‘They haven’t got any there, either.’ I let him refill my glass. The sherry was hardly the best but then nothing was, not even in the Adlon. Not any more. ‘I was thinking that you might like to treat some of your special guests.’
‘Yes, I might.’ He frowned. ‘But you can’t want money. Not for something as precious as this, Bernie. Even the devil has to drink mud with powdered milk in it these days.’
He took another noseful of the aroma and shook his head. ‘So what do you want? The Adlon is at your disposal.’
‘I don’t want that much. I just want some food.’
‘You disappoint me. There’s nothing we have in our kitchens that’s worthy of coffee like this. And don’t be fooled by what’s on the menu.’ He collected a menu off the desk and handed it to me. ‘There are two meat dishes on the menu when the kitchen can actually serve only one. But we put two on for the sake of appearances. What can you do? We have a reputation to uphold.’
‘Suppose someone asks for the dish you don’t have?’ I said.
‘Impossible.’ Willy shook his head. ‘As the first customer comes through the door we cross off the second dish. It’s Hitler’s choice. Which is to say it’s no choice at all.’
He paused.
‘You want food for this coffee? What kind of food?’
‘I want food in cans.’
‘Ah.’
‘The quality isn’t important as long as it’s edible. Canned meat, canned fruit, canned milk, canned vegetables. Whatever you can find. Enough to last for a while.’
‘You know canned goods are strictly forbidden, don’t you? That’s the law. All canned goods are for the war front. If you’re stopped on the street with canned food you’d be in serious trouble. All that precious metal. They’ll think you’re going to sell it to the RAF.’
‘I know it. But I need food that can last and this is the best place to get it.’
‘You don’t look like a man who can’t get to the shops, Bernie.’
‘It isn’t for me, Willy.’
‘I thought not. In which case it’s none of my business what you want it for. But I tell you what, Commissar, for coffee like this I am ready to commit a crime against the state. Just as long as you don’t tell anyone. Now come with me. I think we have some canned goods from before the war.’
We went along to the hotel storeroom. This was as big as the lock-up underneath the Alex but easier on the ear and the nose. The door was secured with more padlocks than the German National Bank. In there he filled my bread bag with as many cans as it could carry.
‘When these cans are gone come and get some more, if you’re still at liberty. And if you’re not then please forget you ever met me.’
‘Thanks, Willy.’
‘Now I have a small favour to ask you, Bernie. Which might even be to your advantage. There’s an American journalist staying here in the hotel. One of several, as it happens. His name is Paul Dickson and he works for the Mutual Broadcasting System. He would dearly like to visit the war front but apparently such things are forbidden. Everything is forbidden now. The only way we know what’s permitted is if we do something and manage to stay out of prison.
‘Now I know you are recently returned from the front. And you notice I don’t ask what it’s like out there. In the East. Just seeing a compass these days makes me feel sick. I don’t ask because I don’t want to know. You might even say this is why I went into the hotel business: because the outside world is of no concern to me. The guests in this hotel are my world and that’s all the world I need to know. Their happiness and satisfaction is all that I care about.
‘So, for Mr Dickson’s happiness and satisfaction I ask that you meet with him. But not here in the hotel. No, not here. It’s hardly safe to talk in the Adlon. There are several suites of rooms on the top floor that have been taken over by people from the Foreign Office. And these people are guarded by German soldiers wearing steel helmets. Can you imagine it. Soldiers, here in the Adlon. Intolerable. It’s just like 1919 all over again but without the barricades.’
‘What are workers from the Foreign Office doing here that they can’t do in the Ministry?’
‘Some of them are destined for the new Foreign Travel Office, when it’s finished. But the rest are typing. Morning, noon and night, they’re typing. Like it’s for a speech by the Mahatma.’
‘What are they typing?’
‘They’re typing up releases for the American press, most of whom are also staying here. Which means that there are Gestapo in the bar. Possibly there are even secret microphones. I don’t know for sure, but this is what I heard. Which is another source of grief for us.’
‘This Dickson fellow. Is he in the hotel right now?’
Willy thought for a moment. ‘I think so.’
‘Don’t mention my name. Just tell him that if he’s interested in a bit of “Life Poetry and Truth”, I’ll be beside the Goethe statue in the Tiergarten.’
‘I know it. Just off Herman Göring Strasse.’
‘I’ll wait fifteen minutes for him. And if he comes he should come alone. No friends. Just him and me and Goethe. I don’t want any witnesses when I speak to him. These days there are plenty of Amis who work for the Gestapo. And I’m not sure about Goethe.’
I hoisted the bread bag onto my back and walked out of the Adlon onto Pariser Platz, where it was already getting dark. One of the only good things about the blackout was that you couldn’t see the Nazi flags, but the brutal outlines of Speer’s partly constructed Foreign Travel Office were still visible in the distance against the purpling night sky, dominating the landscape west of the Brandenburg Gate. Rumour had it that Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, was using Russian POWs to help complete a building that no one other than Hitler seemed to want. Rumour also had it that there was a new network of tunnels under construction connecting government buildings on Wilhelmstrasse with secret bunkers that extended under Herman Göring Strasse as far as the Tiergarten. It was never good to pay too much attention to rumours in Berlin for the simple reason that these were usually true.
I stood by the statue of Goethe and waited. After a while I heard a 109 quite low in the sky as it headed south-east toward the airfield at Tempelhof; and then another. For anyone who’d been in Russia, it was an instantly recognizable and reassuring sound, like an enormous but friendly lion yawning in an empty cave and quite different from the noise of the much slower RAF Whitleys that occasionally ploughed through Berlin skies like tractors of death and destruction.
‘Good evening,’ said the man walking toward me. ‘I’m Paul Dickson. The American from the Adlon.’
He hardly needed the introduction. His Old Spice and Virginia tobacco came ahead of him like a motorcycle outrider with a pennant on his mudguard. Solid footsteps bespoke sturdy wing-tip shoes that could have ferried him across the Delaware. The hand that pumped mine was part of a body that still consumed nutritious food. His sweet and minty breath smelled of real toothpaste and testified to his having access to a dentist with teeth in his head who was still a decade off retirement. And while it was dark I could almost feel his tan. As we exchanged cigarettes and conversational bromides, I wondered if the real reason Berliners disliked Americans was less to do with Roosevelt and his anti-German rhetoric and more to do with their better health, their better hair, their better clothes and their altogether better lives.
‘Willy said you’ve just come back from the front,’ he said, speaking German that was also better than I had expected.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Care to talk about it?’
‘Talking about it is about the only means of committing suicide for which I seem to have the nerve,’ I confessed.