Pavel & I (13 page)

‘I think that will probably do best.'

He tried it on. It gaped at the shoulders and the sleeves were much too long, but it wrapped him up warm all the way down to his ankles. She led him over to the mirror to see what he made of it, but he wouldn't raise his eyes and look at himself.

‘Thanks,' he said sullenly. She couldn't decide whether it was the voice of insolence, or of fear.

‘Take it off,' she ordered. ‘I will shorten the sleeves for you.'

She had just cut several inches off the first of the coat-sleeves when the telephone rang. It ran through the boy like a current, and drew a scream from the monkey on top of its perch. Sonia picked up, the cloth scissors still in one hand, and listened to the Colonel's voice.

‘Sonia, my little dove, I'm looking for the boy. The street Arab that follows Pavel Richter around. Do you know whether he is home?'

‘No.'

‘Be a darling and go down and check. I'll stay on the line.'

Sonia put the phone down on the table and motioned for Anders to stay mum. She walked over to the door, opened and closed it, stood still for two or three minutes, her feet growing cold from lack of movement. Then she re-opened the door, closed it yet again, and walked back to the phone, her heels clicking on the wooden floor with every step.

‘Richter's door's locked and nobody answers. What do you want with the boy?'

‘Oh, he and I, we had ourselves a little talk this morning, and there's something I forgot to ask. Shouldn't have let him go, but you know how it is. Early mornings, and the brow creased with worries. We all make mistakes.'

‘Yes. When are you coming back here?'

‘That depends on how things develop, my darling. Did you know Pavel was out looking for Boyd White's sweet little
belle
?'

‘No, I didn't. He just said he had things to do.'

‘Well, he is. Don't think he will find her, but I'm having an eye kept on him just in case. Perhaps it would be a good idea for you to spend the night with him. Find out what he knows.'

She didn't respond.

‘Do you think,' he asked sweetly, ‘that this could be arranged?'

‘Of course. Whatever you want.'

‘That's my darling. I knew I could count on you.' Sonia heard him blow her a kiss down the phone line and quickly hung up. When she looked up, the boy was watching her intently.

‘You can't have the coat,' she told him abruptly. ‘He would recognize it and know you'd been with me.'

She turned to fetch some gold earrings from the bedroom. ‘Here,' she said. ‘Use these to get yourself a new coat. And stay away from here. Pavel's being watched.'

The boy nodded calmly and weighed the jewellery in his grubby fist. His eyes seemed old to her, his monkey face wrinkled.

‘Eat something in the kitchen before you go, and warm yourself before the oven,' she instructed him. ‘And one more thing: if the Colonel finds out you've got my earrings, I'll tell him that you must have stolen them.'

She turned her back on him then, sat down at the piano, and started playing scales. Sonia did not stop until she heard the door close behind him.

The apartment was near Potsdamer Platz, close to the centre of the city where three of the sectors ran together into a point. The building dated from around the turn of the century, like so much of Berlin's housing; five tall storeys organized around a communal courtyard. Pavel scanned the windows but it was impossible to see anything through the all-pervasive frost. He tried the front door and found it open. Before he disappeared inside, he turned around once, not knowing himself why, other than there was a faint feeling of illicitness about his snooping. He did not know what he was looking for, and hence saw nothing, just street-hawkers, going about their business, and a one-eyed man in a good coat tying his laces by the side of the road. Pavel closed the door behind himself and ran his eyes across the names on the postboxes. There were none he recognized. He had forgotten to ask Franzi about Belle's last name. Chances were she didn't know it. He shrugged and began to climb the stairs.

The soldier gave it away. Actually, he was a policeman, wearing the insignia of the Soviet-controlled police force upon collar and sleeve. He
sat on a chair on the fourth-floor landing, not looking up as Pavel walked first towards, then past him. He was smoking, and the floor around his feet was dotted with literally hundreds of cigarette butts. He – and no doubt some colleagues – must have been sitting out there for days. Pavel tried to judge which door he was interested in and realized it was one floor down, visible for the sentry if he craned his neck a little over the staircase railing. Pavel tarried a while on the top-floor landing, pretending he was ringing a bell up there, then gave a sigh of frustration – far too theatrical no doubt – and walked back towards the policeman.

‘Good day,' he said in German. ‘Long, lonely vigil, is it?'

The man merely nodded his head.

‘You must be freezing out here. No time for a coffee?'

The policeman shrugged noncommittally.

‘You don't speak German, do you?' Pavel smiled, and the man answered him by blowing smoke up into his face and waving him on with his chin.

‘Now what's so important that they would put a Soviet goon in a police jacket on the door?'

He raised his hand in farewell, and continued on down the stairs, examining the door with his eyes as he passed it. Its frame looked a little cracked to him, like someone had shouldered their way in not so long ago. With any luck it was no longer possible to lock the apartment. Back on the ground floor, he let the house door slam shut, took off his shoes and then snuck back up, soft socks upon the icy floor. He took position a full flight beneath the soldier, and listened to his smoking. All he required was a minute's inattention. Surely it was only a matter of time.

He waited an hour or more and nothing much happened. The soldier's smoking stank up the whole staircase, and every ten minutes Pavel could hear the flare of his match. An old woman passed him, carrying a Bavarian cuckoo clock and a large bag of cabbages. She looked at him standing in his socks upon his unlaced boots, his teeth
clamped shut to keep them from chattering. He put a finger to his lips and pointed another upward, towards the sentry. ‘Please,' he mouthed, from between frost-numbed lips.

‘Boys will be boys,' she muttered, and moved past him. Her back was so bent it was as though her face grew out of her chest. The soldier above did not stir. The granny greeted him curtly while she unlocked the door right next to his chair.

Pavel waited another quarter-hour, stiff with the cold, and was about to give up when he heard a door open and the old woman's voice, addressing the sentry. ‘Excuse me,' she said, ‘I could use a strong man for a second.' And then, in bad, staccato Russian: ‘Help old mother boy she short and you just sit there like furniture ready for fireplace shame on you.'

It got him his break. Pavel heard the soldier mumble something and follow granny into her flat. Flushing with gratitude, he leapt off his boots, gathered them in one hand and ran up the half-dozen stairs to the door with the broken frame. His luck held: it was unlocked, or rather, the lock was broken, just as he had hoped. Once inside, he closed the door gently behind himself and sat on the floor rubbing life back into his frozen feet.

The apartment had been searched.
Tossed,
they said in novels. Pavel walked through the debris that covered the floor, past overturned drawers and broken photo frames whose contents had been removed. The cushions of the living-room sofa had been split end to end, and a cheap tea set lay shattered next to the dining table. In the bedroom, he found a lady's wardrobe, gutted. Its door hung crooked on its hinges and evening gowns littered the floor: stoles, blouses, underwear. Pavel stooped to pick up a pair of red silk panties and once again was conscious of the shame of snooping. He had no idea what he was looking for. It surprised him a little that the clothes had not been ‘confiscated'. They were of good quality and could have bought many a pleasure on the black market.

Tired, Pavel sat down upon the four-poster bed and sank deep into the well-worn mattress. Upon the comforter, the crust of dried blood. The stain was not much bigger than the palm of his hand. Pavel ran a finger over it, morbidly curious as to how it would feel. The blood was icy under his numb fingertip, as was the comforter itself. There was something about the winter's cold that obscured all difference. He sniffed at the pillow but smelled nothing. A single dark hair traversed the pillow case, too long to be a man's. Next to the bed frame lay a few condoms, unused. There was no way of telling which of these things constituted a clue.

Pavel stood up again, unsure what to do. Wishing to be diligent in his search, he looked for papers: documents, a sheaf of letters, a diary. Predictably, he found none. If they had ever existed they had been taken by those who had come before him. In the bathroom, a collection of soaps and cosmetics had been dumped in the sink, and someone had scratched the Russian word
kurva
into the mirror's glass. Pavel closed his eyes and tried to imagine how the apartment had looked before it was ransacked; tried to picture a prostitute's life, her days carved up between the attentions of her customers and those of her pimp. He imagined the shame of the first tearful weeks of this existence, soon to be displaced by a fierce sort of pride; a manic delight in her own depravity that made men cower and fawn over her, whom they despised. It was no surprise to him that Boyd had fallen for a woman such as this, loved her perhaps, even as he rented out her flesh. Pavel pictured him bringing home chocolates and a bottle of champagne; smearing toffee across her pouty lips as he fed her with unwashed fingers. It made him angry with the dead man, and he opened his eyes.

He was no longer alone.

The soldier had crept up to him without his noticing. Now they stood a mere yard apart: Pavel with his hands clasped around the sink, and the Russian in the doorway, a cigarette behind his ear. Pavel
could see him in the mirror. The word
kurva
cut up his features into eyes and mouth, his cheek's bony wedge. God, he looked young. His hands held a gun, its muzzle pointed at the small of Pavel's back. He didn't say anything, but just in case Pavel slowly raised his hands and placed them on either side of the mirror. They stood like that, wordless, for about fifteen minutes, until they heard heavy footsteps right outside the apartment door and the rap of knuckles upon its wood.

‘Let's go,' said the soldier in Russian, and waved at him with his gun.

Out in the corridor two more soldiers awaited them, machine pistols in hand. These had not bothered to dress up in police uniforms; both were smoking furiously, blowing smoke from their nostrils. Half a flight up, the old woman was standing on the stairs, a grim smile on her wizened face.

‘Now you him have,' she said in her broken Russian. ‘I tell you he is doing no good.'

The soldiers nodded their thanks and walked him out to a waiting car. They shoved him into the back seat, wrapped a Russian coat around his shoulders, squeezed in on either side. Their guns' muzzles dug into Pavel's side, hurting his kidneys. The driver started the engine and they took off down the street, then turned eastward, towards the sector border.

‘If he makes any trouble,' the driver instructed one of the soldiers, ‘break his skull a little.'

The man nodded and grimly slipped some knuckledusters over his gloved fist.

Sonia sat upon her piano chair. Sat still enough to be conscious of the smell of her own unwashed body, and to hear the monkey on its
cupboard perch, picking at its fur. She did not play. She had tried to, on and off, Haydn and then some Bach, but her mind was elsewhere. The Colonel's words were ringing in her ears:
Perhaps it would be a good idea for you to spend the night with him. Do you think that this could be arranged?