McBride wondered whether it was courtesy on the part of the attache who met him at Tegel or the habit of security, that the man acquired his papers and ushered him through Customs and passport control in the terminal building. McBride had flown in on a Trident to Tegel, West Berlin's principal airport. He wondered briefly why the Cultural Exchange Committee of the Democratic Republic had bothered to send an escort to the airport, and was more surprised at the deference with which he was treated, and the obvious and studied compliments on his book, Gates of Hell produced like mottoes from Christmas crackers by Herr Lobke. The young man seemed anxious to please, yet almost too aware to be the pleasant, rather naive, person he exuded in McBride's direction.
"Professor Dokter Goessler is, I know, very anxious to meet you, to offer his help — it is a remarkable compliment—" McBride almost sensed the unspoken addition of to someone like you, but opted to accept the enthusiasm, the desire to be merely helpful.
Outside the terminal building, a black Zil saloon drew alongside them almost in the instant that Lobke raised his arm. There was even a uniformed chauffeur — one or two arriving passengers glanced at the little tableau, then disregarded it as if dissatisfied with the size or make of the car. McBride slid across the bench seat at the back, and Lobke climbed in beside him. The chauffeur pulled the sun-visor down, and accelerated away from the terminal doors.
They picked up the autobahn heading south-east into the city through the suburb of Wedding. Lobke seemed impressed and distracted from him by the passage of the numerous Mercedes saloons, the Porsches and Datsun sports cars. McBride indulged the immediate excitement of tall buildings, the neon silent but endlessly boastful. The advertisement of the wirtschafiwunder, a slick, affluent stranger in a peasant economy. West Berlin, he sensed immediately, postured like a glamorous, bejewelled model against the temporary chic of a ghetto or a slum. The city shouted at him, demanded he accept its image as reality.
He had been to Berlin before, researching Gates of Hell, but then the city had evidenced to his tunnel-vision the remnants of its battering in 1945, its German-ness, its foundation of ash rather than its post-war substance. Now, he had no preconceptions — he was there to study documents, follow an old, cold trail, and the city leapt upon his senses.
There was a short delay at the checkpoint. The guards seemed uninterested, in the late afternoon sunshine, in McBride as an American, but they checked Lobke's papers thoroughly, even though he had obviously crossed from East to West earlier in the day. On the East German side, the barrier was up almost immediately, and there was a smart salute for the car from the guards. The grey breeze-blocking of the Wall was almost obscured from the consciousness by the ceremony, the swiftness, of their arrival in East Berlin. Except that the Wall was suddenly high enough to cast a long shadow, out of which only after a few seconds did the car emerge into the slanting sunshine again.
One of the Vopos on the checkpoint telephoned the arrival of McBride and Lobke less than a minute after their crossing.
McBride, ringing from Koblenz, had booked a room at the Hotel Spree, an ugly block of pale concrete on the Rathausstrasse near the river and the Marx-Engels Platz. The porter seemed entirely respectful, the desk staff willing and welcoming. The hotel foyer was modern — polished dark wood, greenery and thick carpet, a coffee-shop open-planned to one side. He could have been in any modern four-star hotel in the world.
Lobke left him in the foyer, shaking his hand with a formal warmth, and promising that Professor Doktor Goessler would be certain to contact him. Lobke watched him get into the lift behind the porter carrying his bag, waiting until the door sighed shut, then placed his ID on the desk in front of the clerk.
"Where's the secure phone?" he said. The clerk seemed unsurprised, nodding to a row of four plastic globes sprouting from the wall alongside the coffee-shop. "Second from the left," he said.
Lobke crossed the foyer, watched by a woman in a beige coat and boots who was sitting in the foyer in order to be noticed. Lobke thought he recognized her from the television news programmes. Lobke didn't like the Hotel Spree and its spurious Westernism. He disliked it because it was part of a facade — behind it the grimy dullness of the DDR waited to displace fantasy. To jump out and remind the dreamer that it was a joke, nothing more substantial. On the contrary, he liked West Berlin, liked any messenger-jobs to the Federal Republic, or the rest of Europe. The shiny toys were real there.
Meanwhile the stupid cow in her Italian boots and West German coat waited for her dreary friends from East German TV or the pretend-glossy magazines. He dialled headquarters. Asked for Goessler after identifying himself.
"Chief?"
"Rudi, how did it go?"
"He's booked in. Seems to be enjoying himself — I think he'll go all the way with you, Chief."
"Rudi, what TV stations are you watching these days?"
Lobke laughed. "Ours, naturally."
"OK — well done. I think I shall call Herr Professor McBride at once, and introduce myself."
"Goodbye, Professor—"
Lobke put down the telephone, winked coarsely at the woman in the beige coat who turned her head away immediately, and then he went out of the revolving doors into the evening sunshine, to walk along the Rathausstrasse to Marx-Engels and the Unter den Linden. He liked to look at the Brandenburger Tor with the low sun coming through its columns. It seemed to hold out a vague promise, made to him personally.
McBride unpacked methodically as soon as the porter left, with the tip in dollars that he was not, by law, allowed to receive at all. He always staked his claim to possession of any temporary home by spreading his things around — the toiletries on the bathroom shelf especially helped to establish his claim. While he was still putting socks and pants into a drawer, the telephone rang.
"McBride."
"Ah — a call from Professor Goessler of the University for you, Herr McBride."
"Put him through, please."
McBride straightened at the telephone, as if before a superior. The window of his room looked over the shop roofs on the Rathausstrasse, towards the cathedral. He was pleased it did not face in the opposite direction, where he would have seen, beyond St Hedwig's, the Wall.
"Professor McBride?" The voice of a jolly man— an image he would not have connected with an East German Marxist historian. He shook his head at his own misconceptions.
"Professor Goessler, good of you to call me, sir."
"The pleasure is mine. Please, you are comfortable at the Hotel Spree — it is suitable?"
"Sure, fine, Professor."
"Good, good — if you had given us time, I would have booked your room for you. However, you have not made a mistake with the Spree. Tell me, my friend, are we to get right down to business, as you would say?"
"I'm in your hands, Professor. I haven't changed my ideas since I wrote you—"
"And you expect to find what you are looking for here in Berlin, in our archives?"
"What do you think my chances are, Professor? You've been through all that stuff the Russians gave back in the "60s and "70s."
"My friend, I have only scratched the surface, I assure you!"