Spy hook: a novel (29 page)

“Don’t pretend to be so naive, darling. That’s a common device, we all know that.” The malevolence was unbridled now.

“Bogus names?” said Gloria.

“No need to use bogus names. Use real names. It disguises the purpose of the fund, and can give an account a bit-of class if someone comes snooping around. Providing the signatories don’t find out about it.”

“Perhaps that’s how Bernard’s name got there,” said Gloria softly. She obviously believed Dodo’s story. Dodo’s beady eyes were almost hypnotic. There was something frightening about him: a whiff of evil. “If you never got your hands on any of that loot, you’ve really been swindled darling.” He laughed softly enough to show that it wasn’t a possibility he would spare much time pondering. Then he looked at Gloria, inviting her to join in the fun. When she looked away he picked up his drink and swilled down a good mouthful of it. “Must go,” he said. “Must go.” I didn’t get up. I let the old fool heave himself to his feet and stagger off in the direction of the door. Gloria and I sat together in silence for a few minutes. Finally, in what was doubtless an attempt to pacify me about Dodo’s offensiveness, she said, “He was in a funny mood tonight.”

“And I needed a good laugh,” I said.

It was the day before I was due to pay my regular visit to Berlin that Werner phoned and asked me if I was coming with only hand baggage. I was. Such visits required only a document case big enough to hold pyjamas and shaving gear. “Could you bring a parcel for me? I wouldn’t ask you but Ingrid needs it urgently.”

“Ingrid?” I said. “Who’s Ingrid”

“Ingrid Winter. Lisl’s niece. She’s helping me in the hotel.”

“Oh, is she?”

“It will be heavy,” he said apologetically. “It’s curtain material from Peter Jones, the department store in Sloane Square. Ingrid says she can’t get the patterns she wants anywhere in Berlin.”

“Okay, Werner. I” said okay.”

“Wait till you see the hotel. Almost everything is changed, Bernie. You’ll never recognize the place.”

Oh, my God! I thought. “And how is Lisl taking to all the changes?”, “Lisl?” said Werner as if having difficulty in remembering who Lisl was. Lisl loves the changes. Lisl says it’s wonderful.” “She does?”

“We wouldn’t do anything Lisl didn’t like, Bernie. You know that. It’s Lisl we’re doing it for isn’t it?”

“And Lisl likes it?”

“Of course she does. I’ve just told you she does.”

“See you tomorrow, Werner.”

“And it’s bulky too.”

“Stop worrying, Werner. I said I’ll bring it.” “If the customs want to charge: pay. Ingrid wants to get the curtain people started on the work.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll stay the night? Here? We have room.”

“Thanks Werner. Yes, I’d like that.”

“Ingrid cooks a great Hoppel-Poppel.”

“I haven’t eaten Hoppel-Poppel in twenty years,” I said. “Not a real one.”

“With fresh herbs,” said Werner, “that’s the secret. Fresh eggs and fresh herbs.”

“Sounds like Ingrid is not getting in the way,” I said.

“Oh, no,” said Werner. “She’s not getting in the way at all.” I cursed Werner, Ingrid and the roll of curtain material before I got to Berlin-Tegel. The customs man watched me struggling with it and just grinned. In Berlin even the customs men are human.

Werner struggled to get it into the back seat of his brand-new silver 7 series BMW, and even then the end of the roll of cloth protruded through the open window. “This isn’t you, Werner,” I said as he roared off into the traffic with an insolent skill that I never knew he had. “This flashy new fashionable car with the big engine. It’s not you, Werner.”

“I’ve changed, Bernie,” he said.

“Because of running the hotel?”

“That’s right. Because I’m running the hotel,” and he smiled at some secret joke as he went weaving through the fast-moving traffic that fills West Berlin at this time of the morning. The heater was on, there were grey clouds overhead and it was beginning to rain. Berliners were still wrapped up in their heavy clothes. Spring doesn’t hurry on its way to Berlin. He dropped me at Frank Harrington’s office. Once there I started to earn my pay. Frank, and a couple of his senior people, plodded with me through the latest London directives. Every few minutes there would be some expletive or a sharp intake of breath as I revealed a particularly impractical or ill-advised notion that had sprung from London Central’s committees. I was only there to take the brunt of the Field Office objections, and everyone present recognized that as my role. So I smiled and shrugged and wriggled and prevaricated as they hit me over the head with their reasoned objections. And eventually the game ended and, our role-playing abandoned, I was allowed to resume the more comfortable persona of Bernard Samson, former Berlin Field Unit agent.

It was six-thirty by the time I finished work. The rain had come and gone but there was still a drizzle. The offices had emptied and the streets were crowded. Like rivers of flame the flashing signs made brightly coloured reflections in the wet streets. The car took me to Lisl Hennig’s hotel. As I got out of it I stood in the rain and examined the facade apprehensively, but whatever changes Werner had wrought they were not to be seen from the street. This was the same old house that I’d known all my life. They were all the same, these Ku-Danun houses near the” Zoo. They were built at the turn of the century by speculative builders for nouveau riche businessmen, and the adornments of bearded gods and buxom nymphs were chosen from catalogues by those who wanted to customize their homes. Some of them were grotesquely overdone.

Since then the Red Army’s artillery, and the Anglo American bombing fleets, had added further distinguishing features to all the buildings of Berlin, so that Lisl’s house was scarred and chipped with a pox of splinter damage. The fighting done, the roof had been renewed and the decorated window surrounds of the upper storey had been shoddily and hastily patched up. Real repairs were forty years overdue.

I pushed through the heavy doors and went up the front stairs. The carpet was new, a rich ruby red, and the brass handrail was polished so it shone like gold. There was a sparkling chandelier over the stairs, and the elaborate mirrors on the walls had been cleaned so that they repeated my reflections a thousand times. No sooner had I started up the stairs than I heard the piano. “Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you . . .” And then a sudden cascade of improvised harmonies. It was Werner at the keys. I would recognize his silky ebullient style anywhere. Something almost spiritual happened to Werner when he sat at the piano.

“. . . my irreplaceable you.” Someone had moved the grand piano so that it was in the centre of the “salon”. And either it had been painted white or it was a new piano. There were comfortable soft brown leather armchairs too. And all Lisl’s signed souvenir photos of Berlin personalities of long ago had been cleaned and newly arranged, one close upon the other, to cover the whole wall. Who wasn’t represented there? Here were Einstein, FurtwAngler, Strauss, Goebbels, Dietrich, Piscator, Brecht, Weil, and the photos were signed with extravagant declarations of affection for Lisl or for her mother - Frau Wisliceny - who’d once played hostess to all Berlin. There were not many hotel guests to be seen. just a party of four Danes who were chatting animatedly as if unaware of the music, and a desiccated couple sitting at the bar, drinking colourful cocktails and glaring at each other. I caught a brief glimpse of Ingrid Winter as she came down the stairs with a tray. She was wearing another of her stylish “farmer’s wife goes to church” dresses. This one had a high lacy neckline and long ankle-length skirt. She smiled at me.

Werner looked up from the keyboard. He saw me and stopped playing. “Bernie! I told you to phone. I was going to come and fetch you. The rain is terrible. He looked at my wet coat.

“Frank arranged a car.”

From her chair in the corner Lisl called imperiously, “What are you doing, Bernd? Come and give your Lisl a kiss!” She was in good voice whatever her infirmities. She was dressed in a flowing red robe. Her face was carefully painted and she had false eyelashes which she fluttered like a schoolgirl. As I leaned over her, the smell of perfume was almost overwhelming. “Your coat is wet, Bernd,” she said. “Take it off. Tell Klara to dry it in the kitchen.”

“It’s all right, Lisl,” I said.

“Do as I say, Bernd. Don’t be so stubborn.’ I took the coat off and gave it to the aged Klara who appeared from nowhere. “And then go down to the boiler room. The pump is giving trouble again. I told them you were always able to mend it.” “I’ll try,’ I promised without conviction. Lisl was determined to believe that I had spent my childhood performing all kind of mechanical miracles with the antiquated electricity system and the heating. It wasn’t true of course. The idea that Bernd would fix it had been Tante Lisl’s way of deferring as long as possible the inevitable replacement of aged and broken machinery. “The hotel is looking wonderful, Lisl.”

She grunted as if she hadn’t properly heard me, but the one sided little smile she gave was enough to tell me how pleased she was with Werner’s refurbishment.

I could not really be expected to cure the pump of its chronic arrhythmias: it was too far gone. Werner came with me to the subterranean boiler room and we examined the incontinent old brute with its dribbled rust and flaking insulation. In an attempt to justify Lisl’s confidence in me I gave the meters a tap, rapped upon the pump casing and repeatedly touched warm pipes that should have been hot enough to scorch the flesh. “It’s not just the boiler. The whole system will have to be renewed,” said Werner. “But I’m praying that it will last out tin next year.”

“Yes.” I said. We continued to look at it in the hope that it would suddenly come to life. Then Ingrid Winter joined us. She said nothing. She just stood with us staring at the boiler. I stole a look at her. She was a handsome woman with a lovely complexion and clear eyes that shone when she looked at you. She glowed with the quiet vocational self-assurance that you hope to see in a nurse.

“It’s not only the money,” explained Werner to no one in particular. “We’ll have to change all the pipes and radiators. There will be dust and noise in every room. If we had to do that in the winter it would mean closing the hotel completely . . .” “Couldn’t you change the boiler first?” I suggested. “Then do the plumbing and piping piece by piece?”

“The plumber says we can’t,” said Werner. He knew my ignorance about such matters was profound, and the look he gave me let me know that he knew. “The sort of boiler we’ll need for all the new bathrooms just wouldn’t operate with the old plumbing. It’s very old.”

Ingrid Winter said, “Perhaps we should talk to some other heating engineer, Werner.”

Her accent was the rounded one of southern Bavaria: not one of those raw back-country accents, just a slight burr. But there was some inflection of Ingrid Winter’s voice, some tiny change of pitch or of tone, that made me look at Werner. He stared back at me and gave the same mirthless smile that I remembered from our schooldays together. Werner once confided that it was his inscrutable expression but guilty would have been a better description.

Werner said, “Old Heinmuller knows the system very well, Ingrid. It was him and his father who got it going again after the bombing in the war.”

“We’ll have to do something, Werner dear,” she said, and this time was unable to conceal the intimacy in her voice. There existed between them that intuitive sympathy and unspoken understanding for which Goethe coined the word Wahlverwanduchaft “While we’re here alone, Ingrid, tell Bernie about the Hungarian.” He touched her arm. “Tell him what you told me, Ingrid.”

She hesitated and then said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything ... But the other evening I was telling Werner about my mother and about that awful Hungarian man who lives nearby.”

“Dodo?” I said.

“Yes. He calls himself Dodo.”

“What about him?”

“He’s a pathetic little man,” said Ingrid. “I’ve never liked him. I wish Mother wouldn’t invite him to the house. He’s always leering at me.” She paused and looked closely at the lagging on the boiler pipes. “It should be cleaned anyway,” she said. “I hate dirt.”

“When was it last cleaned and serviced?” I said. She seemed ill at ease. I wanted to give her a chance to compose herself. “I remember once a fellow came and replaced a nozzle or something, and it started working perfectly again.” I “We’ve tried nozzles,” said Werner impatiently. To Ingrid he said, “Tell Bernie what they said about his father. And your father. It’s better that he knows.”

Ingrid looked at me, obviously not wanting to tell me anything at all.

“I’d like to hear, Ingrid,” I said, trying to make it easier for her.

You remember what I told you when you visited my mother?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I upset you. I know I did. I’m sorry.”

“No matter.”

“Most of what I know comes from Dodo: he’s not a reliable source.”

“But tell me anyway.”

“All we’ve ever been told officially is that Paul Winter was killed after the war ended. An accidental shooting.” “By the Americans,” said Werner.

“Let me tell it, Werner.”

“I’m sorry, Ingrid.”

“They said he was escaping,” she said. “But they always-say that, don’t they?”