Читать книгу Funeral in Berlin - Len Deighton - Страница 17

JOHN AUGUST VULKAN

Wednesday, October 9th

‘Oh boy,’ thought Johnnie Vulkan Edelfresswelle – a great calorific abundance of everything but faith – and quite frankly it was great. There were times when he saw himself as an untidy recluse in some village in the Bavarian woods, with ash down his waistcoat and his head full of genius, but tonight he was glad he had become what he had become. Johnnie Vulkan, wealthy, attractive and a personification of Knallhärte – the tough, almost violent quality that post-war Germany rewarded with admiring glances. The health cures at Worishofen had tempered him to a supple resilience and that’s what you needed to stay on top in this town – this was no place for an intellectual today, whatever it may have been in the ’thirties.

He was glad the Englishman had gone. One could have too much of the English. They ate fish for breakfast and always wanted to know where they gave the best rate of exchange. The whole place was reflected in the coloured mirror. The women were dressed in sleek shiny gowns and the men were wearing 1,000-mark suits. It looked like those advertisements for bourbon that one saw in Life magazine. He sipped his whisky and eased his foot on to the foot-rail of the bar. Anyone coming in would take him for an American. Not one of those crummy stringers who hung around writing groundless rumours with ‘Our special correspondent in Berlin’ on the dateline, but one of the Embassy people or one of the businessmen like the one sitting against the wall with the blonde. Johnny looked at the blonde again. Boy, oh boy! he could see what type of suspender belt she was wearing. He flashed her a smile. She smiled back. A fifty-mark lay, he thought, and lost interest. He called the barman and ordered another bourbon. It was a new barman.

‘Bourbon,’ he said. He liked to hear himself saying that. ‘Plenty of ice this time,’ he said. The barman brought it and said, ‘The right money, please, I am short of change.’ The barman said it in German. It made Vulkan annoyed.

Vulkan tapped a Philip Morris on his thumbnail and noticed how brown his skin was against the white cigarette. He put the cigarette in his mouth and snapped his fingers. The bloody fool must have been half-asleep.

Along the bar, there were a couple of tourists and a newspaper writer named Poetsch from Ohio. One of the tourists asked if Poetsch went across to the ‘other side’ very much.

‘Not much,’ Poetsch said. ‘The Commies have me marked down on their black list.’ He laughed modestly. Johnnie Vulkan said an obscene word loud enough for the barman to look up. The barman grinned at Johnnie and said, ‘Mir kann keener.’¹

Poetsch didn’t speak German so he didn’t notice.

There were lots of radio men here tonight: Americans with the blunt accents of their fathers who spoke strange Slav dialects over the jammed night air. One of them waved to Vulkan but didn’t beckon him across there. That was because they considered themselves the cultural set of the city. Really they were mental lightweights equipped with a few thousand items of cocktail-time small talk. They wouldn’t know a string quartet from a string vest.

The barman lit his cigarette for him.

‘Thanks,’ said Johnnie. He made a mental note to cultivate the barman in the near future, not for the purpose of getting information – he hadn’t sunk to that peanut circuit yet – but because it made life easier in a town like this. He sipped his bourbon and tried to think of a way to appease London. Vulkan felt glad that Dawlish’s boy was heading back to London. He was all right as the English go, but you never knew where you were with him. That’s because the English were amateurs – and proud of it. There were some days when Johnnie wished that he was working for the Americans. He had more in common with them, he felt.

All around there was a rumble of courteous conversation. The man with nose, moustache and spectacles that looked like a one-piece novelty was an English MP. He had the managerial voice that the English upper class used for hailing taxis and foreigners.

‘But here in the actual city of Berlin,’ the Englishman was saying, ‘taxes are twenty per cent below your West German taxes and what’s more your chaps at Bonn waive the four per cent on transactions. With a bit of wangling they will insure your freight free and if you bring in steel you have it carted virtually without charge. No businessman can afford to overlook it, old chap. What line of business you in?’ The Englishman brushed both ends of his moustache and sniffed loudly.

Vulkan smiled to a man from the Jewish Documentation Section. That was a job Vulkan would enjoy, but the pay was very small, he heard. The Jewish Documentation Section in Vienna collected material about war crimes to bring ex-SS men to trial. There was plenty of work about, Vulkan thought. He looked through the tobacco smoke; he could count at least five ex-SS officers in here at this moment.

‘Best thing that ever happened to the British motor car industry.’ The Englishman’s loud voice cut the air again.

‘Your Volkswagen people felt the draught in no time. Ha ha. Lost a source of cheap labour and found the trade union johnnies dunning them for money. What happened? Up went the price of the Volkswagen. Gave our chaps a chance. Say what you like, best thing that ever happened to the British motor car industry, that wall.’

Johnnie fingered the British passport in his pocket. Well, the wall didn’t make much difference to him. He preferred it in fact. If the communists hadn’t stopped all their riff-raff streaming across here in search of jobs, then where would they have got people to work in the factories? Johnnie knew where they would have got them: from the East. Who wanted to go swimming out on the Müggelsee and have it full of Mongolians and Ukrainians? Lot of chance there would be then of restoring East Prussia. Pomerania and Silesia to Germany. Not that Vulkan gave a damn about the ‘lost territories’ but some of these loudmouths, who did, shouldn’t shout about the wall so much.

There was a girl from Wedding. He wondered whether it was true what they said about her chauffeur. It was a strange place for a girl like her to live, horrible low-class district. That tiny house with the TV set over the bed. He had put the Scots colonel on to her. What was it he had said afterwards about her wanting a 21-inch model with colour and remote control? Vulkan remembered how the whole bar had laughed at the time. Vulkan blew her a kiss and wrinkled his eyes in greeting. She waved a small gold-mesh evening bag at him. She was still sexy, Vulkan thought, and in spite of all his resolution found himself sending the barman across to her with a champagne cocktail. He wrote a little note to go with it. He wrote the note with a small gold propelling pencil on the back of an engraved visiting card.

‘Take dinner with me,’ he wrote. He debated whether to add a query but decided that women hate indecision. Domination was the secret of success with women.

‘Will join you later,’ he added, before giving it to the barman.

Two more people had joined Poetsch down at the far end of the bar; a man and a girl. The man looked English. Poetsch said, ‘You saw it, did you? We call it the “wall of shame”, as you know. I’d like to show it to every living person in the world.’

A man called ‘Colonel Wilson’ winked at Vulkan. To do this, ‘Colonel Wilson’ had to remove a large pair of dark glasses. Around his left eye and upper cheek there was a mesh of scars. Wilson slid a cigar along the bar to Vulkan.

‘Thanks, Colonel,’ Vulkan called. Wilson was an ex-corporal cook who had got his scars from spluttering fat in a mess hall in Omaha. It was a good cigar. ‘Colonel’ wouldn’t be such a fool as to give him a cheap one. Vulkan smelled it, rolled it and then decapitated it scientifically with a small flat gold cigar-cutter that he kept in his top pocket. A gold guillotine. An amalgam of sharp steel and burnished gold. The barman lit the cigar for him.

‘Always with a match,’ Vulkan told him. ‘A match held a quarter of an inch away from the leaf. Gas lighters never.’ The barman nodded. Before Vulkan had the cigar properly alight, ‘Colonel’ had moved alongside him at the bar. ‘Colonel Wilson’ was six feet one-and-a-half inches of leathery skin encasing meaty sinew, packed dense like a well-made Bockwurst. His face was grey and lined: his hair trimmed to the skull. He could have made a living in Hollywood playing in the sort of film where the villains have thick lips. He ordered two bourbons.

Vulkan could hear Poetsch saying, ‘Truth – I’m fond of saying – is the most potent weapon in the arsenal of freedom.’ Poetsch was fond of saying that, Vulkan thought. He knew that ‘Colonel Wilson’ wanted something. He drank the bourbon quickly. ‘Colonel Wilson’ ordered two more. Vulkan looked at the barman and tipped his head a millimetre towards the girl from Wedding. The barman lowered his eyelids. It was one of the great things about this town, thought Vulkan, this sensitivity to signs and innuendo. He heard the English MP’s voice, ‘Good heavens, no. We have a few tricks left up our sleeve I can tell you.’ The English MP chortled.

The British were deadly, Vulkan decided. He remembered his last visit there. The big hotel in Cromwell Road, and the rain that never stopped for a week. A nation of inventive geniuses where there are forty different types of electrical plug, none of which works efficiently. Milk is safe on the street but young girls in danger, sex indecent but homosexuality acceptable, a land as far north as Labrador with unheated houses, where hospitality is so rare that ‘landlady’ is a pejorative word, where the most boastful natives in the world tell foreigners that the only British shortcoming is modesty.

Vulkan winked to the girl from Wedding. She smoothed her dress slowly and touched the nape of her neck. Vulkan turned to ‘Colonel Wilson’ and said, ‘OK, what’s on your mind?’

‘I want thirty-nine Praktika cameras; with the f/2 lens.’

Vulkan reached for a piece of ice from the canister on the bar. The piano-player did a fancy cadenza and stopped playing. Vulkan put his cigar in his mouth and clapped his hands. His face scowled at the ribbon of smoke. Several people joined in the applause. Vulkan said, ‘Do you?’ still looking at the piano-player.

‘Good price and in dollars,’ said Colonel Wilson. There was no reply from Vulkan.

Wilson said, ‘I know that you don’t do that kind of thing for a living; but this is a special favour for a friend of mine. It’s more of a memento – you know, a camera smuggled out of the East – these guys like that kind of thing.’

‘What guys?’ said Vulkan.

‘Trade delegation,’ said Wilson.

‘Thirty-nine,’ said Vulkan reflectively.

‘It would be no trouble to you,’ said Wilson. ‘Just bring them with you when you come back with a Russian. You are the only guy I know who ever rides through Checkpoint Charlie with a Russian.’ He laughed nervously.

‘Thirty-nine must be the delegation of American radio and TV producers. Poetsch is running that, isn’t he?’

‘Aw,’ said Wilson, ‘don’t go yelling it around. I told you in strict confidence. If you can deliver them before …’

‘You told me nothing,’ said Vulkan. ‘I told you. I’m not a camera dealer, tell Poetsch that.’

‘Leave P’s name out of this.’

Vulkan gently blew smoke at Wilson, saying nothing.

‘Don’t cross me, Vulkan,’ Colonel Wilson said. ‘You don’t want me spilling it to your British pal that I’m no longer a US Army major.’

‘No longer,’ said Vulkan gleefully, almost choking on his drink.

‘I can make plenty of trouble,’ said Wilson.

‘And you can make a one-way trip through the wire,’ said Vulkan quietly.

They stared at each other. Wilson swallowed to moisten his throat and turned back to his drink.

‘OK Johnnie,’ Wilson said over his shoulder. ‘No hard feelings, eh, pal?’

Johnnie pretended not to hear and moved along the bar calling for another bourbon.

‘Two?’ said the barman.

‘One will be enough,’ said Johnnie.

He could see Wilson’s face in the mirror; it was very pale. He could see the girl from Wedding too, touching the hair at the nape of her neck like she didn’t know she was straining her brassiere. She crossed her legs and smiled at his reflection.

‘Poetsch,’ Johnnie thought.

He had wanted to get something on Poetsch, if only to cut down his ranting at the bar. He could hear his voice now. Poetsch was saying, ‘The very same people who made the great little TV film about the tunnel. The whole thing was paid for by the TV company, NBC. And what I’m saying, folks, is that those fifty-nine people who escaped owe their very freedom to our American system of unshackled enterprise and bold corporate drive …’ There were a couple of favours Poetsch could do for Johnnie Vulkan. Johnnie relished the idea of telling Poetsch about them; even the girl from Wedding wasn’t a better prospect than that.

The lounge was beginning to fill up now. Vulkan leaned back against the bar, tensed his muscles and relaxed. It was good to feel he knew them all and that even Americans like ‘Colonel Wilson’ couldn’t take advantage of him. Johnnie Vulkan could pick out the tarts and the queens, the hustlers and the fairies. He knew all the heavies waiting assignment: from the nailers-up of notices to the nailers up of Christs. He saw the girl from Wedding trying to catch his eye. Poetsch’s crowd had grown too. There was that elderly English queer with the dyed hair, and a stupid little Dresdener who thought he was going to infiltrate the Gehlen Bureau – except that Johnnie had told them all about him last week. He wondered whether Helmut had been serious about having the Dresdener killed in a traffic accident. It was possible. King was right as a code name Vulkan decided; they acknowledged his stature by alloting it to him. Freudian. King Vulkan of Berlin.

He supposed the red-haired girl talking to Poetsch now was the one Poetsch had mentioned to him; the girl from Israeli Intelligence.

‘Boy, oh boy!’ thought Vulkan. ‘What a town this is!’ and he eased his way down the bar towards them, smiling at Poetsch.

¹ Mir kann keener: you can’t fool me (a typical Berliner comment).