The Lieutenant’s Lover (29 page)

The summer blazed on. The rumours grew.

Misha knocked at the front door.

Behind him, in the neat suburban garden, a shell hole clawed its way into the lawn and fruit trees. Misha waited twenty seconds, then raised his hand to knock again. Before he could do so, the door swung silently open, and a black-coated servant wafted Misha through a ticking marble hall to a flashily luxurious drawing room. The owner, Thomas Brandt, was present, dressed in a dark grey business suit with a loud tie. A leather coat was flung over one of the sofas.

Misha introduced himself: he was a businessman, he said, needing help with supplies. Brandt yawned ostentatiously, and skewed his body around in the sofa to look at Misha better. He shrugged.

‘So? Why come here?’

‘I came because I read one of the British MilGov bulletins. Specifically, the one in which it was mentioned that you had been fined two hundred thousand Reichsmarks for transporting a hundred and fifty tons of pork from Bremen into the French zone and selling it.’

‘One hundred and seventy-five tons. One seven five not one fifty.’

‘All the better.’

‘Drink.’

Brandt spoke the word like a statement not a question. Getting up, he poured whisky into a pair of heavy crystal tumblers, no water, no ice. The whisky was a Scottish brand, expensive and rare.

‘Thank you.’

‘You want to sell or buy?’

‘Certainly buy. Perhaps selling too.’

‘Oh?’

‘I’m an engineer. I’ve assembled a foundry. Not first-class, but not bad. We’re ready to start.’

‘What’s a foundry? How did you come by it? I’m not a metal basher.’

Misha began to answer, ignoring Brandt’s derogatory tone, but he could see the businessman’s eyes already beginning to glaze. And in any case, what did it matter? The fact was that Misha had done it. It had taken him months to do it, but he’d done it.

First, he’d got hold of some trucks – four Russian-made UralAZ monsters with huge wheels and formidably low gearing. He’d made a date with Kallenbrecher, gone back to the siding, then loaded his trucks till their rear axles were jammed flat against the suspension. Getting the equipment back to the Soviet sector of Berlin had been simple enough. Moving it through into the British sector had been more worrying, but easy enough in the event. Misha had simply waited until two o’clock in the morning, then covered by a sudden squall of rain, he’d driven straight across the sector boundary.

That had been the easy part. But much of the equipment he owned was in an appalling state of repair, and there were still missing parts to be sourced or fabricated. For fourteen long weeks he and a tiny team had laboured to get his factory set up. He’d drawn on the ‘Central Bank of Cigarettes’, as Hollinger had come to call it. But Misha couldn’t afford to flaunt any sudden wealth. There were Soviet informers everywhere in Berlin. The NKVD and other Soviet security forces were becoming ever more brazen in beating or abducting individuals they didn’t want around. So Misha kept things inconspicuous. He kept his looms going, and had even built four more. As far as possible, he used his existing income to get the foundry built.

But none of that did Brandt need to know.

‘We can make anything,’ said Misha. ‘Prototypes. Specialist parts. Replacement parts. Every manufacturer will need castings sometimes. Some manufacturers will need us all the time.’

‘West zones or east zone?’

‘Both. Mostly east. The Soviets ripped out the foundries, but couldn’t reassemble them. They’re desperately short.’

‘Maybe. But it’s a question of payment. The easy things are the simple ones. Food, steel, coal, paper.’

‘I didn’t come here because I needed help with the easy things. The Soviets are desperate. I have names.’

Misha handed over the slip of paper he’d brought with him. A list of businesses that needed castings. Two thirds of the names were located in the Soviet zone.

Brandt stared expressionlessly at the paper, then waved his guest out into the hall. Misha stood there. From another one of the rooms off the hallway, a door opened and a girl stepped out. She was in her early twenties, German but carefully Americanised from her nylon stockings to her bright crimson lipstick. She was pretty and thin, but also brassy, unbelievable, fake.

She said, ‘Brandt?’

‘He’s on the phone.’

‘
Die Scheisse
. He’s always on the phone.’

She left again by a different door.

After fifteen minutes, Brandt was done with his calls and he called Misha in.

‘Castings, yes, everyone wants them. You, what do you need?’

‘Coal for the furnace. Metal for the castings.’

‘OK.’ He used the American term. ‘Coal is easy. Metals I can get. You will need to promote your own products. That’s not a business I understand. You’ve got clearance for the Soviet zone? You’re willing to travel there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. I can give you some contacts too. Take samples, but don’t sell anything. Just find out what people have to offer.’

‘You mean money?’

‘Yes, money. Not roubles of course. And Reichsmarks only if we have to. But anything. Food. Timber. Any sort of vehicles. Engines. Barges. Livestock. Scrap metal. Oil or coal, of course. Anything. I’ll handle things from there.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You speak Russian?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Misha, avoiding any discussion of his past.

‘It’s better to. It’s the Russians who make the decisions these days. But
macht nichts
. I’ll handle things.’

Brandt nodded. The conversation was over. The girl came into the room again, and hung on the doorpost, rolling around it with her skinny hips like a dancer in one of Berlin’s new nightclubs.

Once again, Misha felt a jab of his old, unreasonable certainty. Tonya was alive. She was still in Germany. And he would find her. How could he not?

He felt ridiculously sure.

Oderbruch, just west of the river Oder.

A place of low, forested hills separated by broad floodplains, small farms and scattered villages. Once, the Oderbruch had been well inside the German border. Germany had continued on to the east, reaching as far as Königsberg on the shores of the Baltic. But that had been before the war. After the surrender, Germany had lost everything east of the Oder. Poland had jumped westwards. Königsberg had become Kaliningrad, part of Russia itself. The Oderbruch now marked the furthest eastward limit of Germany. It felt like a place forgotten by time. It felt like the end of the earth.

Tonya saw the landscape unroll behind the truck. She was in the back, along with four ordinary soldiers and a couple of dozen crates and sacks. The other soldiers – all male and twenty years her junior – smoked and talked among themselves. They didn’t include her in their conversation. She didn’t seek to join in.

More flat fields passed away behind their tailgate. More stone houses and low hills. Then the movement of the truck changed. Instead of the gently curving country roads, the truck made a sudden turn and began accelerating hard down a dead straight track, unmetalled and deeply scored and rutted. The soldiers grabbed the sides of the truck for support as the wooden benches beneath them began to leap and jolt. The conversation died to nothing.

The truck drove for another five minutes, then powered through a pair of wooden gates and drew up in a wide dirt turning circle. Tonya was sitting at the rear of the truck and she was the first to get out. All around, she saw low wooden huts surrounded by a wire-mesh fence topped with barbed wire. There were a couple of watchtowers, the only high points visible anywhere on that flat landscape. A few Russian soldiers marched a work detail of poorly-dressed civilians up a dirt path, towards a building whose purpose Tonya couldn’t make out.

The men who had been in the truck with her jumped out. One of them was a junior sergeant. Two of the others were
yefreytor
, senior privates. Tonya herself, having just completed a tedious three-month military detention, had been demoted all the way to
ryadovoy
, junior private, the lowest of the low.

The sergeant ordered them to begin unloading the truck, Tonya included. The loads – flour, salt, potatoes, carrots – were packed in large loads designed by men for men, which Tonya staggered to carry at all. By the time the goods had been unloaded and carried over to the storehouse, Tonya’s arms were trembling from the strain.

The sergeant, who hadn’t moved or helped, nodded curtly. He called Tonya over with a gesture of his finger. He pointed to a hut, whose white bargeboards and painted door distinguished it from the others around.

‘You need to report to the camp commander. He’ll tell you your duties.’

Tonya nodded, then remembered herself. ‘Yes sir,’ she said, with a smart nod.

She walked over to the hut the man had indicated. A sign on the door in Russian and misspelled German read ‘Oderbruch Special Camp Number 11’, together with a sign in Russian only ‘NKVD 174
^th
Frontier Regiment’. Tonya knocked at the door, heard a shout, and walked on in.

The manager fingered the lumps of iron on his desk. Each one was heavy, several pounds apiece, and they made a dull thumping sound as he shifted them around. Overhead light gleamed dully off their rounded surfaces.

These are iron not steel,’ said the manager, plaintively.

‘Of course. It’s easier for us to make samples in softer metals. But we can make almost anything at all.’

‘Yes, well, we need castings all right. We’re meant to make machine tools for the Russians, but we don’t have half the parts we ought to have. Not even screws. Would you believe that? If we want screws, we make them ourselves.’

‘Screws, that’s not my business. Parts, I can make. We’d need specifications or a prototype. Then it’s only a question of—’

‘Payment. You’re going to say payment.’ The manager was broad, but he had a defeated slope to his shoulders. His tone of complaint was firmly settled now, like climate or the local geography.

‘I wasn’t. I was going to talk about quantities and materials. But, yes, we’ll need to arrange payment.’

The manager’s hands continued to move among the chunks of metal. He was manager of the Eberswalde Maschinenfabrik, a once-thriving machine tool plant, now struggling to remain in business in the new postwar conditions.

‘Yes, well, you can say what you like about the old gang’ – the manager meant Hitler – ‘but at least there was a currency that made sense. There wasn’t so much silliness in those days. What will you accept for your samples? Roubles?’

‘Of course not, no.’

‘Reichsmarks?’

‘Preferably not.’

‘So, then, diamonds. American dollars. Fairy gold.’

‘Anything. What do you have? Cement? Sand? Bricks? Trucks? Finished products?’

‘You mean anything?’

‘Yes.’

For once, the manager was shocked out of his despondency. ‘
Anything?
Really anything? We have a yardful of timber – proper stuff, all hardwood, well seasoned – that we don’t want and can’t shift.’

Misha nodded. ‘That sounds good. It’s a start anyway. Think about what you have or can get hold of. My partner will give you a call.’

‘Brandt?’

‘Yes, Brandt.’

The manager nodded, still surprised by the possible simplicity of the transaction. The two men began to discuss quantities, materials, specifications, and Misha was surprised by the manager’s sudden alertness when it came to technical matters. After their unpromising start, it turned out to be a useful meeting. The manager was talkative and supplied many details about the economic picture, of which Misha took a mental note, for onward transmission to Harry Hollinger in due course. Only when the conversation turned away from technical issues again, did the manager’s gloom return.

‘This timber.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, there’s a lot of it. You can’t just slip it out of here unnoticed.’

‘No, of course. We’ll need proper permits from the Ivans.’ Misha still found it strange to talk of his own countrymen in that way, but he was Herr Müller now, his Russian past completely wiped out.

‘That won’t be easy.’

‘We can handle it. I’ll need a translator, though, of course.’

‘Translator? There’s a Polish woman in the factory here who speaks a little…’

‘No, no, no, no, no. It will need to be a proper translator. A professional. There was a woman named Kornikova who impressed me once.’

‘Kornikova…’

‘Yes, Red Army, but very good, very helpful. She’d be able to help with all the permits and so forth. Perhaps if you ask around. I suppose there’s a barracks here in town?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Try there. But ask discreetly, don’t go yelling things out. Otherwise, see what else is available. But I insist on a proper translator Russian for preference. The Soviets prefer their own. I won’t work with amateurs.’

The manager’s face went glassy behind his spectacles. Up until this point, Misha had been the perfect salesman, flexible and ready to overcome every small obstacle. On this one point alone, Misha had taken a rigid stance. But the manager was a man of the world. If a man requests the services of a particular woman, there could only be one possible reason why.