LITMIR.BIZ

       6

      Christmas morning. West Berlin was like a ghost town; as I stepped into the street the silence was uncanny. The Kudamm 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, kabob 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 Volksgerichtshof – 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 clear 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 shirt 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.

      I remembered in time the sort of greeting that Lange gave to old friends – the Handschlag, the hands slapped together in that noisy handshake with which German farmers conclude a sale of pigs.

      ‘A Merry Christmas, Lange,’ I said.

      ‘It’s good to see you, Bernie,’ he said as he released my hand. ‘We were in the other house the last time we saw you. The apartment over the baker’s shop.’ His American accent was strong, as if he’d arrived only yesterday. And yet Lange had lived in Berlin longer than most of his neighbours. He’d come here as a newspaperman even before Hitler took power in 1933, and he’d stayed here right up to the time America got into World War II.

      ‘Coffee, Bernard? It’s already made. Or would you prefer a glass of wine?’ said Gerda Koby, taking my coat. She was a shy withdrawn woman, and although I’d known her since I was a child, she’d never called me ‘Bernie’. I think she would have rather called me ‘Herr Samson’, but she followed her husband in this matter as in all others. She was still pretty. Rather younger than Lange, she had once been an opera singer famous throughout Germany. They’d met in Berlin when he returned here as a newspaperman with the US Army in 1945.

      ‘I missed breakfast,’ I said. ‘A cup of coffee would be great.’

      ‘Lange?’ she said. He looked at her blankly and didn’t answer. She shrugged. ‘He’ll have wine,’ she told me. ‘He won’t cut down on it.’ She looked too small for an opera singer, but the ancient posters on the wall gave her billing above title: Wagner in Bayreuth, Fidelio at the Berlin State Opera, and in Munich a performance of Mongol Fury which was the Nazis’ ‘Aryanized’ version of Handel’s Israel in Egypt.

      ‘It’s Christmas, woman,’ said Lange. ‘Give us both wine.’ He didn’t smile and neither did she. It was the brusque way he always addressed her.

      ‘I’ll stick to coffee,’ I said. ‘I have a lot of driving to do. And I have to go to Police HQ and sign some forms later today.’

      ‘Sit down, Bernie, and tell me what you’re doing here. The last time we saw you you were settled in London, married, and with kids.’ His voice was hoarse and slurred slightly in the Bogart manner.

      ‘I am,’ I said. ‘I’m just here for a couple of days on business.’

      ‘Oh, sure,’ said Lange. ‘Stuffing presents down the chimneys: then you’ve got to get your reindeer together and head back to the workshops.’

      ‘The children must be big,’ said Mrs Koby. ‘You should be with them at home. They make you work at Christmas? That’s terrible.’

      ‘My boss has a mean streak,’ I said.

      ‘And you haven’t got a union by the sound of it,’ said Lange. He had little love for the Department and he made his dislike evident in almost everything he said about the men in London Central.

      ‘That’s right,’ I said.

      We sat there exchanging small talk for fifteen minutes or maybe half an hour. I needed a little time to get used to Lange’s harsh, abrasive style.

      ‘Still working for the Department, eh?’

      ‘Not any longer,’ I said.

      He ignored my denial; he knew it counted for nothing. ‘Well, I’m glad I got out of it when I did.’

      ‘You were the first man my dad recruited in Berlin, at least that’s what people say.’

      ‘Then they’ve got it right,’ said Lange. ‘And I was grateful to him. In 1945 I couldn’t wait to kiss the newspaper business goodbye.’

      ‘What was wrong with it?’

      ‘You’re too young to remember. They dressed reporters up in fancy uniforms and stuck “War Correspondent” badges on us. That was so all those dumb jerks in the Army press departments could order us about and tell us what to write.’

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