Bernard Samson: Faith - Bernard Samson: Faith Part 20
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Bernard Samson: Faith Part 20

'You never said it; but that's what you thought. Admit it, Bernd.'

'It crossed my mind.'

'VERDI's old man is probably still living on the money he earned from your dad. Things are tough for Russian army pensioners these days. Even the Guards regiments are weeks and weeks behind with their pay. A few Swiss francs would go a long way over there.'

'I'm going to see what I can get out of the old man, Werner. But I need to know what it's all about. Does VERDI's contract provide for him to come over here to live? And if so, when? Or is Dicky going to keep him over there as long as possible? Is the old man coming over too? Or is the whole thing bullshit a just one of Dicky's dreams?'

'Reading the ashes of that contract Dicky offered him won't help you figure out any of that.'

'He didn't keep it?'

'He burned it.'

'Is he on the level?'

'If he goes through with it, his people will spend a lot of time and trouble trying to find him and kill him,' said Werner. 'They would have to. If he got away with a big one like this, others would try.'

'Perhaps we both have spent too much time with devious people, Werner. I almost feel sorry for VERDI trying to decide which way to jump.'

'Don't feel sorry for VERDI,' said Werner feelingly. 'He's a nasty piece of work and always has been. You know that. And you're his meal-ticket.'

'You said you didn't think he would come over to us.'

'No, I said his people will seek him out to kill him. But that won't stop a man like VERDI. He'll ignore Dicky's contract. He'll wait for you to make contact and then he'll start the real bargaining.'

I sighed. What a prospect. 'And his father? Is he a part of the deal?'

'He must be a hundred years old. Forget about the old man. Watch out for VERDI. He's not the same greasy little thug we used to know, Bernard, hanging around in the Polizeiprasidium with his hands in his pockets and nothing to do. He's been to the Military Diplomatic Academy and spent some years behind an Area Desk before being transferred to the Stasi. He's acquired a polished arrogance you'll never believe.'

'But isn't he a codes and ciphers man?'

'He was, and that's why Dicky needs him, but since going to the Stasi he's a big shot. All the Russian-trained senior staff are big shots.'

'Do we know why he moved to the Stasi? Wasn't he better off with the KGB?'

'Who said he volunteered? They always get rid of them, Bernard. Even the Volga Germans are not permitted to serve in Germany, lest they become too pally with the locals. Having a German mother put VERDI in that same doubtful category. If he volunteered to move, it was only because he knew he would never get the papakha in the KGB.' The papakha was the peaked hat with the oversize top that is worn by Soviet colonels and above. It sounded right, and Werner had an instinct that I always trusted.

We sat there in that dark room watching the sun go down. Berlin was cold, as cold and grey as only Berlin can be. There was not a breath of wind, and the unusual calm added to the strange unreality. Summer had gone but winter had not arrived.

Strangers who hated the city complained about the wide streets and the larger-than-life stone apartment blocks that dwarfed the people below. And on days like this even Berlin's most loyal inhabitants were tempted to ponder ways to escape. The sun was low, its last rays dribbled down the top of the next apartment house like rich German mustard on a boarding-house dumpling. The trees were bare, and on Tante Lisl's cherished rose-bushes just one large white bloom survived: brown-streaked with frost, and drooping, it hung by a thread. 'But I'll see the father too,' I said, breaking a long silence.

Werner seemed not to have heard: 'Remember the days when hotel staff over there turned away tips, haughtily telling us that that was not the way things were done in their new socialist State? Remember when they were all so proud and condescending? Remember when spying was done by patriots? That's not so long ago, Bernie. Now those same bastards will sell their own mother for a Black and Decker power drill and a Rolling Stones album. It's dog eat dog and getting worse every day.' I could only just see him in the darkness but I knew he'd turned to look at me. Perhaps I wasn't registering the appropriate rage. My capacity to hate VERDI was limited. He had after all let me get away at a time when there was an arrest-on-sight order on his desk. Even being thrown off the WarsawaBerlin Express was better than what was waiting for me at journey's end. 'Why are you doing this anyway?' Werner said, and sighed.

'For Dicky.'

'For Dicky,' said Werner scornfully.

'I'm not in a position to argue with London Central,' I said. 'And Fiona thinks that tapping into their records will tell us what happened that night Tessa was killed.'

'You were there, weren't you?'

'I was there on the Autobahn,' I admitted. 'We were at a section of road that was being rebuilt. It was staked out. It was dark and the rain was bucketing down. And all I could think about was getting Fiona out of there in one piece. So I don't know what happened. Not what really happened.'

'You're in one piece, and so is Fiona,' said Werner. 'Does it matter what really happened?'

'I'd like to sort it out, Werner. I'd like to have an explanation that eased Fiona's mind.'

'Let it go, Bernard. Just do your duty the way the book says. Screw it all up. Invite VERDI over here and say hello to him and make sure he doesn't like the offer. Let him say whatever he wants to say but then forget it. Scribble one of your famous reports that take five pages to say nothing. And go back to London and tell Dicky that it won't work. Dicky will believe you. And I'll back you up one hundred per cent.' I knew he was pulling the funny face that he kept for situations very serious. 'This is heap bad medicine, pale-face.'

'Fiona and George Kosinski ... they won't let it go, Werner. They loved Tessa a I did myself. She's my family in a way. And bereaved families won't let go until they are satisfied. People are like that when they lose a relative; somehow it brings them a crumb of comfort to know who did it and why.' Werner nodded. No need to tell a Jewish Berliner that about the mysterious deaths of relatives, but I could see he hadn't given up on persuading me to drop it. I wondered if he had some motive that I wasn't party to. 'It's better to get it sorted out,' I said.

'You know best, I suppose. And you've got to live with the family.'

'Yes,' I said.

'I'm pleased it's all worked out for you,' Werner said. He was almost back to being the old Werner now. 'I hear Fiona is looking beautiful and working in London Central.'

'Yes, and the children are coming home in a week or so.'

'And you have a new home.'

'The Kosinski apartment in Mayfair; furnished with antiques and deep pile carpets. It's like a museum. Fiona just wallows in the luxury of it. I could never have done anything like it out of my salary.'

'And you are comfortable there too?'

'It's spectacular, it's London and I can walk to work.'

'So life is perfect?'

'Except that I love Gloria.' I couldn't believe that I'd said it. I was saying to Werner something I'd not even admitted to myself.

Werner looked at me and said nothing for a long time. Perhaps he was wondering if he'd heard aright, or he was waiting for me to retract this admission. 'Have you told Gloria that?' he said eventually.

'No.'

'Fiona?'

'Of course not.'

'So why tell me?' said Werner, as if he didn't want to be burdened by my secrets.

'Because I felt that if I didn't tell someone soon I would turn into a frog.'

'A prince,' said Werner. 'You're already a frog.' He was making light of it while he wrestled with the implications. The sun had finally disappeared now. The street outside was dark, Werner only the faintest shadow against a glimmer of light that was coming from somewhere down the hall. Tante Lisl's ugly old clock struck the hour. I wondered how she ever got a full night's sleep with that chiming all the time. 'I'm sorry, Bernie,' he said finally. He coughed and turned his head as if avoiding my eyes. Werner had been through all this with Zena and Ingrid. He knew the implications. 'When I saw you together a you and Gloria ...' He stopped. I'll never know what he was about to say.

'I suppose it will pass,' I said. 'I hear that everything passes in time: the pain of love, death, failure, humiliation, hatred, bereavement ... the pain of everything fades eventually.'

'No,' said Werner.

'Becomes an endurable ache.'

'Perhaps,' said Werner.

'But is it fair to Fiona?' I said to myself as much as to him. 'I mean, suppose I make sure I never speak with Gloria again, and smile a lot and make like a loving husband and perfect father? Is that enough?'

'Is this a rhetorical question, or are you going to sit there looking at me and expecting an answer?'

'Tell me, Werner.'

'Who am I to advise anyone?' Werner said calmly. 'Zena drives me crazy. She spied on me. I'm beginning to wonder if she didn't get me kicked out of Berlin. She thinks of nothing but money. You think she's a bitch; maybe she is, but I can't live without her. What do you want me to tell you? You'll do what you have to do. There is no such thing as decision-making, that's just a gimmick the gods provide to refine and add to the torment.'

'I know that old man Fedosov is the key to it.'

'You mean you have a hunch?'

'Yes, that's what I mean.'

'Your hunches have been wrong before, Bernie. Let me come with you tomorrow.'

'No. I might need you here.'

'Okay. Anything else?'

'Yes. Would you by any chance still have the keys to the bar, Werner?' I said.

14.

Whatever trauma may have been troubling the deeper recesses of the collective communist mind in the Politburo, it did not mean that the gun-toting bureaucrats manning the frontier were any less obnoxious. It might even be felt that the contrary was true; that the more that Gorbachev conceded to the restless masses of the USSR the more vicious became the stranglehold that East Germany's communist dictatorship exerted upon its long-suffering proletarians.

I travelled to East Berlin by train, alighting at Friedrichstrasse station in the hope that the crowded concourse would mean faster processing through the control point there. I should have known better. The grey-faced men of the Grepo were at their most obdurate, sitting behind the bullet-proof glass, examining every passport and travel document as if they were learning to read. In the baggage hall bodies and bags were examined with the same malevolent scowl. I stood in the long line of passive travellers and waited my turn.

The railway station was a huge glasshouse on stilts with the trains echoing through it on their way around town on elevated tracks. It was all just as magical as it had been when I was a child, its glass-filled metalwork curving high into the grey sky above. But you were never alone on Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. Here was the Kafka show as Busby Berkeley might have staged it. Dancing their slow ballet on walkways high in the air, a grim chorus line was silhouetted against the grey light of the sky, twirling sniper rifles and machine pistols and staring down at us menacingly.

It was bitterly cold that day, and the wind came through the station like a blast through a wind-tunnel. I couldn't help reminding myself how quickly and conveniently an army car would have taken me through Checkpoint Charlie. As an officer of the 'occupying power' I would not have been subject to the prying fingers and hard-eyed hatred of the Grepos.

But in a car marked with all the trappings of the British Army I'd have been conspicuous. They would have picked me up as I went through. And, with those abundant facilities always provided to East German secret policemen, they would have followed me wherever I went, difficult to detect and even more difficult to throw off.

So I lined up on the cold platform and waited my turn to go across as Peter Hesse, construction company's site-clerk and native of Hanover. It was an identity I'd used before. There was back-up from a builder's merchant in Dusseldorf and an address where the residents were ready to swear that Peter Hesse was their neighbour.

Once outside in the dirty Berlin air, I breathed freely again. Friedrichstrasse was busy with buses and bicycles and cars a some of them stinking and noisy with their rattling two-stroke engines. Friedrichstrasse station has always been the very centre of old Berlin; what the Westies called Stadtmitte, and the Ossis called the Zentrum. It was a popular crossing point, and always busy with Vopo cops and soldiers and the Grepo border police.

Back in the Twenties Friedrichstrasse was the busiest street in the city, its commercial centre and entertainment section too. Here some of Berlin's famous old theatres a the Wintergarten, the Apollo, the Metropol and the Admiralspalast a had provided the most outrageous entertainment in the whole outrageous city. Fight your way through the grotesquely painted hookers that crowded these streets, and, for the price of a drink, you could have seen Richard Tauber sing 'Dein ist mein ganzes Herz' or watched a youthful Marlene Dietrich croon 'Naughty Lola'. In those days the songs of the cabaret had been biting, topical and wicked, and in the audiences could be spotted everyone from Brecht to Alfred Doblin; from Walter Gropius to Arnold Schonberg. This was the Berlin you read about in the history books.

Stand outside the station and look towards Weidendamm Bridge and the narrow River Spree. On the night of the 1st of May 1945 Martin Bormann and a furtive band of Nazi big shots crept along this street and under this railway arch that is a part of the elevated station. They'd emerged from the dank safety of the Fuhrerbunker, just down the street, where Hitler a married for only a few hours a having then killed his wife and committed suicide, had been doused with fifty litres of aviation spirit and ignited for a funeral pyre. The escapers were trying to get to Rechlin airport, which was still under German control. An experimental six-engined Junkers Ju 390 was parked there. It was capable of flying to Manchuria, and Hans Bauer, Hitler's personal pilot, was with the party and ready to prove it. But they had little chance of getting that far. Half of Berlin was on fire and the other half was thronging with trigger-happy Red Army soldiers, and even if most of the Ivans were hopelessly drunk, that did not mean that such a conspicuous bunch of Nazis could escape unnoticed. Some Tiger tanks of the SS Nordland Division were on the far side of the River Spree, and shell-fire from them dropped among the escapers. Bauer was carrying in his pack Hitler's favourite painting of Frederick the Great, and Bormann was carrying his Fuhrer's last Will and Testament to proclaim it to the world. They got across the river and sheltered in a well-known brothel that stood on the corner of Friedrichstrasse and the Schiffbauerdamm. After a discussion with the brothel-keeper and her daughter the two men set out along the same S-Bahn railway embankment that my train had followed, past the hospital, to where the Wall has now been constructed to block off the Invalidenstrasse. A few more steps and perhaps they would have escaped, but Bauer was taken prisoner by an alert Red Army man and Bormann bit hard on a cyanide capsule and died. Hitler's last Will and Testament was never seen again.

Now I walked across the Weidendamm Bridge and nodded at the spot where the brothel once sheltered its much-sought visitors. I loved this filthy old town, and while away in California I'd sorely missed its inescapable allure. It wasn't just practical reasons that made me choose to walk to Pankow. I wanted to feel the hard pot-holed paving under my feet and sniff the browncoal that polluted the air, and see the irrepressible Berliners go about their day.

Pankow is a Bezirk; a borough that comes complete with Burgermeister and council. It's on the north side of Berlin, and is one of the larger ones. To get there from Friedrichstrasse station I walked right across the Prenzlauer Berg. It gave me a chance to be sure I wasn't shadowed. The Department's instruction manuals insist that a man walking is a perfect target, but I'd joined the Department as a Kellerkind a a street-wise Berlin kid who played in the city's postwar rubble a and I believed I could spot a tail within five minutes of the first contact. I knew the city streets and I knew the back alleys. I knew the big apartment buildings, many of them no more than gutted shells by war's end, that I'd watched as they were rebuilt to the original cramped specifications of their nineteenth-century designs. I knew which ones had courtyards and second courtyards a Hinterhofs a and exits that emerged on the far side of the block.

I carried in my pocket a letter to post. This provided an excuse to go to a post-box and then turn about and go back the way I'd come. It is often all that is needed to totally disorganize even a skilled surveillance. I was there in twenty minutes.

VERDI's father lived just round the corner from the Rathaus at the top of Muhlenstrasse, near the eye clinic. Berlin is not a very old town, compared with London or Paris. At the beginning of the century it was not very extensive. Fifteen minutes' walk from the city centre you can already spot here and there the remains of grand country-style mansions, built by men who wanted to be well away from the Alexanderplatz and the hustle and bustle of city life. Now most such mansions had been demolished by urban planners and replaced with apartment blocks, their grounds and gardens swallowed up by sports centres or parks or Volksschwimmhalle like the one that could be seen from the apartment where Fedosov lived.

I knew these streets. This block was conveniently close to Pankow S-Bahn station, Pankow U-Bahn station, and to the police station too. These were the places chosen to house VIPs, senior security officers, a few Red Army veterans like Fedosov, and retired Stasi staff. At one time there was a permanent police patrol around the block, but even here the economy was being squeezed and today I could not see a uniformed officer.

Apart from an ugly modern block of apartments this was a street of old buildings. Single-family dwellings right up until Hitler's time, they were now divided into spacious apartments like the one that Fedosov occupied on the second floor of number 16.

'Ja?' said a voice through the plastic grille at the side of the door.

'Colonel Fedosov?' I said, making a guess at what rank he might have retired with.

'Captain Fedosov,' said the voice. 'Who are you? What do you want?' It was the petulant voice of a capricious old man.

'I want to speak to you. I'm a friend of your son. Can I come in?'

'Come up.'

I stood there shivering in the cold. There was some grunting and groaning and eventually a loud buzzer sounded and the door lock snapped open to admit me. As I pushed my way inside the warmth met me. No matter what you didn't like about German communism, its heating arrangements were always extravagant to a fault. Heating was provided by the State as a part of the rental and they did not stint.

The lobby was grand, its floor black and white marble in elaborate patterns. Pankow had escaped from the war relatively intact. The Red Army's artillery bombardments, and the air attacks, had concentrated upon the Mitte, the Reichstag, the Chancellory, Wilhelmstrasse and the Palace. After an initial few days of raping and looting, the best houses of the still intact bourgeois boroughs like this one had been commandeered for the military and political occupiers.

Even the marble staircase was original, with an ornate balustrade, although there was an unmistakable institutional look to the dull colours of the paintwork and the austerity of the repairs and fittings. Fedosov emerged from his front door above and looked down the staircase-well to see me. 'Second floor,' he called. His voice was hard as it echoed off the marble and brick. He didn't seem to care who I was.

'Can you spare me ten minutes of your time?' I asked as I came huffing and puffing to his landing.

He nodded. He was a small man with one of those ferocious moustaches that you see generals of Stalin's Red Army hiding behind in old photos. I wondered if he had some circulatory problem, for despite the comfortable warmth provided by the central heating system he was wearing layer upon layer of garments: a long sleeveless padded coat over a white roll-neck sweater from whose collar a blue shirt was trying to escape, brown baggy trousers, thick woollen socks and zip-sided red velvet slippers bearing his initials VF in gold embroidery. He looked like a marginally more prosperous version of one of the vagrants who are nowadays to be seen sleeping in the streets of most large towns of the affluent West.

'Come in. Hang your coat on the hook,' he said. He no doubt thought I was a writer asking him once more to plant the red banner on the roof of the Reichstag. Fedosov's apartment was large and comfortable. His long-term residence here was evident on every side. It was a strange collection of treasures and keepsakes: ancient books, a pendulum clock, a crucifix, photos, badges, medals and souvenirs of a long military career.

'I'd like ten minutes of your time,' I said.

'Go on through,' he said.

The second room into which he'd shown me was a neat little den with a view of the street. Outside, on the window-sill, there was a wooden bird shelter fitted with a shallow water-dish. The carpets, like the armchairs, were old and large and run-down. They looked as if they might have served a generation or two of Berliners prior to the arrival of Fedosov and his comrades in May 1945. 'Sit down,' he said. I had the feeling that Fedosov would have willingly given ten minutes of his time to anyone who happened by. Thirty minutes perhaps.

On a side-table there was a pile of library books, copies of the Russian Army weekly newspaper and some Party magazines, all printed in Russian script. You have to be very bored to be driven to such reading matter. I looked around. 'What a lovely apartment,' I said. It was a shrine to Stalinism. The old brute's framed portrait was in a place of honour. Arrayed round it were countless enamel souvenir plaques. A thousand rippling red flags celebrated endless Party events: rallies, conventions and anniversaries. Facing the window, where it got the best light, there was a large framed print of the action of May Day 1945 when Fedosov and the men of Banner Party No. 5 took their flag to the top of the Reichstag amid the bullets and shell fragments. The artist had improved considerably upon the well-known heavily retouched re-enactment that the Red Army photographers took in full daylight after hostilities ended, a photo in which sightseers could be seen in the streets below. In this painting the bullets were flying. It was dawn, with a very red sun prising its way through golden clouds. The men were tall and strong and handsome and had disdained such things as steel helmets and bayonets and guns. Their well-tailored uniforms were only slightly stained and their hands grasped a gigantic banner that floated in the wind so that its golden hammer-and-sickle device was well in evidence. This was war the way the propaganda service fought it.

'Your son used to know me,' I said. He moved a book from his armchair and sat down opposite me. I produced a pack of Philip Morris, took one and offered them to him. He took the pack and looked at it carefully before putting a cigarette into his mouth. 'Back in the old days.' I leaned forward and lit his cigarette for him, using a cigarette lighter that had belonged to my father. 'Keep the packet,' I said. I'd hoped that the lighter, a distinctive one with a double-headed eagle design, might provoke a memory, or even a comment. But he gave no sign of recognizing it.

'Old days? When?' He didn't look like a soldier. That is to say he didn't look like any of the retired military men that I knew in the West. My idea of a soldier was a fit active man with a ramrod spine, military haircut and brisk voice. But Fedosov wasn't that kind of soldier: he'd been just one man of millions and millions who had hacked their way from Moscow to Berlin on foot. He served under generals who openly affirmed that the quickest way of removing an enemy minefield was to send an infantry company to advance across it. Fedosov had survived three years of Eastern Front fighting armed only with an obsolete submachine gun and his quickness of mind. Never mind his battlefield commission and the artist's interpretation, such a man was not likely to be of the type who recklessly exposed himself to enemy fire. I reasoned that the law of averages said Fedosov would have learned to let others jump over the parapet and go to kill a hundred Germans single-handed; Fedosov, I decided, was going to be a man of caution and resource. He was hardly likely to resemble the men who presented arms outside Buckingham Palace. 'Do you speak Russian?' he asked.

'A word or two.'