the days when there was a respect for Christian values – eine christliche Weltanschauung. And after a few customers had bought him drinks, he’d be talking about the Kaiserzeit as if he’d been a general in the first war instead of an artillery captain in the second.’ Axel drank some beer. ‘There’s no fool like an old fool,’ he said with unexpected vehemence, and looked at his beer so that I could not see his eyes. ‘I’d hate anything to happen to him, Bernd.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But don’t worry about him. He’s over sixty-five, so he is permitted to visit the West.’
‘He sees Werner sometimes.’ He looked at me. ‘They’re in some kind of racket together.’
It was more a question than a statement. ‘Are they?’
‘Are you still with the Army intelligence people?’
I nodded. It was my cover story for Berliners such as Axel who remembered my father and had seen me coming and going, and had given me the use of their sofas and their motorcars from time to time. It was not the sort of cover story that earned respect from Germans. Germany is the only country in the world where a job in any sort of intelligence-gathering organization is considered little better than pimping. It is a product of the postwar years when informers were everywhere.
‘You’re not after Dad?’
‘Stop worrying about him, Axel,’ I said. ‘Rolf came right through the war, and then survived through the years that followed the war. I’m sure he’s doing fine. In fact, I might be able to look him up next time I go into the East Sector. I’ll take him something, if you like.’
‘So what’s it all about, Bernd?’ said Axel. He got up and went to the window, staring eastwards to where the spike of the East German TV tower rose out of the Alexanderplatz. Once it was the heart of the city, where pedestrians dodged bikes, bikes dodged cars, and cars dodged the trams that came through a five-way intersection at frightening speeds. Now the traffic had vanished and the ‘Alex’ was just an orderly concrete expanse with red flags, flower boxes and slogans. ‘You might as well come out with it,’ said Axel, still staring out the window.
‘With what?’
‘It’s nice to see you again, Bernd. But you work out of London nowadays, you say. With only a couple of days in the city and lots of old friends to visit, you didn’t come to my little place to talk about how well I did in my chemistry exams, and have a can of beer – which I notice you drink very very slowly, as policemen do when they are on duty – and be interrupted by the shouting of the kids next door, and sit close to the heating because I can’t afford to turn it up any higher. You must have had a reason to come here, and I think you are going to ask me a favour.’
‘Remember a couple of years ago when I was looking for that kid who’d stolen a briefcase from an office near the Zoo station?’
‘You asked me to look up a post-office box number and tell you who rented it. But that was an official request. That came through the British Army.’
‘This one is more delicate, Axel.’ I took from my pocket the envelope that Frank Harrington had left in my street guide. Axel took it reluctantly; even then he didn’t immediately look at it. ‘It’s urgent, I suppose? These things are always urgent.’ He read the address.
‘It is, Axel. Otherwise I could have gone through the post office.’
He laughed scornfully. ‘Have you tried getting anything out of our wonderful post office lately? Last week it took them four days to deliver a letter from a postbox in Tiergarten, and then it was nearly torn in two. And the price for a letter now…’ He read the numbers that were the address. ‘One thousand is Berlin and twenty-eight is Lübars.’
‘You said Polizeipräsidium kept copies of the forms the box renters sign. Could you get the name and address of the person who rents that box at Lübars post office? Could you get it even on a Saturday?’
‘I’ll phone from the bedroom.’
‘Thanks, Axel.’
‘It depends who’s on duty this morning. I can’t order anyone to do it. It’s strictly forbidden…it’s a criminal offence.’
‘If I could clear up the inquiry immediately, I could go home.’
‘We all thought you’d grow up to become a gangster,’ said Axel. ‘Did I ever tell you that?’
‘Yes, Axel. You’ve told me that many times.’
‘We asked Herrn Storch, the mathematics teacher, but he said all the English were like you.’
‘Some of them are worse, Axel,’ I said.
He didn’t laugh; he nodded. He wanted me to know how much he disliked it. He wanted me to think twice before I asked him more such favours. When he went into the bedroom to phone, he turned the key in the door. He wanted to be sure that I could not get close enough to hear him.
The call took only five minutes. I suppose the Polizeipräsidium have such records on a computer.
‘The addressee, Mrs Harrington, is the renter of the box. She gave an address in Lübars,’ said Axel when he returned from the phone. ‘I know exactly where it is. It’s a street of beautiful houses with a view across open farmland. What wouldn’t I give to live in such a place.’
‘How difficult is it to get a postbox in a false name?’ I asked.
‘It depends who is on duty. But you don’t have to provide much to get it in any name you wish. Many people have boxes under a nom de plume or a stage name, and so on.’
‘I have not been to Lübars since we were kids. Is it still as pretty as it used to be?’
‘Lübars village. We’re quite close. If this window faced north, I could show you the street. They’ve preserved everything: the little eighteenth-century village church, the fire station and the village green with the fine chestnut trees. The farmhouses and the old inn. It’s just a stone’s throw away but it’s like another world.’
‘I’ll get along, Axel,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the beer.’
‘And what if on Monday they fire me? What then? You say how really sorry you are, and I spend the rest of my life trying to support a family on social welfare payments.’
I said nothing.
‘You’re irresponsible, Bernd. You always were.’
I would have expected Frank Harrington to have his mistress hidden away in a small anonymous apartment block somewhere in the French Sector
of the city where no one notices what’s happening. But the address Axel Mauser had provided was in the northernmost part of the Western Sector, a prong of land sandwiched between the Tegel Forest and the Wall. There were small farms here just a short way from the city centre, and tractors were parked on the narrow cobbled lanes among the shiny Porsches and four-litre Mercedes.
The big family houses were designed to look as though they’d been here since Bismarck, but they were too flawless to be anything but reconstructions. I cruised slowly down an elegant tree-lined road following three children on well-groomed ponies. It was neat and tidy and characterless, like those Hollywood back lots designed to look like anywhere old and foreign.
Number 40 was a narrow two-storey house, with a front garden big enough for two large trees and with a lot of empty space behind it. There was a sign on the chain fence, BELLEVUE KENNELS, and another that said BEWARE OF THE DOGS in three languages, including German. Even before I’d read it, the dogs began barking. They sounded like very big dogs.
Once through the inner gate, I could see a wired compound and a brick outbuilding where some dogs were crowding at the gate trying to get out. ‘Good dog,’ I said, but I don’t think they heard me.
A young woman came from somewhere at the back of the house. She was about twenty-two years old, with soft grey eyes, a tanned sort of complexion, and jet-black hair drawn back into a bun. She was wearing khaki-coloured cotton pants, and a matching shirt with shoulder tabs and button-down pockets. It was all tailored to fit very tight. Over it she had a sleeveless sheepskin jacket – fleece inwards – with the sort of bright flower-patterned embroidery that used to be a status symbol for hippies.
She looked me up and down long enough to recognize my Burberry trench coat and Professor Higgins hat. ‘Did you come to buy a dog?’ she said in good English.