Pierre Frei - Berlin - A Novel

A heap of something was smouldering in the garden behind the terraced house. Ben looked at it with dire foreboding.

'Looks as if someone didn't know what to do with all his old Nazi junk and dumped it in our shed,' said his grandfather, confirming his fears. A complete Party uniform with all the bits and bobs. Take the poker, boy, and keep pushing the stuff into the flames.' Dr Hellbich went back to the house.

Ben poked about among the remnants, downcast. There was no hope of saving anything but the dagger of honour. He smuggled that upstairs under his shirt, and freshened up the steel blade and leather sheath with Sidol and shoe polish. Then he polished the swastika on the hilt with an old sock.

The gullible Clarence P Brubaker was in transports of delight. A truly historic artefact!'

'The Fuhrer himself gave it to him.'

'I just must meet him,' the hopeful aspirant to the Pulitzer Prize urged.

'The Fuhrer?'

'The man with the dagger. Hitler's right-hand man, didn't you say? When can I meet him?'

'He wants five cartons of Chesterfields for his dagger.'

Brubaker agreed at once. 'Five cartons of Chesterfields, OK. You take them to him and tell him he'll get another ten from me in person. He can pick the time and the place. That's a fair offer, right?'

'I'll tell him. But I can't promise anything. He's very cautious.'

Mr Brubaker found an army bag made of olive-green sacking, which comfortably held the five cartons of cigarettes along with a pack of a hundred pieces of chewing gum as a reward for Ben. This payment for such a sensational underground story seemed well worth it to Hackensack's star reporter. 'You can keep the bag,' he said.

You don't have an empty potato sack, do you?'

'I don't think so, but look around in the cellar if you like.' Brubaker had long since given up wondering about the peculiar things that Germans wanted.

There was no potato sack in the cellar, just a mountain of dirty washing going mouldy. A horde of Red Army soldiers had dragged the building's washerwoman away from her boiler and into the garden, where thirty men raped her before the thirty-first killed her. That had been four months earlier. Ben pulled a large pillowcase out of the heap and took it upstairs with him. Only a fool would carry an olive-green bag, easily identifiable as the property of the US Army.

'Don't forget to mention the ten cartons of Chesterfields,' Brubaker told him.

Ben boldly followed this up. 'Fifteen would be better.'

'Fifteen it is.'

Satisfied, Ben fetched himself a bottle of Coke from the fridge, put the pillowcase with the bag inside it over his shoulder, and marched straight off to Rodel the master tailor, who noted down credit for five cartons of Chesterfields on the suiting with his tailor's chalk. He added credit of a few hundred marks for the bag, chewing gum and pillowcase too.

On the way to the GYA Club, Ben did his sums. If he could get twenty cartons of cigarettes out of Brubaker instead of fifteen, he would be certain of his suit and his shoes. But the great reporter wouldn't pay up until he could shake the hand of Hitler's right-hand man, and this was going to be a difficult feat to bring off, even for the ingenious Ben. 'I'll think of something,' the German Reich's latter-day beneficiary told himself.

The drama group was rehearsing. 'We lead a life of liberty,' bawled Schiller's robbers down in the cellar, 'we lead a life of joy. ' Meanwhile, behind the improvised stage, Herr Appel was taking a mouse out of a trap and tipping it into the garbage. Ben watched with interest as Appel removed the chewing gum from his mouth and stuck it on the little board as bait, then set the trap again.

Heidi Rodel sat down beside him. 'What did you think of the song?'

'Not much different from what we sang in the Jungvolk.' Only a few months earlier, he and the other members of his troop had sung 'Flames arise!' Or as his grandfather Hellbich called it under his breath, 'Song of the Young Brown Fire-Raisers'. That had been the full extent of Hellbich's public opposition to the regime.

Heidi moved close enough for their knees to touch. 'We're going skinnydipping when it gets dark. Want to come?'

On weekend expeditions with the Jungvolk they had held swimming races naked, comparing penis size with their neighbours as they lay in the sun and thinking nothing much of it. But plunging into the water at night with a naked Heidi was something else. Ben suddenly had a feeling like climbing the bars in gymnastics. Confused, he went upstairs, dropped into an armchair and reached for the latest issue of the American soldiers' paper, Stars and Stripes.

Herr Appel made his laborious way up the stairs. He unwrapped a new piece of chewing gum from its silver paper, stuck out his tongue and applied the gum to it. With his bulging eyes, he reminded Ben of a chameleon he'd seen in the reptile house at the zoo. Except that Herr Appel drew in his tongue with its prey rather more slowly.

'We lead a life of liberty, we lead a life of joy.'sang the chorus down in the cellar for the umpteenth time.

Not bad, that Goethe,' said Appel appreciatively, chewing.

Ben didn't bother to put him right. He picked up the newspaper and read the headline: 'WEREWOLVES GETTING ACTIVE'. An over-eager correspondent had written about an alleged conspiracy of former members of the Hitler Youth, which he claimed had organized itself into a secret league called The Werewolves, whose aim was to oppose the occupying power. In his mind's eye, Ben saw the solution to his problem begin to emerge, if only in vague outline for the time being.

Inspector Dietrich was waiting in the outer office of the German-American Employment Office. The German secretary was painting her fingernails. 'Would you like a coffee, inspector? And a sandwich to go with it? I'll have one brought over from the canteen. We have plenty of everything here.'

'That's very kind of you, but I don't want to go in to see your boss with my mouth full.'

'Tell you what, I'll pack one up for you to take away,' she whispered in conspiratorial tones. 'My name's Gertrud Olsen.'

'Extremely nice of you, Frau Olsen.'

'I'm looking for a man, see? Well, a girl will try anything. Even sandwiches. Are you married, inspector?'

'Yes, these last fifteen years. We have two sons.'

'We'd been married just a year, Horst and I. He was a military airman, went on reconnaissance flights for the artillery. They shot him down at Smolensk. I lost our baby when the news came. I mean, it's not that I'll ever forget Horst. Only when you're on your own you feel kind of claustrophobic. Come and see me some time. Irmgardstrasse 12a.'

'That's very close to me. We live with my parents-in-law in Riemeister Strasse. As I said, I'm married.'

'The nice men always are.' She took a mirror out of her handbag and retouched her lips. Dietrich thought the colour of the lipstick was rather too bright. 'Present from the boss. It's what he prefers,' she said apologetically.

'What's your boss like?'

'Mr Chalford? I don't think he likes Germans much. Otherwise he's OK. A bit impatient sometimes, maybe. But then again, he often brings me a little something from the PX.'

Chalford arrived about five o'clock. He had been in a meeting with the city commandant. 'Come into my office. inspector. Captain Ashburner said you were coming. Let's see what we can do for you.' Dietrich looked at the American with curiosity. Chalford was round and well nourished, a messenger from a world where everything was all right. 'Terrible, all these murders.' The smooth, pink face with the pale-blue eyes was distressed. 'OK, inspector, let's come straight to the point.'

'What do you know about the dead woman?'