'Who is it?' she called anxiously. 'Who's there?'
'It's Bernd,' I said.
'Come in, you wretched boy.' Her shout was loud enough to wake everyone in the building.
She was propped up in bed; there must have been a dozen lace-edged pillows behind her. She had a scarf tied round her head, and on the side table there was a bottle of sherry and a glass. All over the bed there were newspapers; some of them had come to pieces so that pages had drifted across the room as far as the fireplace.
She'd snatched her glasses off so quickly that her dyed brown hair was disarranged. 'Give me a kiss,' she demanded. I did so and noticed the expensive perfume and the makeup and false eyelashes that she applied only for very special occasions. The heiliger Abend with her friends had meant a lot to her. I guessed she'd waited for me to come home before she'd remove the makeup. 'Did you have a nice time?' she asked. There was repressed anger in her voice.
'I've been working,' I said. I didn't want to get into a conversation. I wanted to go to bed and sleep for a long time.
'Who were you with?'
'I told you, I was working.' I tried to assuage her annoyance. 'Did you have dinner with Mr Koch and your friends? What did you serve them – carp?' She liked carp at Christmas; she'd often told me it was the only thing to serve. Even during the war they'd always somehow managed to get carp.
'Lothar Koch couldn't come. He had influenza and the wine people had to go to a trade party.'
'So you were all alone,' I said. I bent over and kissed her again. 'I'm so sorry, Lisl.' She'd been so pretty. I remember as a child feeling guilty for thinking she was more beautiful than my mother. 'I really am sorry.'
'And so you should be.'
'There was no way of avoiding it. I had to be there.'
'Had to be where – Kempinski or the Steigenberger? Don't lie to me, Liebchen. When Werner phoned me I could hear the voices and the music in the background. So you don't have to pretend you were working.' She gave a little hoot of laughter, but there was no joy in it.
So she'd been in bed here working herself up into a rage about that. 'I was working,' I repeated. 'I'll explain tomorrow.'
'There's nothing you have to explain, Liebchen. You are a free man. You don't have to spend your heiliger Abend with an ugly old woman. Go and have fun while you are young. I don't mind.'
'Don't upset yourself, Lisl,' I said. 'Werner was phoning from his apartment because I was working.'
By this time she'd noticed the smell of the mud on my clothes, and now she pushed her glasses into place so that she could see me more clearly. 'You're filthy, Bernd. Whatever have you been doing? 'Where have you been?' From her study there came the loud chimes of the ornate ormolu clock striking two-thirty.
'I keep telling you over and over again, Lisl. I've been with the police on the Havel getting a car from the water.'
'The times I've told you that you drive too fast.'
'It wasn't anything to do with me,' I said.
'So what were you doing there?'
'Working. Can I have a drink?'
'There's a glass on the sideboard. I've only got sherry. The whisky and brandy are locked in the cellar.'
'Sherry will be just right.'
'My God, Bernd, what are you doing? You don't drink sherry by the tumblerful.'
'It's Christmas,' I said.
'Yes. It's Christmas,' she said, and poured herself another small measure. 'There was a phone message, a woman. She said her name was Gloria Kent. She said that everyone sent you their love. She wouldn't leave a phone number. She said you'd understand.' Lisl sniffed.
'Yes, I understand,' I said. 'It's a message from the children.'
'Ah, Bernd. Give me a kiss, Liebchen. Why are you so cruel to your Tante Lisl? I bounced you on my knee in this very room, and that was before you could walk.'
'Yes, I know, but I couldn't get away, Lisl. It was work.'
She fluttered her eyelashes like a young actress. 'One day you'll be old, darling. Then you'll know what it's like.'
6
Christmas morning. West Berlin was like a ghost town; as I stepped into the street the silence was uncanny. The Ku-damm was empty of traffic and, although some of the neon signs and shop lights were still shining, there was no one strolling on its wide pavements. I had the town virtually to myself all the way to Potsdamer Strasse.
Potsdamer Strasse is Schöneberg's main street, a wide thoroughfare that is called Hauptstrasse at one end and continues north to the Tiergarten. You can find everything you want there and a lot of things you've been trying to avoid. There are smart shops and slums, kebab counters and superb nineteenth-century houses now listed as national monuments. Here is a neobaroque palace – the Volksgerichtshof – where Hitler's judges passed death sentences at the rate of two thousand a year, so that citizens found guilty of telling even the most feeble anti-Nazi jokes were executed.
Behind the Volksgerichthof – its rooms now echoing and empty except for those used by the Allied Travel Office and the Allied Air Security Office (where the four powers control the air lanes across East Germany to Berlin) – was the street where Lange lived. His top-floor apartment overlooked one of the seedier side streets. Lange was not his family name, it was not his name at all. 'Lange' – or 'Lofty' – was the descriptive nickname the Germans had given to this very tall American. His real name was John Koby. Of Lithuanian extraction, his grandfather had decided that 'Kubilunas' was not American enough to go over a storefront in Boston.
The street door led to a grim stone staircase. The windows on every landing had been boarded up. It was dark, the stairs illuminated by dim lamps protected against vandals by wire mesh. The walls were bare of any decoration but graffiti. At the top of the house the apartment door was newly painted dark grey and a new plastic bell push was labelled john koby – journalist. The door was opened by Mrs Koby and she led me into a brightly lit, well-furnished apartment. 'Lange was so glad you phoned,' she whispered. 'It was wonderful that you could come right away. He gets miserable sometimes. You'll cheer him up.' She was a small thin woman, her face pale like the faces of most Berliners when winter comes. She had dear eyes, a round face, and a fringe that came almost down to her eyebrows.
'I'll try,' I promised.
It was the sort of untidy room in which you'd expect to find a writer or even a 'journalist'. There were crowded bookshelves, a desk with an old manual typewriter, and more books and papers piled on the floor. But Lange had not been a professional writer for many years, and even in his newspaper days he'd never been a man who referred to books except as a last resort. Lange had never been a journalist, Lange had always been a streetwise reporter who got his facts at firsthand and guessed the bits in between. Just as I did.
The furniture was old but not valuable – the random mixture of shapes and styles that's to be found in a saleroom or attic. Obviously a big stove had once stood in the corner, and the wall where it had been was covered in old blue-and-white tiles. Antique tiles like those were valuable now, but these must have been firmly affixed to the wall, for I had the feeling that any valuable thing not firmly attached had already been sold.
He was wearing an old red-and-gold silk dressing gown. Under it there were grey flannel slacks and a heavy cotton button-down shin of the sort that Brooks Brothers made famous. His tie bore the ice-cream colours of the Garrick Club, a London meeting place for actors, advertising men, and lawyers. He was over seventy, but he was thin and tall and somehow that helped to give him a more youthful appearance. His face was drawn and clean-shaven, with a high forehead and grey hair neatly parted. He had a prominent bony nose and teeth that were too yellow and irregular to be anything but his own natural ones.