'And another reason?'
Her brow darkened.
'You said that could be one reason.'
'Well of course. It can't simply be a matter of pulling Poroshin's tail out of the fire, can it? I wouldn't be at all surprised if Emil had been spying for him.'
'Got any evidence for that? Did he see much of Poroshin when he was still here in Berlin?'
'I can't say he did, I can't say he didn't.'
'But he's not charged with anything besides murder. He's not been charged with spying.'
'What would be the point? They've got enough to hang him as it is.'
'That's not the way it works. If he had been spying, they would have wanted to know everything. Those American MPs would have asked you a lot of questions about your husband's associates. Did they?'
She shrugged. 'Not that I can remember.'
'If there was any suspicion of spying they would have investigated it, if only to find out what sort of information he might have got hold of. Did they search this place?'
Frau Becker shook her head. 'Either way, I hope he hangs,' she said bitterly.
'You can tell him that if you see him. I certainly won't.'
'When did you last see him?'
'A year ago. He came back from a Soviet POW camp in July and he legged it three months later.'
'And when was he captured?'
'February 1943, at Briansk.' Her mouth tightened. 'To think that I waited three years for that man. All those other men who I turned away. I kept myself for him, and look what happened.' A thought seemed to occur to her. 'There's your evidence for spying, if you need any. How was it that he managed to get himself released, eh? Answer me that. How did he get home when so many others are still there?'
I stood up to leave. Perhaps the situation with my own wife made me more inclined to take Becker's part. But I had heard enough to realize that he would need all the help he could get possibly more, if this woman had anything to do with it.
I said: 'I was in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp myself, Frau Becker. For less time than your husband, as it happens. It didn't make me a spy. Lucky maybe, but not a spy.' I went to the door, opened it, and hesitated. 'Shall I tell you what it did make me? With people like the police, with people like you, Frau Becker, with people like my own wife, who's hardly let me touch her since I came home.
Shall I tell you what it made me? It made me unwelcome.'
Chapter 6
It is said that a hungry dog will eat a dirty pudding. But hunger doesn't just affect your standards of hygiene. It also dulls the wits, blunts the memory not to mention the sex-drive and generally produces a feeling of listlessness.
So it was no surprise to me that there had been a number of occasions during the course of 1947 when, with senses pinched from want of nourishment, I had nearly met with an accident. It was for this very reason I decided to reflect upon my present, rather irrational inclination, which was to take Becker's case after all, with the benefit of a full stomach.
Formerly Berlin's finest, most famous hotel, the Adlon was now little more than a ruin. Somehow it remained open to guests, with fifteen available rooms which, because it was in the Soviet sector, were usually taken by Russian officers. A small restaurant not only survived in the basement, but did brisk business too, a result of it being exclusive to Germans with food coupons who might therefore lunch or dine there without fear of being thrown off a table in favour of some more obviously affluent Americans or British, as happened in most other Berlin restaurants.
The Adlon's improbable entrance was underneath a pile of rubble on Wilhelmstrasse, only a short distance away from the Fnhrerbunker where Hitler had met his death, and which could be toured for the price of a couple of cigarettes in the hand of any one of the policemen who were supposed to keep people out of it. All Berlin's bulls were doubling as touts since the end of the war.
I ate a late lunch of lentil soup, turnip 'hamburger' and tinned fruit; and having sufficiently turned over Becker's problem in my metabolized mind, I handed over my coupons and went up to what passed for the hotel reception desk to use the telephone.
My call to the Soviet Military Authority, the SMA, in Karlshorst was connected quickly enough, but I seemed to wait forever to be put through to Colonel Poroshin. Nor did speaking in Russian speed the progress of my call; it merely earned me a look of suspicion from the hotel porter. When finally I got through to Poroshin he seemed genuinely pleased that I had changed my mind and told me that I should wait by the picture of Stalin on Unter den Linden, where his staff car would collect me in fifteen minutes.
The afternoon had turned as raw as a boxer's lip and I stood in the door of the Adlon for ten minutes before heading back up the small service stairs and towards the top of the Wilhelmstrasse. Then, with the Brandenburg Gate at my back, I walked up to the house-sized picture of the Comrade Chairman that dominated the centre of the avenue, flanked by two smaller plinths, each bearing the Soviet hammer and sickle.
As I waited for the car, Stalin seemed to watch me, a sensation which, I supposed, was intended: the eyes were as deep, black and unpleasant as the inside of a postman's boot, and under the cockroach moustaches the smile was hard permafrost. It always amazed me that there were people who referred to this murdering monster as 'Uncle' Joe: he seemed to me to be about as avuncular as King Herod.
Poroshin's car arrived, its engine drowned by the noise of a squadron of YAK 3 fighters passing overhead. I climbed aboard, and rolled helplessly in the back seat as the broad-shouldered, Tatar-faced driver hit the BMW's accelerator, sending the car speeding east towards Alexanderplatz, and beyond to the Frankfurter Allee and Karlshorst.
'I always thought that German civilians were forbidden to ride in staff cars,' I said to the driver in Russian.
'True,' he said, 'but the colonel said that if we are stopped I'm just to say that you're being arrested.'
The Tatar laughed uproariously at my look of obvious alarm, and I could only console myself with the fact that while we were driving at such a speed, it was unlikely that we could be stopped by anything other than an anti-tank gun.
We reached Karlshorst minutes later.
A villa colony with a steeplechase course, Karlshorst, nick-named 'the little Kremlin', was now a completely isolated Russian enclave which Germans could only enter by special permit. Or the kind of pennant on the front of Poroshin's car.
We were waved through several checkpoints and finally drew up alongside the old St Antonius Hospital on Zeppelin Strasse now housing the SMA for Berlin. The car ground to a halt in the shadow of a five-metre-high plinth on top of which was a big red Soviet star. Poroshin's driver sprang out of his seat, opened my door smartly and, ignoring the sentries, squired me up the steps to the front door. I paused in the doorway for a moment, surveying the shiny new BMW cars and motorcycles in the car park.
'Someone been shopping?' I said.
'From the BMW factory at Eisenbach,' said my driver proudly. 'Now Russian.'
With this depressing thought he left me in a waiting-room that smelled strongly of carbolic. The room's only concession to decoration was another picture of Stalin with a slogan underneath that read: 'Stalin, the wise teacher and protector of the working people'. Even Lenin, portrayed in a smaller frame alongside the wise one, seemed from his expression to have one or two problems with that particular sentiment.
I met these same two popular faces hanging on the wall of Poroshin's office on the top floor of the SMA building. The young colonel's neatly pressed olive-brown tunic was hanging on the back of the glass door, and he was wearing a Circassian-style shirt, belted with a black strap. But for the polish on his soft calf-leather boots he might have passed for a student at Moscow University.