Philip Kerr - Field Grey

'Lovers?'

'Yes, lovers, I suppose.'

'We'll check out the address for you. See if she's still there. Save you the trouble if she's not.'

'Thanks.'

He shrugged. 'But if she is, we have no objections. It will be difficult. It's always difficult going in and out of Berlin. Still, we'll manage.'

'Good. Then we have a deal. If I knew the words, I'd sing La Marseillaise.'

'A signature on a piece of paper will do for now. We're not much for singing here at the Swimming Pool.'

'There's one question I have. Everyone calls this place the Swimming Pool. Why?'

The two Frenchmen smiled. One of them stood up and opened a window. 'Can't you hear it?' he said after a moment. 'Can't you smell it?'

I got up and went to his side and listened carefully. In the distance I could hear what sounded like a school playground.

'You see that turreted building over the wall?' he explained. 'That is the largest swimming pool in all of Paris. It was built for the 1924 Olympics. On a day like today, half the children in the city are there. We go there ourselves sometimes, when it's quieter.'

'Sure,' I said. 'We had the same thing in the Gestapo. The Landwehr Canal. We never went swimming there ourselves, of course. But we took lots of others there. Communists, mostly. That is, provided they couldn't swim.'

From La Sante I was transferred to the Pension Verdin at 102 Avenue Victor Hugo in the suburbs of Sainte-Mande, which was about a five-minute drive south from the Swimming Pool. It was a quiet, comfortable place with polished parquet floors, tall windows, and a lovely garden where I sat in the sun awaiting my return to Germany. The Pension was a sort of safe- house and hotel for members of the SDECE or its agents, and there were several faces I half-recognised from my time at the Swimming Pool; but no one bothered me. I was even allowed out – although I was followed at a distance – and spent a day walking north-east along the Seine as far as the lie de la Cite and Notre-Dame. It was the first time I'd seen Paris without the Wehrmacht everywhere, and hundreds of signs in German. Bicycles had given way to a great many cars, which did little to make me feel any safer than I'd felt as an enemy soldier in 1940. But a lot of this was just nerves – cement fever after spending the last six months in one prison or another: I couldn't have felt more like a big house brother if I'd been carrying a ball and chain. Or looked like one. That was why they took me to Galeries Lafayette on Boulevard Haussmann to get some new clothes. It would be an exaggeration to say that my new clothes made me feel normal again: too much water had run off the mountain for that to happen; however, I did feel partly restored. Like an old door with a new lick of paint.

The French had not exaggerated the difficulty of travelling to Berlin. The inner German border between West and East Germany – the Green Border – had been closed since May 1952, with transport links between the two halves of the country mostly severed. The only place where East Germans were able to cross freely into the West was in Berlin itself; and getting in or out of the East was restricted to a few points along a heavily guarded and fortified fence of which the largest and most frequently used was the Helmstedt-Marienborn crossing, at the edge of the Lappwald. First, though, we had to go to Hannover, in the British zone of occupation.

We left the Gare du Nord on the overnight train: me and my two French handlers from the SDECE. They had names now – names and passports – although it seemed unlikely that their names were real, especially as I now had a passport myself – French – in the name of Sebastian Kleber, a travelling salesman from Alsace. The Frenchman with the eyebrows went by the name of Philippe Mentelin; the Insomniac was calling himself Emile Vigee.

We had a sleeping compartment to ourselves but I was too excited to sleep and when, nine and a half hours later, the train pulled into Hannover railway station, I uttered a quiet little prayer of thanks that I was back in Prussia. The equestrian statue of King Ernst August was still in front of the station, and City Hall with its red roofs and green cupolas looked much the same as I remembered, but elsewhere the city was very different. Adolf Hitler Strasse was now Bahnhofstrasse; Horst Wessel Platz was Konigsworther Platz; and the Opera House no longer stood in Adolf Hitler Platz but Opern Platz. The Aegi- dienkirche on the corner of Breite Strasse was a bombed-out ruin, overgrown with ivy and left that way as a memorial to those who had died during the war. Elsewhere the city was hardly recognisable. One thing hadn't changed, however: it's said that the purest German is spoken in Hannover; and that's certainly what it sounded like to me.

The safe-house was in the east of Hannover, in a large wooded area called the Eilenriede, on Hindenburg Strasse, close to the zoo. The house was a largish villa in a smallish garden. It had a red mansard roof and an octagonal corner tower with a silver- steel cupola. This tower contained my room, and although my door wasn't locked it was hard to rid myself of the impression that I was still a prisoner. Especially when I mentioned to Emile Vigee that I'd seen two suspicious-looking men from my Rapunzel-like vantage point.

'Look there,' I said, inviting him into my room and over to the window. 'On Erwinstrasse, is it?'

He nodded.

'Those two men in the black Citroen,' I said. "They've been there for at least an hour. From time to time one of them gets out, smokes a cigarette, and watches this house. And I'm pretty sure he's armed, too.'

'How can you tell from here?'

'It's a warm day, but all three buttons on his suit are done up. And every so often he adjusts something on his breast.'

'You have keen eyes, Monsieur Kleber.'

Every time Vigee spoke to me now he called me Kleber, or Sebastian, to help me become accustomed to hearing this name.

'I used to be a cop, remember?'

'Nothing to worry about. They're both with us. As a matter of fact they're going to drive you to Berlin and back here before going on to Gottingen and Friedland. They're both German and they've made the drive many times before, so there shouldn't be a problem. They work for the VdH here in Hannover.' He glanced at his watch. 'I invited them both for dinner tonight. To give you a chance to meet them. They're a little early, that's all.'

We went to dinner at the nearby Stadt Halle, formerly the Hermann Goring Stadt Halle – a very large round building that was a bit like Fat Hermann himself. With its green roof the place was half concert hall and half circus tent, but according to Vigee there was also a good restaurant.

'Not as good as Paris, of course,' he said, 'but not bad for Hannover. With quite a reasonable wine list.' He shrugged. 'I expect that's why Goring liked it, eh?'

As we arrived for dinner everyone else was leaving to go to the Friday night concert, and I decided the French had probably timed it that way so that we could talk without fear of being overheard. The music helped of course. It was Mendelssohn's Third Symphony, the Scottish.

The two Frenchmen were disappointed with the food, but to me, after months of prison fare, it was delicious. My two fellow Germans had also brought hearty appetites, although little in the way of conversation. They wore grey suits to match their grey skin. Neither was very tall. One of them had bright blond hair that must have come out of a bottle; the other might have come out of a bottle himself, he drank so much, although it appeared not to affect him at all. The blonder man was called Werner Grottsch; the other called himself Klaus Wenger. Neither seemed inclined to try to find out anything about me. Perhaps they were already well informed on that subject by Vigee, but I thought it more likely that they knew better than to ask, and if so it was a compliment I repaid by making no enquiries of them.