Bill made his way back towards the river and the inviting sanctuary of his Mercedes-Benz. The streets had mostly cleared. It was far too cold to be lingering around. An ill wind blew in off the Spree, and Bill pulled down his hat to keep it from freezing his eyes. He felt a little drunk. The vodka had given him a warm protective thermal layer and a slight feeling of giddiness. He felt like a newborn foal trying to work out how his legs worked.
He forced his feet to keep moving. Bill had no intention of staying among the Russians any longer than he had to. Everyone knew what the Ivans could be like. If you fell asleep here, one of the bastards would have your gold tooth when you yawned. There was no way you’d survive falling asleep on the streets alone on the East side of the city with these crooks at the best of times, let alone in this icy hell.
Bill was craving the warmth of his bed. He would take a slow and careful drive home. Shuffling along, he wondered about the investigation. He seemed no nearer to locating Misselwitz. So far, the only link Bill could make was the stack of business cards in the drawer at Misselwitz’s mostly empty apartment. No dirty dishes, no worn clothes. Nothing that might give away recent occupation.
He pulled out the card and mulled over the message again:
You have a friend at St. Bernhardt Church. All sins cleansed. Escape in the arms of our Lord.
Maybe it was some secret society for homosexuals? Why would Misselwitz be in Berlin at all, let alone run a lonely-hearts agency for the locals who were light in the loafers? What about the IDs? Why would anyone need fake papers in Berlin when you could just make up your own identity and claim your documents were destroyed?
It seemed to Bill that he had more questions than answers. First, he needed a good night’s sleep, then to touch base with Jack and see if he had any ideas. He also had an overwhelming urge to visit Irene but decided that arriving at her apartment in the early hours of the morning stinking of vodka and cigars might not be the best thing for their budding relationship. No, he told himself, just head home.
Reaching his shiny, frost-covered, black refuge, he fumbled around in his pocket for his key.
“You won’t need that,” a disembodied voice said from somewhere.
Turning and reaching for his revolver, Bill saw the voice emanating from a weasel-faced Berlin cop. The cop placed his large truncheon onto Bill’s right arm, which was now gripping his gun, about to draw.
“You won’t need that, either,” Weasel’s grey-haired colleague announced. His black Walther PP pointed at Bill’s chest.
“Well, if you are the weasel, I guess that must make you Badger,” Bill said to them, releasing the grip on his gun and slowly revealing his empty hand.
“Oh, look. A fucking comedian,” the Weasel shouted to no one in particular as he reached around and grabbed Bill’s gun. Bill stood perfectly still. There isn’t much you can do when someone is holding the hot end of a pistol at you, just out of arm’s reach.
“We are going for a little drive. Turn around. We need to cuff you,” Badger ordered.
“Great, I could use a tour of the city’s underbelly from the local vermin.”
The cell was large, poorly lit, and very cold. Bill pulled the meagre blanket up around him and lay on the bare wooden boards that were masquerading as either a bed or a bookshelf. He wasn’t sure which. He was shoeless, still wearing his best suit, and conscious that he could now feel the fabric catching on the splintered timber under him. He shuffled around a little, but comfort eluded him. He drifted into a sort of semi-sleep a few times, waking to change position as the numbness of cold and his aching limbs kicked in.
Eventually, he gave up trying to sleep altogether. The beginning of a hangover was hacking through the nerve endings in his brain, somewhere behind his eyes. He cursed himself for drinking too much when he was not only on an active investigation but also in the Russian sector, having just that afternoon tap-danced on the Berlin cops’ toes.
Just as the sun rose outside, he was finally roughly shoved through the cell door by two young cops and down a stark white corridor towards another room, presumably for questioning. One of the young cops left and stood outside, visible through the glass panel in the door’s tiny window. The other, just inside the door. The room was empty but for two small chairs on either side of a square table.
“What’s this, the dining room? When is breakfast?” Bill asked the cop.
He stared straight ahead, ignoring him. Bill tried again.
“I’ll take my eggs over easy.”
Tough crowd. Bill resigned to just sitting and humming, trying his best to appear unperturbed.
A short time later, a dark-haired man in his fifties wearing horn-rimmed glasses barged into the room, almost knocking over the young cop.
“Alright, piss off,” he said to the guard as he pulled out the chair opposite and took his place opposite Bill. Then, with a stern look, he emptied the small box he’d come in with onto the table between them. The young cop closed the door behind him but remained visible with his colleague outside.
“Right then, what do you and your pal think you were doing pretending to be police earlier today?”
“What? I don’t know what you are talking about. I want to call my Lawyer.”
“Tough. No lawyer. Who are you, and what are you doing questioning people and claiming to be cops?”
Bill’s mind raced through the day’s events, trying to recall exactly what he had done to upset the Berlin bulls. His brain struggled through the hangover and pain caused by nodding off on the hard wooden bench.
The forger. Of course! The bookshop. The tall man had loose lips, it seemed. Maybe he needed another visit to loosen his jaw, too, Bill thought.
“If you are charging me with a crime, I suggest you do so, and I will consult my legal representation. Otherwise, I do not wish to converse with you further. I am a British citizen and an employee of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Therefore, you have no right to detain me or obstruct me from my legal activities as a journalist.”
“I’m afraid I don’t like your attitude.”
“Please don’t be afraid. I get that a lot.”
“Lousy punk. What did you do in the war, sit at a typewriter writing about real heroes, or just typing up the shipping forecast for your betters?”
“I mainly played cards and drank a lot. You? Communist in hiding returned from the Steppe?”
“Red? Ha! Fuck off!”
“Ah, we are getting somewhere. So how many old Jews’ skulls did you smash on the pavement? How many helpless disabled children did you euthanise for the glorious thousand-year Reich? SS, SD? Which was it then? If I lift your arm, I bet you have your blood group tattooed under there, as per SS regulations. You sicken me.”
His face reddened. Bill had hit a nerve, and he moved his jaw around like a cow chewing cud, wondering what to say to that. Bill wondered if he’d just given him the excuse he was looking for to beat the hell out of him. He tensed up and waited to get hit. The way Bill saw it, everyone takes a beating sometimes, and besides, that would confirm Bill’s suspicions about what this big lump had done in the war.
To end up a detective in this born-again Berlin Police, he must be well connected, Bill supposed. Communist? Possibly, but more likely ex-Gestapo. The old Red Castle at Alexanderplatz was the main police precinct for the whole city. At least it was until Uncle Joe, and his red storm destroyed it. The real cops had mostly perished in the last days of the liberation. The rats with the blood group tattoos had scurried and hid in the rubble of the city. If the Americans had chosen Berlin to drop their new bomb, all that would be left would be cockroaches, the SS and the Gestapo.
The allies needed a tough police force to keep order in the decaying city, and who better to instil fear than the very same mob who had been terrorising the country for the past twelve years? The terror from the Russians had been brutal but brief. The long shadow of the men in black coats would last a generation.
This particular phoenix had risen from the ashes of the war, and he was probably hungry but certainly angry and resentful.
“What would you know about anything? Limp-wristed, glorified typist. Fucking pen-pusher. What sort of a journalist carries round a revolver, and an American one, at that? You’d probably do more damage to yourself than anyone you tried to fire it at.”
“A paranoid one who likes his gun to work when needed,” Bill quipped.
“Look, you smart-arsed punk, the French sector is my town. You and I both know what you were up to, intimidating people just to get them to talk and get your story, whatever the hell it is. So don’t piss up my leg and tell me it’s raining. I have enough trouble as it is with the bloody Yanks breathing down my neck.”
He suddenly stopped his speech short. Whatever he wanted to say, he prevented himself from saying it.
“Oh?” Bill asked.
So, the Amis were shaking him down. What about? First, the brown suits had threatened Albie at The Post not to publish the photograph, and now they had their greasy hands on the throats of the cops in the French sector.
“Nice try, punk. I’ve checked your credentials, and it seems you are well connected. Your carry permit is valid. They even vouched for you at the BBC office. Unfortunately, I can’t hold you with no real evidence, but, Hell-be-damned, next time, I’ll just make sure I’ll find some, understand?”
“Are you suggesting you will fabricate evidence to charge me with a fictitious crime?”
“Maybe next time, I’ll just kick your teeth in and dump you in the Tiergarten with the other vegetables. Now, take your crap and get the hell out of my sight,” then he added, “and stay out of my town.”
“I’ll be sure of it, Mr …?”
“Müller. Chief Müller.”
“So, what was he like?” Jack enquired, sipping carefully at his steaming milky coffee.
The cafe was bustling. Never had the chasm between the classes been more evident to Bill than right there. There were no shortages for the middle class and foreign diplomats. While they sat in the heated cafe drinking hot drinks, they watched as, outside, three bedraggled children, no older than ten, begged the passers-by for money and cigarettes. They wore torn coats and had grubby, threadbare trousers. Two of them had hob-nailed boots on—the kind you see worn by farm labourers. One had fashioned some laces using twine. The other shuffled along with the tops wide open. The third, smaller boy had wrapped his feet in canvas sandbags to give at least some protection from the cold.
“He was a belligerent old prick,” Bill answered as he stirred a third sugar lump into his tea. He would drink coffee but had always preferred tea. “He obviously rules the French sector with an iron fist, and we stepped on his toes.”
“You think he’s in on the ID business?”
“I expect he’s cut into everything that happens on his patch. The cops are more bent than the villains in Berlin. Especially the ones that used to wear the long black coats.”
“So, he’s ex-Gestapo?”
“Undoubtedly.”
An even younger boy appeared in front of the other three urchins. He was small and looked malnourished. The city was full of these feral children. The various governments had little desire to be burdened with their care. Some were orphans, whilst many had been sent out by their mothers to obtain whatever they could to help keep the family fed, whether it be through begging, barter or just plain old theft. The smaller child appeared to be looking for something and was pointing down the street.
“Well, all has gone quiet at the church. So, what’s the next move?”
“We need to get on the trail of Misselwitz. It feels like we are chasing our tails. He’s in the city, so he’ll have to surface sometime.”
“What about Schmidt? I could pay another visit to Misselwitz’s building and see if he’ll talk.”
“I don’t think he’s using it. It’s a front in case he needs to give it out. It’s probably the address on his ID card. Let’s not shake down Schmitt just yet, in case it spooks Misselwitz to go even further down his rabbit hole. Then there’s the fat priest. I don’t see any other leads at the moment if we can’t catch up with the moustache man. I’ll head back to Anna’s tomorrow to try to speak to her girls. Perhaps others have made acquaintance with our amateur photographer. I’m still none the wiser about how this all fits together.”
Bill lit his pipe and slouched back in his chair. Jack stared thoughtfully out the window at the four kids.
Jack was something of an enigma in the service. Since the war he rarely smoked while on operations. In England, he occasionally smoked, and he was never bothered by Bill’s pipe, even in the confines of a vehicle or small room, but Bill had, with maybe one exception, never seen him smoke while overseas in the past year.
Bill looked up at the diminutive beggars just as he got his pipe to stay lit. The two largest boys started to shove the new child to the ground as the smaller of the three kicked him in the leg.
Jack rose slowly and deliberately from his seat, then, whilst muttering something in Polish under his breath, made his way to the cafe door. As he pulled the giant door open, the air pressure changed in the room, and the cold air rushed to fill the vacuum. Bill knew something had gotten to him, as Jack seldom spoke Polish these days.
The three boys stopped tussling with the younger boy, who was now in floods of tears and stared in terror at Jack’s looming figure approaching them. The boy with the laced boots turned to run, so Jack grabbed him by the ear and spun him back around. Bill couldn’t hear what was being said, but the three belligerents quietly listened and nodded as Jack harangued them in a raised voice, his arms gesturing all around him. Finally, the three boys looked down at the ground and spoke to the youngest boy, who was wiping away tears.
Bill looked on as Jack reached into his pocket and handed the three older boys something. Placing a few objects into each of their outstretched palms. Bill looked back at the table to see the little bowl, which had held the sugar cubes, was now empty. Then, smiling to himself, he swivelled back around just as Jack added a banknote to each grubby little hand. Now beaming with smiles, they each shook the hand of the littlest kid, thanked Jack, and then made off in the direction of the city centre, Mitte, where the Reichstag once stood proud near the famous Brandenburg Gate and the grand facade of the Adlon Hotel. These days, the hotel was gone, and the gate was simply a sorry, tired, inconvenient obstruction to the progressives’ brand-new political divergence of the Russian, British and American sectors.
The politics were hanging by a thread. The allied nations seemed to eye each other distrustfully, like two Rugby teams ready for a scrum, but with guns. The Russians appeared to be distancing themselves from the clique more, day by day. Indeed, if Errington was right, their spies were even probing their organisation for intel.
Jack led the young boy into the cafe, much to the disgust of a uniformed British officer sitting at a table near the door with a couple of suits. Jack ignored their screwed faces, nodded to the waiter, and sat the boy down at their table.
“I hate bullies,” Jack grunted as he sat down. “This whole country is full of them.”
“They are just boys with no fathers, Jack.”
“Hello, sir,” the young boy said to Bill, almost avoiding eye contact.
“Hello, young man. Are you hungry?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good, then this is indeed a good day to get a kicking,” Jack interjected.
The waiter appeared and bowed his head. Jack shook his head and pointed to the scruffy boy.
“Sir?” the waiter asked, confused.
“Ask him what he wants,” Jack added.
The waiter, perturbed, turned to the boy, “What would you like … sir?”
The scrawny little kid looked to Jack, who nodded encouragingly. “Whatever you want, kid.”
“Schnitzel?” he said, unsure if he was allowed.
“Very well.”
“Plus a basket of bread and a tall glass of milk,” added Bill.