“Once.” The man exhaled and looked gratefully at the cigarette. “It happens here every three or four months. The derelicts sleep under trie wagons, to keep out of the rain, poor devils. Then, when the engines start, instead of staying where they are, they try to get out of the way.” He put his hand to his eyes. “I must have reversed over him, but I never heard a thing. When I looked back up the track, there he was — just a heap of rags.”
“Do you get many derelicts in this yard?”
“Always a couple of dozen. The Reichsbahn Polizei try to keep them away, but the place is too big to patrol properly. Look over there. Some of them are making a run for it.”
He pointed across the tracks. At first, March could make out nothing, except a line of cattle-trucks. Then, almost invisible in the shadow of the train, he spotted a movement — a shape, running jerkily, like a marionette; then another; then more. They ran along the sides of the wagons, darted into the gaps between the trucks, waited, then scampered out again towards the next patch of cover.
Globus had his back to them. Oblivious to their presence, he was still talking to Krebs, smacking his right fist into the palm of his left hand.
March watched as the stick-figures worked their way to safety -then suddenly the rails were vibrating, there was a rush of wind, and the view was cut off by the sleeper train to Rovno, accelerating out of Berlin. The wall of double-decker dining cars and sleeping compartments took half a minute to pass and by the time it had cleared the little colony of drifters had vanished into the orangey dark.
PART FIVE
SATURDAY 18 APRIL
Most of you know what it means when one hundred corpses are lying side by side. Or five hundred. Or one thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time — apart from some exceptions caused by human weakness — to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never to be written and is never to be written.
ONE
A crack of light showed beneath her door. Inside her apartment a radio was playing. Lovers” music — soft strings and low crooning, appropriate for the night. A party? Was, this how Americans behaved in the presence of danger? He stood alone on the tiny landing and looked at his watch. It was almost two. He knocked and after a few moments the volume was turned down. He heard her voice.
“Who is it?”
“The police.”
A second or two elapsed, then there was a clatter of bolts and chains, and the door opened. She said: “You’re very funny,” but her smile was a false one, pasted on for his benefit. In her dark eyes exhaustion showed, and also — was it? — fear? He bent to kiss her, his hands resting lightly on her waist, and immediately felt a pricking of desire. My God, he thought, she’s turning me into a sixteen-year-old …
Somewhere in the apartment: a footstep. He looked up. Over her shoulder, a man loomed in the doorway of the bathroom. He was a couple of years younger than March: brown brogues, sports jacket, a bow tie, a white jersey pulled on casually over a business shirt. Charlie stiffened in March’s embrace and gently broke free of him. “You remember Henry Nightingale?”
He straightened, feeling awkward. “Of course. The bar in Potsdamer Strasse.”
Neither man made a move towards the other. The American’s face was a mask.
March stared at Nightingale and said softly: “What’s going on here, Charlie?”
She stood on tiptoe and whispered in his ear. “Don’t say anything. Not here. Something’s happened.’Then, loudly: “Isn’t this interesting, the three of us?” She took March’s arm and guided him towards the bathroom. “I think you should come into my parlour.”
IN the bathroom, Nightingale assumed a proprietorial air. He turned on the cold water taps above the basin and the bath, increased the volume of the radio. The programme had changed. Now the clapboard walls vibrated to the strains of “German jazz” — a watery syncopation, officially approved, from which all traces of “Negroid influences” had been erased. When he had arranged everything to his satisfaction, Nightingale perched on the edge of the bath. March sat next to him. Charlie squatted on the floor.
She opened the meeting: “I told Henry about my visitor the other morning. The one you had the fight with. He thinks the Gestapo may have planted a bug.”
Nightingale gave an amiable grin. “Afraid that’s the way your country works, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer.”
Your country…
“I’m sure — a wise precaution.”
Perhaps he isn’t younger than me, thought March. The American had thick blond hair, blond eyelashes, a ski-tan. His teeth were absurdly regular- strips of enamel, gleaming white. Not many one-pot meals in his childhood, no watery potato soups or sawdust sausages in that complexion. His boyish looks embraced all ages from twenty-five to fifty.
For a few moments nobody spoke. Euro-pap filled the silence. Charlie said to March: “I know you told me not to speak to anyone. But I had to. Now you have to trust Henry and Henry has to trust you. Believe me, there’s no other way.”
“And, naturally, we both have to trust you.”
“Oh come on…”
“All right.” He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender.
Next to her, balanced on top of the lavatory, was the latest in American portable tape recorders. Trailing from one of its sockets was a cable, at the end of which, instead of a microphone, was a small suction cup.
“Listen,” she said. “You’ll understand.” She leaned across and pressed a switch. The spools of tape began to revolve.
“Fraulein Maguire?”
“Yes?”
“The same procedure as before, Fraulein, if you please.”
There was a click, followed by a buzz.
She pressed another switch, stopping the tape. “That was the first call. You said he’d ring. I was waiting for him.” She was triumphant. “It’s Martin Luther.”
THIS was a crazy business, the craziest he had ever known, like picking your way through a haunted house in the Tiergarten fun fair. No sooner did you plant your feet on solid ground than the floorboards gave way beneath you. You rounded a corner and a madman rushed out. Then you stepped back and found that all the time you had been looking at yourself in a distorting mirror.
Luther.
March said: “What time was that?”
“Eleven forty-five.”
Eleven forty-five: forty minutes after the discovery of the body on the railway tracks. He thought of the exultant look on Globus’s face, and he smiled.
Nightingale said: “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. I’ll explain. What happened next?”
“Exactly as before. I went over to the telephone box and five minutes later he rang again.”
March raised his hand to his brow. “Don’t tell me you dragged that machine all the way across the street?”
“Damn it, I needed some proof!” She glared at him. “I knew what I was doing. Look.” She stood to demonstrate. The deck hangs from this shoulder strap. The whole thing fits under my coat. The wire runs down my sleeve. I attach the suction cup to the receiver, like this. Easy. It was dark. Nobody could have seen a thing.”
Nightingale, the professional diplomat, cut in smoothly: “Never mind how you got the tape, Charlie, or whether you should have got it.” He said to March: “May I suggest we simply let her play it?”
Charlie pushed a button. There was a fumbling noise, greatly magnified — the sound of her attaching the microphone to the telephone — and then:
“We have not much time. I am a friend of Stuckart.”
An elderly voice, but not frail. A voice with the sarcastic, sing-song quality of the native Berliner. He spoke exactly as March had expected. Then Charlie’s voice, in her good German: