Tim Powers - Declare

“Good Lord, I don’t want forced labor!”

“For the fertilizer factory you’re not even going to start up, right-live your cover. It’d be seen as a mercy, though, if you wanted Soviets who’ve been German prisoners of war. We’ve been repatriating them, by force-we had a crowd of Russian soldiers who were captured by the Germans in ’42, and we had to tear-gas ’em to get them into the eastbound train cars to go back home. Eleven of them actually managed to kill themselves, rather than return. I gather Moscow doesn’t look kindly on Communists who’ve been too long in the West, even if the time was spent in prison camps.”

Again Hale thought of Elena. The gin was suddenly as sour as varnish in his mouth, and he put the teacup down on the desk.

“You’re going to be walking around?” asked Flannery.

Hale nodded. “I-expect so.”

“Here.” Flannery crossed to a closet, and after unlocking a padlock on a hasp he opened the closet door and handed Hale two cartons of Chesterfield cigarettes. “Easiest thing is don’t carry money at all. A pack of cigarettes is worth, very roughly, five dollars, clean currency anywhere in the city. As a favor to Jimmie Theodora, the United States will part with some smokes-but if you need actual cash, I can’t requisition that. I assume you didn’t bring much down the hole-but you’ll get any you need from the British Sector HQ on the Kurfursten Damm, right? You’ve even got your boss here to authorize it.”

This was the second time Flannery had referred to Hale’s “boss.” Hale tried to think of a way to get Flannery to say who he was talking about, then just asked, “Who do you mean by my boss?”

“Philby, Kim Philby. Visiting SIS dignitary. He was through here today talking to our OSS brass about what’s to become of Berlin.”

Hale nodded, and he didn’t change his expression or pause in tucking the cigarette cartons into the inside pockets of his coat. “Oh sure, the Section Nine man,” he said, making sure to speak carelessly. “I’m SOE-only vaguely connected. But yes, I can touch the HQ for cash.”

After thanking Flannery, and then discussing the bleak local restaurant situation for a few minutes to take the closing emphasis away from the name Philby, Hale walked down the stairs to the street.

Hale realized that Berlin must be the current stop on Philby’s good-will tour of liberated European capitals. But why in God’s name did the man have to be in Berlin on this particular day?

Hale left the pistol under the car seat in the U.S. Sector HQ parking lot when he set out into the city’s streets to reconnoiter.

For pedestrians the sector divisions of the city appeared to have little meaning-Hale saw men in Soviet uniforms mingling with American soldiers at the sidewalk tables along the Kurfursten Damm, where the only drinks available seemed to be imitation orange juice and ersatz coffee; and electric streetcars with their broken windows covered by wooden panels clattered down tracks in the center of the street, their step rails jammed with passengers whose bags and suitcases clearly marked them as fugitives from the east. Hale soon gathered that the local civilian population was sharply divided between native Berliners and “rucksack” Berliners, and the local traffic policemen-oddly medieval-looking figures in coal-scuttle hats and short-sleeved dark tunics over long-sleeved baggy white shirts-kept trying to rout the shabby immigrants away from the once-elegant café tables.

When Hale ventured to walk east-past the sawed-off tree stumps and the ruined pavilions of the Tiergarten, to the unmarked Soviet border that was understood to run down the broad lanes of the Koniggratzer Strasse-he found that the Soviet police were a good deal harsher.

He had paused on the western Koniggratzer Strasse sidewalk, drawn by the smell of grilled meat to a wood-and-canvas stand selling Fleisch Bratwurst, and by the fact that he could pause there without being conspicuous. He gladly wasted a pack of Chesterfields on one sizzling sausage served on a cracker, and as he chewed small bites of the thing in the shadow of the waving uncooked sausages that fringed the stand’s roof he squinted out at the broad street. On the far side, the south face of a modern nine-story office building curved around out of his sight as the Leipziger Strasse swung away to the north over there, and though half of the high office windows that he could see were boarded up, the shops under the awnings on the sidewalk level were bustling with shoppers.

Russian soldiers with red cap-badges and purple shoulder-boards stood out in the center of the cracked boulevard pavement, mostly clustered around an eccentrically placed tobacco kiosk that Hale thought must be a disguised guard shack, but from time to time one of them would stride out to stop some figure crossing the street. The guard would look at the hapless pedestrian’s papers, while dozens of others crossed in both directions unmolested, and would then invariably nod and step back to the kiosk.

Hale was reflecting that it would be hard in this city of bomb craters to find evidence of a hole being dug for a big stone to be put into, and that he didn’t have many more hours until the installation would commence-and he was considering buying another Bratwurst -when the pop of a gunshot snapped his attention back to the soldiers in the street.

A ragged man was running north, away from a dropped bag and from a soldier who was carefully aiming a handgun at him for a second shot; Hale realized that the soldier had stepped toward the west side of the street so as to be sure of firing only back into the Soviet Sector.

Another Soviet soldier was sprinting away from Hale north along the western Koniggratzer Strasse gutter, matching the fugitive’s pace but apparently not trying to stop him. And then Hale noticed two other soldiers doing the same on the eastern side of the boulevard. Were they herding the man?

Hale followed, jogging up the western sidewalk and just keeping the fugitive and his pursuers in sight. The cigarette cartons bounced awkwardly under his coat.

With Hale trailing watchfully behind, the desperate procession moved quickly up the street, and now that the fugitive and his calmly jogging pursuers had moved north from the spot where the shot had been fired, many of the pedestrians clearly didn’t even notice the several men running tensely past them through the sparse crowd. The buildings on either side of the boulevard were bizarrely scaffolded with their own ruin-exposed floors, sagging roof sections, and beams dangling on snagged cables-and Hale thought that this terrible pursuit seemed to be taking place in some stray hour after the end of the world.

The fleeing man had crossed two streets without being able to run into the western sector, and now he crossed another street and was running out across the wide square in front of the towering mottled-gray pillars of the Brandenburg Gate. Soldiers up by the Reichstag ruins on the far side appeared to be simply waiting for him, though Hale saw a jeep swerve onto the square from between two of the wide-spaced pillars to cut him off from running east. Roadblocks around a tall lorry-mounted crane blocked the man from slanting west.

Hale stamped to a halt beside a broken wall on the south side of the square and then just panted and watched the pursuit through the fringe of his disordered hair.

The fugitive out there on the broad pavement was slowed by rubble and shell-holes, and he was shouting something at his pursuers, probably surrender-but while he was still yelling, the chilly summer afternoon air shook with the bang of a rifle shot, and the man out in the middle of the square fell to one knee, silent now.

Hale felt cold air on his bared teeth, and realized that he was gritting them. He had never seen a man die, but he was suddenly sure that he was about to see it happen now. The very air seemed achingly tense, like a flexed pane of glass.