A German Requiem

A German Requiem

Philip Kerr

*

PART ONE.

BERLIN, 1947

These days, if you are a German you spend your time in Purgatory before you die, in earthly suffering for all your country's unpunished and unrepented sins, until the day when, with the aid of the prayers of the Powers or three of them, anyway Germany is finally purified.

For now we live in fear. Mostly it is fear of the Ivans, matched only by the almost universal dread of venereal disease, which has become something of an epidemic, although both afflictions are generally held to be synonymous.

Chapter 1

It was a cold, beautiful day, the kind you can best appreciate with a fire to stoke and a dog to scratch. I had neither, but then there wasn't any fuel about and I never much liked dogs. But thanks to the quilt I had wrapped around my legs I was warm, and I had just started to congratulate myself on being able to work from home the sitting-room doubled as my office when there was a knock at what passed for the front door.

I cursed and got off my couch.

'This will take a minute,' I shouted through the wood, 'so don't go away.' I worked the key in the lock and started to pull at the big brass handle. 'It helps if you push it from your side,' I shouted again. I heard the scrape of shoes on the landing and then felt a pressure on the other side of the door.

Finally it shuddered open.

He was a tall man of about sixty. With his high cheekbones, thin short snout, old-fashioned side-whiskers and angry expression, he reminded me of a mean old king baboon.

'I think I must have pulled something,' he grunted, rubbing his shoulder.

'I'm sorry about that, I said, and stood aside to let him in. 'There's been quite a bit of subsidence in the building. The door needs rehanging, but of course you can't get the tools.' I showed him into the sitting-room. 'Still, we're not too badly off here. We've had some new glass, and the roof seems to keep out the rain. Sit down.' I pointed to the only armchair and resumed my position on the couch.

The man put down his briefcase, took off his bowler hat and sat down with an exhausted sigh. He didn't loosen his grey overcoat and I didn't blame him for it.

'I saw your little advertisement on a wall on the Kurfürstendamm,' he explained.

'You don't say,' I said, vaguely recalling the words I had used on a small square of card the previous week. Kirsten's idea. With all the notices advertising life-partners and marriage-markets that covered the walls of Berlin's derelict buildings, I had supposed that nobody would bother to read it.

But she had been right after all.

'My name is Novak,' he said. 'Dr Novak. I am an engineer. A process metallurgist, at a factory in Wernigerode. My work is concerned with the extraction and production of non-ferrous metals.'

'Wernigerode,' I said. 'That's in the Harz Mountains, isn't it? In the Eastern Zone?'

He nodded. 'I came to Berlin to deliver a series of lectures at the university.

This morning I received a telegram at my hotel, the Mitropa '

I frowned, trying to remember it.

'It's one of those bunker-hotels,' said Novak. For a moment he seemed inclined to tell me about it, and then changed his mind. 'The telegram was from my wife, urging me to cut short my trip and return home.'

'Any particular reason?'

He handed me the telegram. 'It says that my mother is unwell.'

I unfolded the paper, glanced at the typewritten message, and noted that it actually said she was dangerously ill.

'I'm sorry to hear it.'

Dr Novak shook his head.

'You don't believe her?'

'I don't believe my wife ever sent this,' he said. 'My mother may indeed be old, but she is in remarkably good health. Only two days ago she was chopping wood.

No, I suspect that this has been cooked up by the Russians, to get me back as quickly as possible.'

'Why?'

'There is a great shortage of scientists in the Soviet Union. I think that they intend to deport me to work in one of their factories.'

I shrugged. 'Then why allow you to travel to Berlin in the first place?'

'That would be to grant the Soviet Military Authority a degree of efficiency which it simply does not possess. My guess is that an order for my deportation has only just arrived from Moscow, and that the SMA wishes to get me back at the earliest opportunity.'

'Have you telegraphed your wife? To have this confirmed?'

'Yes. She replied only that I should come at once.'

'So you want to know if the Ivans have got her.'

'I've been to the military police here in Berlin,' he said, 'but '

His deep sigh told me with what success.

'No, they won't help,' I said. 'You were right to come here.'

'Can you help me, Herr Gunther?'

'It means going into the Zone,' I said, half to myself, as if I needed some persuasion, which I did. 'To Potsdam. There's someone I know I can bribe at the headquarters of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany. It'll cost you, and I don't mean a couple of candy-bars.'

He nodded solemnly.

'You wouldn't happen to have any dollars, I suppose, Dr Novak?'

He shook his head.

'Then there's also the matter of my own fee.'

'What would you suggest?'

I nodded at his briefcase. 'What have you got?'

'Just papers, I'm afraid.'

'You must have something. Think. Perhaps something at your hotel.'

He lowered his head and uttered another sigh as he tried to recall a possession that might be of some value.

'Look, Herr Doktor, have you asked yourself what you will do if it turns out your wife is being held by the Russians?'

'Yes,' he said gloomily, his eyes glazing over for a moment.

This was sufficiently articulate. Things did not look good for Frau Novak.

'Wait a moment,' he said, dipping his hand inside the breast of his coat, and coming up with a gold fountain-pen. 'There's this.'

He handed me the pen. 'It's a Parker. Eighteen carat.'

I quickly appraised its worth. 'About fourteen hundred dollars on the black market,' I said. 'Yes, that'll take care of Ivan. They love fountain-pens almost as much as they love watches.' I raised my eyebrows suggestively.

'I'm afraid I couldn't part with my watch,' said Novak. 'It was a present from my wife.' He smiled thinly as he perceived the irony.

I nodded sympathetically and decided to move things along before guilt got the better of him.

'Now, as to my own fee. You mentioned metallurgy. You wouldn't happen to have access to a laboratory, would you?'

'But of course.'

'And a smelter?'

He nodded thoughtfully, and then more vigorously as the light dawned. 'You want some coal, don't you?'

'Can you get some?'

'How much do you want?'

'Fifty kilos would be about right.'

'Very well.'

'Be back here in twenty-four hours,' I told him. 'I should have some information by then.'

Thirty minutes later, after leaving a note for my wife, I was out of the apartment and on my way to the railway station.

In late 1947 Berlin still resembled a colossal Acropolis of fallen masonry and ruined edifice, a vast and unequivocal megalith to the waste of war and the power of 75,000 tonnes of high explosive. Unparalleled was the destruction that had been rained on the capital of Hitler's ambition: devastation on a Wagnerian scale with the Ring come full circle the final illumination of that twilight of the gods.

In many parts of the city a street map would have been of little more use than a window-cleaner's leather. Main roads meandered like rivers around high banks of debris. Footpaths wound precipitously over shifting mountains of treacherous rubble which sometimes, in wanner weather, yielded a clue unmistakable to the nostrils that something other than household furniture was buried there.