Berlin: A Novel (55 page)

The couple of seconds were enough. She got her hand on the Beretta in her shoulder bag. Armand had practised the movement with her. She shot right through the leather. The bag and its contents muted the sound of the shot. Fredie fell on his knees. He looked up at her imploringly, about to say something. Her second shot hit him in the middle of the forehead.

She acted fast and with circumspection. She undid the cord, and the prisoner rubbed his wrists. In her excitement she spoke in German. 'Quick, put this on.' She threw him Fredie's coat.

The man understood. He buttoned the coat up to his chin, buckled the belt round it and put on the cap with the death's head. Luckily he was wearing grey trousers and black shoes. 'You keep quiet, I'll do the talking.' He seemed to understand that too.

They approached the grating. 'I'll see the rest down here another time. Come along, Herr Brigadefuhrer. We must celebrate meeting again like this.' Marlene kept up an uninterrupted flow of talk. 'How's your wife? It seems for ever since I last saw Nina. Monsieur Gaston, allez.' The little caretaker trotted after them. And your sheepdog Harro?' Up the steps, not too hastily. Marlene forced herself to keep calm. 'Such a nice creature.' One step at a time, over the black and white stone flags of the ground floor and so to the open double door. Another guard. 'What do you say to a glass of champagne in the Ritz, Herr Brigadefiihrer? It's not far on foot, and we can have your car follow us.' Out in the street at last. Stroll calmly on. Then a dive round the corner. A sigh of relief.

The man she had rescued dumped his disguise in a doorway. Bertrand's bicycle taxi skidded into view on the wet carriageway. They were safe.

Sleep, sleep was all she wanted. After twenty-four hours Armand broke the silence in the glasshouse. 'Get up, Madeleine, you have to get out of here. They're looking for you everywhere. You not only killed the head of the Paris Gestapo, it so happens that you rescued one of our most important men in the process. We're taking you to Provence. You'll be safe there until the war is over.'

They played marches, Resistance songs, and over and over again the Marseillaise. The Parisians hailed the soldiers who had liberated them. The tall, thin general stood on a podium above the jubilant crowd. Armand, in the uniform of a colonel in the Free French forces, stood beside him. 'Madeleine, mon general,' he introduced her. The tall, thin general embraced Marlene and pinned an order to her blouse.

She climbed down from the podium and stood in line with the others whom the general had decorated. The woman next to her had been given the cross of the Legion d'Honneur too. She wore American uniform. 'What's your name? Where are you from?' she asked in a husky voice.

Marlene reverted to her native accent. 'I'm Marlene. Berlin born and bred.'

'Me too,' said her neighbour.

The general is greatly impressed by your story,' Armand told her. 'He'd like to know if there's anything that we can do for you.'

Marlene didn't even have to think about it. 'I want to go home.'

The DC3 with French markings on its fuselage and wings made a bumpy landing. There were great cracks in the runway and only some of the bomb craters had been filled. The Americans had occupied their sector of Berlin a few days earlier, taking over Tempelhof airport. As yet the French had no airfield in their sector.

Marlene climbed out of the plane. An elegant Spahi officer was waiting for her. 'Capitaine de Bertin, madame. I'm to look after you while you are here. We've put you up in the guest house at our headquarters, and you can decide when you want to return to Paris.' Capitaine de Bertin put her case in the big staff car.

'I don't want to go back to Paris. I want to go to RUbenstrasse.'

'What, madame?'

'RUbenstrasse, please.'

The captain was a veteran of many diplomatic missions, but this complicated task was executed only after much discussion with the driver, and with the aid of several German workers. At last they set off, passing ragged men and women making for unknown destinations. Others were busy clearing rubble. Children with hungry faces reached their hands out to the car. 'Chocolate,' they begged. 'Chocolate.' There were ruins everywhere.

Marlene wept. This was her city.

There was no Ri benstrasse any more, only a lunar landscape of broken bricks and rubble, with a single chimney rising from it three storeys high. Oh well, she thought, and wiped her tears away. 'Arretez, s'il vous plait.' They stopped. 'I must go on from here alone.'

Capitaine de Bertin gave her a card. 'You can reach me any time at this number.' He helped her out of the limousine and saluted. 'Goodbye, madame. You are a very brave woman.' The car disappeared in a cloud of dust.

Marlene took her case and set off. She knew she had made the right decision.

Only the entrance of the building in Schoneberg was left. 'The Reich family now in Lichtenrade,' someone had chalked on the charred wood of the door, adding the address. A dozen tenants had left similar information. Franz Giese was not among them.

Marlene clambered over the ruins to the place where the stairs had led up into his building. Dandelions grew among the rubble. Something glinted gold among the broken bricks and scraps of mortar. It was the rutting stag in the autumnal wood. She picked the last splinters of glass out of the frame and stuck the picture under her arm. Now what? Obvious. Look for Franz.

She slept in the park. She had a dried sausage in her case, and ate some of it for breakfast. A hydrant supplied washing water in the morning. 'Tastes horrible, but it's drinkable,' an old man told her, slurping it noisily from the hollow of his hand.

EMPLOYMENT OFFICE - the notice hung on a side door of the Schoneberg town hall which was still almost intact. She joined the end of the long queue. After two hours she reached a table.

'Name?'

'Kaschke, Marlene.'

'Papers?'

She gave the man her old passport, the one she had kept through the years.

'It's expired.'

'I'll get a new one before my next luxury trip round the world. Now I need work and somewhere to live.'

'The Housing Department deals with accommodation. I can register you as looking for work, but we don't have anything at the moment.'

'Do you speak English?' an elderly lady asked.

Marlene was surprised. A little. Why do you want to know?'

'You should try the American employment office in Lichterfelde. They wouldn't take me, I'm too old.'

'How old are you, Fraulein Kaschke?' The head of the German-American Employment Office could see it in her passport, but he was testing her English.

Marlene did her sums. 'I was born in 1912. Now we are in 1945. That makes me thirty-three years old, right?'

'Your English is OK. Let's see what we have for you. What are your legs like?'

'I beg your pardon?'

'Raise your skirt.' The man spoke German with a heavy American accent.

Anything else?' she asked indignantly. 'If you're looking for tarts for an army whorehouse you've come to the wrong address, mister.'

'Nonsense. The usherettes in the Uncle Tom cinema wear short dresses. Our boys like to see girls with pretty legs. Well, what about it?'

'Usherette? That's fantastic!' She couldn't raise her skirt fast enough.

He inspected her legs. All right, they're in order. We pay a hundred and twenty marks a week. You get army food and half a CARE parcel a month. Now go for your medical. Your address, please.'

'Third bench in the park. Just back from the East. I was working on the land there,' she lied. 'My apartment's gone.'

'Sorry, no job without an address.' The American wrote something on a piece of paper and rubber-stamped it. 'Take this to the Zehlendorf Housing Department office.'

Is he doing this because he wants to get me into bed? Marlene wondered. But Mr Chalford took no more notice of her, just lovingly stroked the black marble obelisk on his desk. 'Looks like a big toothpick,' she said.

'That,' Mr Chalford told her, sounding offended, 'is a genuine Barlach.'

A British bomb had torn away a third of the front of Number 198 Argentinische Allee. The bizarre cross-section of floors was reminiscent of a doll's house. The bedroom, kitchen and bathroom in the third-floor apartment on the left were intact, including the furniture. The door to the living room went nowhere. One step through it and you were on the brink of the abyss. Marlene unpacked her few things. She put the cross of the Legion d'Honneur on the chest of drawers, with the rutting stag behind it.

'Pretty picture.' She swung round, startled. The man in the doorway had plastered his yellowish strands of hair across his skull, and wore shabby trousers and check slippers. 'The name's Muhlberger. I live next door. My wife's in the West.' He scratched his crotch. And you are ... ?'

'Marlene Kaschke. They've allotted me this place. And next time you call please knock or ring, Herr Miihlberger, or better still don't call at all.'

'Oh, hoity-toity. are we? Well, if the lady thinks she can manage without masculine protection ... a woman's not safe around here, so they say now, specially at night.'

'I don't think there'll be a problem - so long as I don't come across you,' she shot straight back at him. With a dirty laugh, he disappeared.

She found a hammer and nails in the kitchen and hung the stag above the chest of drawers. She knew Franz would be glad she'd found the picture. Her face cleared. 'Now for the cinema.'

It was like a dream. The dimly lit auditorium with the curving rows of seats. The heavy, silvery blue curtain that would open any minute for Hans Albers, Willy Fritsch or Heinz Riihmann. First the man who played the Wurlitzer would climb out of the depths and accompany the colourful slides of advertisements with his magical, swelling organ music. Marlene remembered every detail of her past visit to the Onkel Tom cinema.

The manager was a pale corporal called Pringle, who was sitting in the office drinking coffee with his pallid German boyfriend. 'There'll be no playing around with the boys. Gisela will get your dress.'

Gisela was a strong-minded redhead who advised her, 'Do as I do, wear four pairs of panties on top of each other. They're always bloody pinching your arse. Here, this should fit.' She helped Marlene into the short lilac taffeta dress with its frilled sleeves and tied a large bow, also lilac, in her hair. Then she steered Marlene to the mirror and stood beside her. 'Designed and made by Corporal Pringle. The taffeta cost him four cartons of Chesterfields. He and Detlev just love to sew. Well, at least those two don't pinch you, the little darlings.' The two young women looked at each other and spluttered with laughter.

Marlene was given a torch and a tray slung around her with chocolate bars, bags of popcorn and a small chilled container for ices on a stick. Her territory was the left-hand aisle. A doll-faced, black-haired girl paraded up and down the right-hand aisle, and Gisela took the middle one.

There was no Wurlitzer now, there were no ads, there was no documentary. The loudspeakers played swing, while slides warned you about sexually transmitted diseases. Instead of the screen heroes of the pre-war UfA, Terra and Tobis studios, the cinema was showing a Metro-Goldwyn Mayer movie with Clark Gable. Admission was from eight, and the movie began at twenty to nine.