Philip Kerr - Field Grey

'Talking of West Germany, Elisabeth, do you go there ever?'

'No. I'd have to cross the Green Border. And I don't like to do that. I did it once. I felt like a criminal in my own country.'

'And East Berlin. Do you ever go there?'

'Sometimes. But there's less and less cause to go. There's not much there for those of us who live in West Berlin. Just before Jimmy – my American sergeant – went back to America, we took a trip around old Berlin. He wanted to buy a camera and you can still get a good one for not much money in East Berlin. We got a camera, too, but not in a shop. On the black market. The only shop we visited, a department store the communists call HO, had very little in it. And as soon as I saw it I realised why so many East Germans turned up here last year to get a food parcel. And why quite a few of them never went back.'

'But you wouldn't say it was dangerous.'

'For someone like me? No. You read about the odd person getting snatched by the Soviets. Injected with something and then bundled into a car. Well, I suppose if you were important that might happen. But then you wouldn't go there in the first place if you were someone like that, would you? All the same, I wouldn't have thought you would want to go across to the Russian sector. You having escaped from a POW camp 'n'all.'

'Look, Elisabeth, there's nobody left in Berlin I can really trust. If it comes to that there's no one left I even know. And I need a favour. If there was anyone else I could ask I would.'

'Go ahead and ask.'

I handed her an envelope. 'I was hoping I could ask you to deliver this. I'm afraid I don't know the correct address and I thought – well, I thought you might help. For old times' sake.'

She looked at the name on the envelope and was silent for a moment.

'You don't have to,' I said. 'But it would help me a lot.'

'Of course I'll do it. Without you, without that money you sent, I don't know how I'd ever have hung on to this place. Really I don't.'

I finished my coffee and then my cigarette. I must have looked as if I was about to leave because she said, 'Will I see you again?'

'Yes. Only I'm not sure when. I'm not living in Berlin at the moment. For the foreseeable future I'll be staying in Gottingen.' She looked puzzled at that, so I explained: 'With the VdH. Gottingen is near the Friedland Transit Camp for returning POWs. They're there for only a couple of days, during which time they receive food, clothing and medical aid. They're also given Army discharge certificates, which they need to obtain a residency permit, a food ration card, and a travel warrant to get home.'

'Poor devils,' she said. 'How bad was it, really?'

'I'm not about to sit here and tell any woman from Berlin about suffering,' I said. 'But maybe, because of it, we'll know how and where to find each other.'

'I'd like that.'

'Do you have a telephone?'

'Not here. If I want to make a call I always use the telephone at the club. If you ever need to get in contact with me that's the best place to do it. If I'm not there they'll take a message.' She found a pencil and paper and scribbled down the number. 24-38-93.

I put the number in my empty wallet.

'Or you could write to me here, of course. You should have written before to let me know you were coming. I'd have prepared something. A cake. I wouldn't have been in my dressing gown. And you should have sent me an address in Cuba. So that I could have written back to thank you.'

'That might have been a little difficult,' I confessed. 'I was living there under a false name.'

'Oh,' she said, as if such an idea had never occurred to her. 'You're not in any trouble are you, Bernie?'

'Trouble?' I smiled ruefully. 'Life is trouble. Only the naive and the young imagine that it's anything else. It's only trouble that finds out if we're up to the task of staying alive.'

'Because if you are in trouble…'

'I hate to ask you another favour…'

She took my hand and kissed the fingers, one by one. 'When are you going to get it through your thick Prussian head?' she said. 'I'll help you in any way I can.'

'All right.' I thought for a moment and then, taking her pencil and paper, I started to write. 'When you get to the club I want you to make a call to this number in Munich. Ask for a Mister Kramden. If Mister Kramden isn't there, tell whoever it is that you will call back in two hours. Don't leave your name and number, just tell them that you want to leave a message from Carlos. When you get to speak to Kramden, tell him I'll be staying with my Uncle Francois in Gottingen for the next few weeks at the Pension Esebeck, until I've met Monsieur Voltaire off the train from the Cherry Orchard. Tell Mister Kramden that if he and his friends need to contact me I'll be going to the St Jacobi church each day I'm in Gottingen, at around six or seven o'clock in the evening; and to look for a message under the front pew.'

She looked over my notes. 'I can do that.' She nodded firmly. 'Gottingen's quaint. Pretty. What Germany used to look like. I've often thought it would be nice to live there.'

I shook my head. 'You and me, Elisabeth. We're Berliners. Hardly cut out for fairy-tale living.'

'I suppose you're right. What will you do, after Gottingen?'

'I don't know, Elisabeth.'

'It seems to me,' she said, 'that if there's no one else in Berlin you know, or who you can trust, then you should think yourself free to come and live here. Like you did before. Remember?'

'Why else do you think I sent you that money from Cuba? I hadn't forgotten. Lately I've had to do quite a bit of remembering one way or another. Telling my story to – well, it doesn't matter who. A lot of stuff I'd rather forget. But I don't forget that. You can depend on it. I never forgot about you.'

Of course, not everything had been told back at Landsberg. A man should keep some secrets after all, especially when he's talking to the CIA.

Special agents Scheuer and Frei might have opened a file in Elisabeth Dehler's name if I'd told them every little detail about what happened on the train from the pleni camp in Johannesgeorgenstadt to Dresden, and then Berlin, in 1946.

I hadn't wanted them bothering her, so I hadn't mentioned the fact that the address on the envelope containing the several hundred dollars Mielke had given me was Elisabeth's.

Instead of pocketing this money, I'd resolved to deliver it to her myself – as the MVD assassin would have done, if I hadn't killed him first. Besides, I needed somewhere to stay, and where better a place to stay than with a former lover? So, when I got off the train from Dresden in the no less depressing ruin of Anhalter station in Berlin I'd quickly boarded a westbound tram and headed straight for the Kurfurstendamm.

From there I walked south, convinced that at least one of Hitler's predictions had come true. In the early days of his success he had told us that 'in five years you will not recognise Germany' and that was a fact. Kurfurstendamm, formerly one of Berlin's most prosperous streets, was now little more than a series of ruins. Even for a former policeman, it was hard to find my way around. Once, forgetting the uniform I was wearing, I asked a woman for directions and she hurried away without reply, as if I'd been the carrier of plague. Later on, when I heard about what the Red Army had done to the women of Berlin, I wondered why she'd not picked up a rock and thrown it at me.

Motzstrasse was not as badly damaged as some. Even so it was hard to imagine anyone safely living there. One decent earth mover could probably have levelled the entire street. It was like walking through a scene from the apocalypse. Piles of rubble. Buttressed facades. Moon-sized craters. The prevailing smell of sewage. The road underfoot as uncertain as a mountain path. Burned-out armoured vehicles. The occasional grave.