Pavel & I (33 page)

‘What is it?' Sonia would giggle over a glass of vintage Chianti that the midget had hoarded during the war and now drank by the case. ‘What is this big secret you are selling? Go on, tell me.'

‘People,' the midget told her gravely one night. ‘I'm selling Germans. The only type of German that's still worth a damn.'

When Fosko heard this during Sonia's evening report, a smile stole across his outsized lips.

‘Keep it up, my dove,' he cooed into the phone receiver. ‘You're doing good work.'

I wondered sometimes whether he thought that she minded, fucking a midget for money.

The Colonel's objective was very simple: to get hold of the information without either the mob or the Soviets knowing about his involvement. A plan was taking shape that cast Sonia as a sort of double-bait, and Boyd as his frame. I was not entirely sure what motivated Fosko's interest in Söldmann's goods. Presumably he planned to sell them himself, through intermediaries, and grow rich in the process, though it is not impossible that he was genuinely concerned about national security. He and I never talked about matters of principle; I had been hired, off the books, solely to oversee the practical aspects of his various operations, most of which seemed driven by commercial interests. I wore no uniform, nor was I to be found on any official payroll. Those of Fosko's faithful who remained in regular army service treated me with quiet suspicion.

In the third week of Sonia's assignment she obtained what everybody was waiting for: the date when the transaction was to take place. December was at its halfway mark, Berlin lay paralysed with cold. Lying in bed, snug beneath two sets of down duvets and cuddled close to Sonia's fattened-up rump, Söldmann confided to her the details of his plan. She had trouble hearing it all; his mouth was pressed against the small of her back, and the voice barely carried through the layers of bedding.

‘Tomorrow at midnight,' he said, ‘I'll be rich. I'll retire after this. We can get out of here. I'm thinking South America, or maybe Egypt.'

She asked a few cautious questions and learned that Söldmann was meeting his Soviet contact close by, in the American sector. He said
he wasn't crazy enough to venture east, where Germans disappeared every day.

‘Will I see you?' she asked. ‘Beforehand, I mean. I want to wish you luck.'

He giggled, slapped her arse, and promised he would drop by after ten, to pass the time.

‘That,' she said, ‘would be swell.'

She would be reunited with her piano very soon now.

When he was gone, Sonia called the Colonel, who told her to come out and stay in his villa the following night.

‘What will happen to Söldmann?' she asked.

‘Söldmann is no longer any of your concern.'

‘Good,' she said. ‘I never want to see him again.'

I wonder whether she meant it. It is human nature to grow fond of those we fondle, no matter the reason.

The next night, at ten, Söldmann stood outside Sonia's apartment, his hair slicked back with French pomade and a bouquet of tulips in his arms that had cost him dear. The door stood ajar for him, as it had so many times before. He won't have seen his assailant. The sap struck as soon as he was through the door. Söldmann carried a little leather pouch. Inside was the merchandise. No sooner was it found than the midget was killed. A stiletto thrust to the kidney. The killer threw the body on the bed, threaded two red stars through the holes of his collar, placed a call to Fosko and let it ring one-two-three times. Then he took off.

Don't worry – the nameless assassin, it wasn't me. The Colonel judged me too clumsy for a job such as this: blindsided, my dexterity blighted by gout. I daresay he was right.

Fosko and Sonia had been sitting in his drawing room when the phone rang. He counted off the rings, checked his wristwatch, and then gave Sonia instructions to call Boyd at the brothel. ‘Tell him you are in trouble. Tell him you need him there right away. Be convincing, so he can't say no.'

She did what was asked of her. What else could she do? To her credit, she did not go as far as sobbing down the phone. All she said was: ‘Boyd, it's me, Belle. I need you. At the flat. Something terrible has happened.'

That's all it took. He promised her he would ‘fly like the wind' and blew her a kiss. She thanked him and put down the phone.

‘Now, how long do you think it will take him to drive over to the flat?' Fosko mused. ‘Three, four minutes?'

He waited for two, then placed another call. This one went out to the police station five blocks from where the midget was filling his coat with blood. The officer on duty answered. Fosko got his attention immediately.

‘
Hilfe.
Help.
Mein Gott. Das Mann ist tot.
He killed him. A Russian officer.
Ruskie Offizier.
I saw it through my window. It was terrible.
Schrecklich,
my good man.'

He smacked his lips and waited for an answer.

He got one.

‘
Ja, ja.
' The German kept repeating it. ‘
Ja, ja.
'

It made him sound a right idiot.

Fosko hoped it wouldn't preclude him dispatching a patrol. He passed on the address, house and flat number, asking the man to repeat it back to him.

‘
Lützowstrasse. Neunundzwanzig.
Nine and two.
Ja, ja.
'

When the police officer asked him to pass on his personal details, Fosko hung up.

‘Crikey,' he said. ‘If I had known they were this dim, I wouldn't have given Boyd any head start at all.'

What happened next is subject to some conjecture, though I did my best to verify the facts. Boyd rushed over to rescue his damsel in distress. The girls at the brothel said he tried to call her back, but nobody picked up the phone. To be on the safe side, he took a gun along. He had his own set of keys, and when nobody answered the
bell, he burst in without further ado, gun in hand. What he found was a dead midget: pencil moustache and blood on his cashmere. There was no sign of his beloved. A bouquet of tulips lay trampled in the hallway.

As he stood there contemplating the red stars upon Söldmann's collar, he suddenly became aware of a racket across the road. He went over to the window and looked out. The police were in the street, two, three cars that blocked off the road. Within minutes they were joined by a patrol car full of Russian soldiers. They were busy raiding house twenty-nine. Boyd was standing in house ninety-two. The Berlin street system had house numbers run up one side, and down the other. Twenty-nine and ninety-two were virtually opposite each other. ‘
Neun-und-zwanzig.
' Nine-and-twenty. The bloody Germans count their numbers from the back. When the Colonel learned this, I thought he would never stop laughing.

Anyway, so there he was, standing in a room with a corpse on the bed and the coppers across the road. Boyd was none too stupid; he figured out where they'd been heading before a flawed translation had tripped them up. The way he saw it, he had five minutes, ten tops. If they found him with a dead man in an apartment rented in his name he was as good as done for – especially if they thought the corpse a Russian. If, on the other hand, all they found was a blood stain on a whore's fragrant sheets, he might just be able to talk his way out of it. So he picked up the body, threw it into the trunk that he had used to move Sonia's belongings, lugged it down the stairs, out the back door, across the yard and over the wall. Thankfully, he had parked his car out back in the first place, from a long habit of caution. The engine caught despite the cold. He did not turn on the headlights until he was well out of the sector.

Boyd drove to a bar, called a friend, had a drink, and shoved off. Outside the snow kept piling up. It made him think of cats, for some reason. To make things convincing he worked over the midget with a
car jack in a back alley, and even gave his fender a good whopping. When we searched his car two days later, it really did look like it had been in an accident, though I doubt a midget would have made that big a dent.

Meanwhile, back in Lützowstrasse, watching the shenanigans of the German policemen and Russian Military Police who searched first one house and then – a lieutenant's superior intuition – the other, was a lone man in a car, freezing, and puzzled as to what the hell was going on. He had dropped off his diminutive boss some fifteen minutes previously, and had been instructed to wait for him until he had brought to completion his amorous errand. We have met him before, albeit briefly, on a grainy photograph in the Russian interrogator's office, where Pavel first learned Söldmann's name: a beefy young tough with a handlebar moustache and a big scar running down his cheek. He was the mobster's right-hand man, had been since the organization's earliest days, and answered to the aristocrat name of Arnulf von Schramm, though he was the most proletarian of punters, and stupid to boot. Schramm waited half the night, conscious that his boss had missed his appointment with the Russian. Söldmann never returned, nor did Schramm see the police cart out a half-sized body, which would have settled the matter, albeit grimly. Eventually he drove home, hoping against hope that the mystery would resolve itself. One should have thought he would keep an eye on the situation; track the potential re-emergence of the merchandise, dig around for Söldmann's sources. As a matter of fact, he did none of the above; went to ground instead, and got himself drunk five days running, sliding further out of our story with every swig. I don't regret it. Schramm's people had lost the war. Berlin would tolerate them only at the margins.

While Schramm was waiting in his car, the midget's killer arrived back at the villa, carrying the leather pouch like a bloody talisman. The Colonel subjected its contents to a thorough investigation, the
results of which were that Söldmann had carried in his bag what in this line of business is conventionally called a ‘ringer'. If he'd carried the merchandise on him at all, he still had it. For a glum few hours Fosko assumed the Russians must have it, since he expected them to have taken possession of Söldmann's body. Some hours after dawn, his informant with the Wilmersdorf police let him know that no corpse had been recovered. It is the only time I have seen the Colonel break into open jubilation. He even went so far as to offer me one of his prized cigars. We sat and smoked and had kippers for breakfast.

From here on in, things should have been easy. Boyd White had the merchandise, or at the very least he had the body. Fosko had Sonia call Boyd midday on the nineteenth of December:

‘Someone killed Söldmann,' she whispered. ‘I found him dead in my bed.'

They agreed to meet in a quiet alley that very evening.

I will keep short the details of my interrogation of Boyd. I had some others help me (the man with the knife was there, and Easterman, the big oaf) and it must be said that Boyd squealed almost at once, even before we had pulled so much as a single nail. The problem was that we did not understand his screeches, and took them for mockery. He kept giving us the same address over and over: Seelingstrasse 21, the apartment on the fourth floor. Fosko got so annoyed after a while, he put a bullet through him, right through the throat, where it made a hell of a hole. Then he instructed us to continue working on the body. He wanted it to look rough, too rough for western hands. There was a lot of racism in those days concerning the ‘Asian' propensity for violence. To us, all Russians were brutes, apart fromthose we met in novels, for those of us who liked to read.

Seelingstrasse 21, fourth floor. We thought Boyd was giving us Sonia's address, letting us know that he knew about the Colonel's setup. Nobody even dreamed that he might know somebody one floor down, and that Americans keep their floors in different order. I mean,
Christ Almighty, it's not something you think about when you are busy sticking wires into a man's flesh.

The rest you already know. We thought we had lost the scent for a while, but then Pavel showed up on the scene, with his kidneys, and Fosko put on that show in the morgue. Now that I knew him I realized it had been naive to assume he would take fright and give up the midget. We thought he must either be a civilian who wanted no trouble, or that he was in on the game and had squirrelled away the merchandise. It turned out that he was something else altogether.
An interesting man
. I loved talking to him.

Boyd, by comparison, did not compare.

I only talked to Boyd once, and even then he had nothing interesting to say.

On the third of January the Colonel returned from his travels, a few hours after his wife and children had been driven off to the airport in Berlin-Gatow to fly back to England. He returned in the midst of our talking, and was in what can only be described as a crabby mood – a circumstance that changed when he received a telephone call a little later that day that rang like a theatre bell announcing the final act. I was dimly aware that I was partaking in tragedy, and fully expected to find the stage littered with bodies by the time the curtain fell. All I could hope (this must have been Rosencrantz's prayer, and Guildenstern's) was that I would not be one of them.