Funeral in Berlin (16 page)

In medieval times it was the aim of players
to annihilate every opponent instead of
checkmating the king.

Tuesday, October 22nd

TEREZIN. BELZEC. OSVETIM. GLIWICE. MAJDANEK. SOBIBOR BERGEN-BELSEN. IZIBICA. FLOSSENBURG. GROSSROSEN. ORANIENBURG. TREBLINKA. LODZ. LUBIN. DACHAU. BUCHENWALD. NEUENGAMME. RAVENSBRUECK. SACHSENHAUSEN. NORDHAUSEN. DORA. MAUTHAUSEN. STRASSHOF. LANDSBERG. PLASZOW. OHRDRUS. HERZOGENBUSCH. WESTER-BORK.

The Pinkas Synagogue is a tiny grey stone fifteenthcentury building, its Gothic Renaissance interior bare of all furnishings except the carefully painted lettering.

The walls of the little synagogue seem grey, grey with an intricate pattern of tiny writing. Jammed
together like the victims themselves, and written with obsessional clarity, are the names of the camps and of the dead. The grey wall stretches away like infinity and the lines of names are as hushed as a Nuremberg rally.

The man I had come to see tapped the stone wall at shoulder height. Under the scarred finger tip I read the name Broum. As his finger moved in the cool light the name was revealed, hidden, revealed and then hidden again as his hand rested over it.

‘The best book is the world,’ said Josef-the-gun, ‘that’s what the Talmud tells us; the best book
is
the world.’ His hand made a curious turning movement. He looked at it like a stage conjurer, proud that by opening his fist he could make fingers materialize. He looked at the wall as though he had produced that too from his sleeve and he tapped it to show what a solid manifestation it was.

‘I know what you are going to say,’ said Josef-the-gun. His voice sounded indecently loud.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Now you understand for the first t-t-t-t-t-time.’ I could see the tip of his tongue vibrate as he stuttered. ‘That’s what they all say and, believe me, it sounds silly.’

‘Is that what they all say?’

‘One man said “I went to St Peter’s before I understood Luther and I had to come here to understand Hitler”.’

‘Understand,’ I said, ‘that’s a complicated word, “understand”.’

‘That’s right,’ said Josef-the-gun. He moved suddenly like a trout in a patch of sunlight.

‘What is there to understand? You write a numeral six, put six zeros behind it and you call it “Jewish Dead”. You write six zeros behind a numeral seven, and you call that “Russian Civilian Dead”. You change the first numeral to three and you have a symbol for murdered Russian prisoners. Five: it’s Polish corpses. Understand? Why, it’s simple mathematics. Just name it as the nearest round million.’ I said nothing. ‘So you are inquiring about Broum?’ he said finally. He removed his wide-brimmed black hat and studied the band of it as though he had some secret message inside.

‘Broum,’ I said. ‘Yes. Paul Louis Broum.’

‘Ah yes,’ said the man; ‘
Paul Louis
Broum.’ He emphasized the given names carefully. ‘That’s the voice of officialdom all right.’ And he gave a secret little smile, then ducked and bobbed away like he thought I was about to strike him. ‘Broum,’ he said again; he rubbed his chin and moved his eyeballs up into his forehead in an attitude of deep thought. ‘And you saw Jan-im-Glück yesterday.’

‘Harvey took me there,’ I said.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said still rubbing his chin. ‘Well, my brother is an old man…’ He stopped rubbing his chin long enough to make a little circular motion with his index finger. ‘…it happens to us all as we get older.’

‘He seemed lucid enough,’ I said.

‘I meant no d-d-d-disrespect,’ said the man. He ducked away again. I realized that some of the physical movements were to cover his stuttering.

‘You knew Broum?’ I asked.

‘Everyone knew him,’ said the man. ‘People like that, everyone knows them, no one likes them.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘People like what?’

‘Very rich people,’ said the man. Didn’t you know he was v-v-v-very rich?’

‘What’s the difference,’ I asked, ‘rich or poor?’

The old man leaned towards me. ‘The difference between the unhappy poor and the unhappy rich is that the unhappy rich can change.’ He gave an abrupt cackle. He shuffled across the cold floor and when he spoke again his voice echoed around the vaulting. ‘When the Gestapo needed a h-h-h-h-h-headquarters here in Prague they chose the Petschek House—that’s a bank—they used the vaults and strongrooms as their torture chambers. A symbolic dwelling for the tortures of fascism, eh? The vaults of capitalist wealth.’ He dodged away waving a finger.

I realized why he was called ‘Josef-the-gun’—it was because of this stutter. ‘But why was Broum unpopular in the camp?’ I asked to try to get the conversation back on my lines.

‘He wasn’t unpopular with the G-G-G-G-G-G-Germans. Oh dear no. They liked him almost as much as his money. Almost as much as his money,’ he said again. ‘They did favours for money, you see, the Germans.’

‘What sort of favours?’

‘Any sort,’ said the gun. ‘The medical officer for a start, he’d sell all manner of lovely things for money. For the right amount of money he could c-c-c-c-cure you.’

I nodded.

‘Cure you,’ said the old man. ‘You understand what I mean?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they could make innocent prisoners suffer or let guilty ones go free.’

‘Guilty ones,’ said the man. ‘What a strange vocabulary you have.’

‘Who killed Broum?’ I asked. I wanted to cut through the man’s rhetoric.

‘International disinterest,’ said the man.

‘Who personally killed him?’ I said.

‘Neville Chamberlain,’ said the man.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Who actually strangled him?’ I added ‘Broum’, in an effort to avoid another long flight of philosophy and paradox.

‘Ah,’ said the man, ‘strangled?’ He put on his hat like a judge about to pass the death sentence. ‘The instrument of death?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was a guard,’ said the man.

‘An officer?’ I asked.

Josef removed his hat and wiped the leather band with a handkerchief.

‘Was it the medical officer?’ I prompted.

‘Didn’t my brother tell you?’ he said. ‘He knew.’

‘You tell me,’ I said. The man put his hat back
on. ‘A Landser named Vulkan. Just a boy. Not good nor bad.’

He walked out of the door into the bright sunlight. Beyond him greenery sprouted between the white gravestones like they were gigantic mustard-and-cress sandwiches. I followed him.

‘Did you know this soldier Vulkan?’

He turned quickly. ‘Just as well as I know you. What do you think Treblinka was—a Conservative club?’ He stepped away. The bright sunlight made his skin waxy and yellow.

‘Try to remember,’ I said. ‘This is important.’

‘Oh, that’s different,’ said the man. He rubbed his chin. ‘If it’s important, I’ll
have
to remember.’ He chewed each syllable carefully and presented the finished word on the tip of his tongue, anxious not to mutilate a vowel or drop an aitch. ‘I was getting it mixed up with the trivia of half a million people being fed into a gas chamber.’ He looked up at me, frankly jeering, and began to walk towards the street.

‘This prisoner Broum,’ I said. ‘What had he done?’

‘Done?’ said the man. ‘What had
I
done? To be in a concentration camp you need only be a Jew.’ He opened the cemetery door with a howl of rusty hinges.

‘Had he been involved in a murder?’ I asked.

‘Have we not all been involved?’ said the man.

‘A communist,’ I said. ‘Was he a known communist?’

The man turned in the doorway. ‘Communist,’ he repeated. ‘You may have heard someone in a concentration camp admit to being a murderer and many agreed that they had been spies. A prisoner would sometimes even confess to having at one time—for a short while—been a Jew. But a communist, no. No one would ever let that word pass their lips.’ He stepped through the door into the street and walked slowly towards the old synagogue.

I walked alongside. ‘You may be the last chance of bringing a guilty man to justice…’ I pleaded. ‘…a traitor.’

The man seized on the word ‘traitor’. He said, ‘What’s that mean? Is that another of your special words? What was a man who threw a piece of his bread ration into the children’s compound when it was against his orders as a German soldier to do so?’

I didn’t answer.

‘What was a man who would only throw his bread for money?’

‘What about a Jew who worked for the Germans?’ I countered.

‘No worse than a Frenchman who worked for the Americans,’ said the old man cockily. ‘L-l-l-l-look at the clock up there.’

I looked past the Staronova Synagogue to where an ancient clock with Hebrew numbers glinted golden in the sun.

‘This was the Ghetto,’ said Josef with a sudden sweep of his hand. ‘Every day I looked at that
clock when I was a young boy. I was eighteen before I discovered that it was different from every other clock in the world.’

Around the corner rolled a huge, glassy tourist bus sparkling like a paste brooch. A resonant, amplified voice inside the coach was saying, ‘…wealth of sculptural decoration presages the High Gothic. This is the oldest surviving Jewish prayerhouse in Europe.’

‘That clock goes backwards,’ said Josef, ‘anticlockwise.’

Solemn tourists cocooned with camera straps disembarked. ‘It keeps the right time but every twenty-four hours it moves one whole day in the wrong direction.’ He tapped my arm. ‘That’s what will happen to
us
if we spend our days remembering the Vulkans, Broums and Mohrs instead of moving forward into a world that can never give birth to such people.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Josef-the-gun eyed me curiously, wondering if I would understand him. He said, ‘We must live out our personal decisions and beliefs, for this is what I was taught. When one day I face my God, He will not say to me, “Why were you not Moses?” God will say, “Why were you not Josef-the-gun?”’

Josef-the-gun moved away past the disgorged tourists like a mechanical toy with a broken ratchet. The American from the hotel called to his wife, ‘Quick, Janie, get some movie. That’s so typical: the old guy under the clock.’

Switchback: to return to original position in any
given sequence.

Friday, October 25th

Someone from the Meteorological Office should discover why it is that every time I fly into London Airport it is raining. Perhaps I should ask Mrs Meynard. The great silver wings shone with it and the motors made the puddles sag and blew them into weird branch shapes as the plane trundled towards the apron. There was the click of seat belts being loosened and that sudden nervous chatter of relief. Somewhere near the front, efficient men in camel-hair waistcoats were on their feet probing for plastic raincoats and bottles and cameras amongst the salvage of their holiday.

The stewardess shook off her lethargic disinterest in the passengers and in a sudden surge of newfound energy began to assemble her own belongings. The motors gave a volley of pops before the
blades came to a final sticky halt. Outside on the wet tarmac shiny loaders clustered around their siege ladders. The great door of the city swung open. In the corridors there was a last-minute scuffle as the engines of war moved closer—so must the greedy eyes have watched Bokhara. From their positions of power men in uniforms of blue and gold appeared, still strapping together their documents and treasures even as the sack began.

‘Nice trip?’ said Jean.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I read a history book for most of the way—and tried to forget the taste of the meal.’

‘That can be quite difficult.’ Jean had wangled a Jaguar from the car pool. I eased myself into the leather-work as the driver nosed his way into London Road traffic.

‘Been working hard?’

‘I’ve been getting my hair done almost every day.’

‘It looks nice.’

‘Does it?’ Jean turned her head and prodded at the chignon. ‘It’s a new man who used to be an assistant…’

‘Don’t tell me the secrets,’ I said. ‘It spoils the magic for me.’

‘There’s a few things that you’ll have to check. There are a couple of letters that I’ve written undated so that you can see if I’ve done the right thing. The only appointment you have is lunch with Grenade tomorrow but I haven’t promised.’

‘What’s he want?’

‘It’s some conference that O’Brien at the Foreign Office has arranged. I said you probably wouldn’t be back in time. I’ve told Chico that he must go.’

‘Good girl,’ I said. ‘Why does Grenade bother with those things? They only have them so that O’Brien can write those long reports and have his neighbours in East Anglia along as guest speakers at twenty-five guineas a time.’

‘Grenade goes to them because it’s an expensepaid trip to London where, as you well know, he spends all his time on draughty railway stations watching trains.’

‘Well, that’s harmless enough.’

‘It’s not harmless when you make me entertain him. Last November I had ten days ill in bed with influenza through standing around on the sloping ends of railway stations. All I got out of it was where to find an ashpan drop-bottom, steam accumulators and why they are still used, and the ability to recognize a three-cylinder locomotive by sound alone.’

‘I think you are secretly rather proud of yourself.’

‘If he wasn’t such a nice old character I’d flatly refuse to go again.’

‘Then you are offering to go again?’

‘You dare.’

‘It’s all guilt, you know,’ I said.

‘What, the trains?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He was in Resistance during the
war. He destroyed any number of locomotives.

Now that they are being exterminated by progress

he feels he has a task to protect and preserve

them.’

‘Are you giving him lunch?’

‘Yes. You can come too. He likes you.’

‘I’ll book a table then—Chez Solange?’

‘No, make it King’s Cross Station Restaurant—he’ll like that better.’

‘Over my dead body,’ said Jean.

I scarcely recognized the office. It had been repapered; it was lighter than I ever remembered it before. I was deprived of those hollow areas of paper which made a drumming sound when you tapped them, but Jean thought that was a good thing.

The gramophone music from the dispatch department hadn’t changed, though, and the sound of Munn and Felton’s (Footwear) Band sailing through the ‘Thunder and Lightning Polka’ was clearly audible from the second floor. I flipped the switch on my intercom. The duty dispatch clerk answered, ‘Sir.’

‘Angels Guard Thee,’ I said and flipped the switch off.

‘And the new window,’ said Jean. ‘You haven’t mentioned that.’

‘I noticed,’ I said. ‘And the Mother-in-law’s Tongue is coming on a treat.’

‘I’ve been oiling the leaves,’ said Jean. ‘It’s a lot
of trouble but the man in the shop said it was well worth while.’

‘He was right,’ I said. ‘It looks great.’ I turned over the stuff on my desk.

The trombone solo of ‘Angels Guard Thee’ filtered up from dispatch. ‘Everything is great,’ I said.

‘I had a reply from Berlin Documents Centre
¹
—nothing known there.’ I grunted. ‘I have one or two things though,’ said Jean, ‘if you’d like to see.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘In a minute or so.’

Jean walked across to her desk and the wet sort of light that envelops London on rainy days made a halo around her face as she stood near the window. I watched the movements of her hands as she picked up the large heaps of uncompleted work. Her hands moved without haste or irritation: like a skilled nurse or a croupier. She wore one of those shirt-style dresses with buttons and pockets and too many seams. Her hair was drawn back tightly from her face and her skin was taut and wrinkle-free like the very finest aero-dynamic design. She felt me looking at her and looked at me. I smiled but she did not smile back. She opened a small compartment of her desk. The dispassionate impersonal attitude made her very desirable. ‘You are looking pretty damn sexy today, Jean,’ I said.

‘Thanks,’ she said. She continued to process a
heap of file cards and I read a memo from the Defence Ministry. Jean had that diligence upon which all intelligence work and all police work and for that matter all research of any kind must be based. Jean could sift through a haystack, find a pin and then look at it close enough to see the Lord’s Prayer written on the head of it. It’s that extra piece of effort at the end which makes the difference.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You’ve signed the Official Secrets Act. You know that withholding information from me is a felony. Let’s see what it is.’

‘Now then,’ said Jean, ‘don’t be all pompous.’

‘There are days when I could cheerfully consign you to a job at the FO,’ I said. ‘You’d find out what pomposity really means there. They all talk like officers in English war films.’

Jean riffed through her desk. It was a large Knoll International desk that I had had to really fight the appropriations people about. There were so many drawers and sub-compartments that only Jean knew her way around it. She produced a limp paper file. She’d written ‘Broum’ in pencil on the front.

‘There’s no code name for him,’ she said.

I lifted the key on the desk communication box. Alice answered, ‘Yep.’

‘Alice,’ I said, ‘can you let me have one of those code names we reserved for the Cuban Embassy people last year?’

‘What for?’ said Alice, adding a ‘sir’ as an afterthought.

‘It’s for those papers in the name of Broum that Hallam is supplying for us.’

‘You want a depersonified one then?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We think there may be a real live Broum hanging around somewhere. If we have to make a claim to FO or HO for any documents on him it would make our position stronger to have an open file ready.’

‘Death’s-head hawk moth,’ said Alice. ‘I’ll backdate the opening of the file a year ago today.’

‘Thanks, Alice,’ I said.

You couldn’t fail by talking to Alice in terms of inter-departmental conspiracy. I told Jean the code name and the file date.

‘Death’s-head hawk moth,’ said Jean. ‘That’s a terrible long code name. Do I have to type that out all through the file?’

‘Yes you do,’ I said. ‘I have enough trouble with Alice as it is without asking her to change a code name after I’ve wangled one out of her.’

Jean raised one eyebrow. ‘You’re frightened of Alice.’

‘I’m not frightened of Alice,’ I said. ‘I just want to work without unnecessary friction.’

Jean opened the brown folder. Inside there were some flimsy typewritten documents. Printed at the top it said ‘Sûreté Nationale’. Under that, the typing was single-spaced and the open part of many of the round characters was clogged with dirt. I read it through slowly and painfully. It was a transcript of a judge’s preliminary hearing of a
murder case.
²
It was datelined Colmar, February 1943.

‘Just an ordinary murder,’ I said to Jean. ‘This fellow Broum was a murderer?’

I read the transcript through again. ‘The way this reads, he was about to get the chop,’ I said. Jean passed me a photostat of a German Army document. The photostat was brown and spotted. It was a receipt for a prisoner taken from the civil prison in Colmar by a German Army major whose signature was like a piece of rusty barbed wire. ‘Photo of Broum?’ I asked.

‘If you read it carefully you’ll find you’re holding a receipt for a prisoner
and
a dossier. Also notice,’ said Jean, ‘that the French documents have him as Monsieur Broum but the German one says
Obergefreiter
Broum. The Archives must have checked back to his desertion from Caen, and he probably had an equivalent army rank.’

‘I noticed,’ I said. ‘Check Caen area courtmartial records. The normal procedure is to return a man to his unit…’

‘We know all that, darling, but his unit was no
longer there and I can’t find where they were. The group 312 Geheime Feldpolizei had vanished, as far as I can find, and Ross at the War Office says that the Germans didn’t send their people back to the original unit.’

‘He’s an old know-all, Ross,’ I said.

‘He’s been very sweet and helpful.’

‘I hope you haven’t been giving him access to our records,’ I said. I shuffled all the stuff on the desk. ‘Good, good.’ I said. ‘Send a thank you to Grenade through the usual channels, even though I will tell him tomorrow myself.’

‘Grenade has got nothing to do with it,’ said Jean.

‘Didn’t this come from Grenade?’ I said.

‘No,’ said Jean. ‘I got it.’

‘What do you mean you
got
it?’ I said. ‘You climbed through the window of the Sûreté Nationale at dead of night, do you mean?’

‘Silly,’ said Jean. ‘All I did was put a Green through to Interpol.’

‘What?’

‘Now don’t blow your top, darling. I mixed it up with a lot of ancient old tat and even then I had Special Branch origin it.’

‘Grenade will know,’ I said. ‘All Interpol requests go straight to DST.’

Jean said, ‘If you sat over there for a couple of days—’ she pointed to her desk: it was stacked with documents, dossiers, newspaper clippings, unsorted file cards, unanswered correspondence
and IBM cards—‘you’d know how unlikely it is that Grenade or anyone else at DST is going to attach any significance to an Interpol Green. Even if they do, it won’t have origined us. It origined Special Branch. Even if they dust it for fingerprints and find where it came from, so what? Is that what we’re supposed to be doing here in Charlotte Street, working against Grenade?’

‘Simmer down,’ I said. ‘It’s not the role of this department to make political decisions. That’s what we have Houses of Parliament for.’

‘Which, coming from you,’ said Jean, ‘is very funny.’

‘Why coming from me?’

‘Because when Parliament wake up in the small hours of the morning bathed in sweat and screaming, you are what they are dreaming of.’

‘Look, Jean,’ I said.

‘I’m joking,’ said Jean. ‘Don’t give me the Dutch Uncle just because I made a joke.’

I took no notice. ‘You only have the same sort of fear that everyone here has. That’s why you are employed here. The moment we notice someone who isn’t frightened that this set-up and all the other set-ups like it are a threat to democratic parliamentary systems—we fire him. The only way a department that pries can run is to admit of no elite which is immune from prying.

‘On the other hand this is a Government department like all other Government departments; without money it could not exist. There is the
danger that the people who allocate the money are going to feel that they should be immune from prying. That is why, every time someone is after my blood, Dawlish protects me. Dawlish and I have a perfect system. It is a well-known fact that I am an insolent intractable hooligan over whom Dawlish has only a modicum of control. Dawlish encourages this illusion. One day it will fail. Dawlish will throw me to the wolves. Until he does, Dawlish and I have a closeness in inverse proportion to our differences because that’s his protection, my protection and, believe it or not, Parliament’s protection.’

Jean said, ‘And next week, schools, your lesson will be “Statesmanship for the under fives”. And now back to Victor Sylvester.’

‘Victor Sylvester,’ I said. ‘My God, did you fix with the BBC for him to play “Someday I’ll find you”?’

Jean said, ‘Good job I don’t rely on your memory. You create an international incident by proxy. The tune was “There’s a small Hotel” and it went out on the BBC Overseas request programme yesterday morning.’

‘Good,’ I said.

‘Speaking of music, I’ve bought you a little gift.’ She opened the vast filing drawer of her teak desk and produced a brown paper envelope. Inside was a twelve-inch gramophone record of Schönberg’s ‘Variations for wind band’.

I looked at it and wondered why Jean had
bought it for me. I’d only heard it the previous week when I went to the concert with…Oh.

Jean was looking down at me like a protégée of Count Dracula. ‘I was at the Royal Festival Hall that night when you had business with the celebrated Miss Steel.’

‘So what,’ I said. ‘So were a couple of thousand other music lovers.’

‘The operative word is lovers,’ said Jean.

‘Go down to dispatch,’ I said, ‘and borrow their gramophone.’

‘I hope you feel guilty every time you hear it,’ Jean said.