The Berlin Assignment (12 page)

“Herr Müller was a regular until Uwe's kidneys gave up,” Uwe's son-in-law said, viewing his customer skeptically.

“I heard that happened. I hope he didn't suffer. He was always optimistic.”

The bartender accepted the inevitable. He grabbed a chair, turned it around and sat with his momentous arms across the backrest. He
stared at Hanbury. “When Uwe first learned he had a condition, he came home glum.
Even the best sickness is no good
, he said. He was weak. We were worried. My wife Ilse wanted to cheer him up. She told him not to worry, that we'd help him get through it. Uwe said – I hear him saying it –
I want to do it right, Ilse. If I had to die three or four times, I wouldn't worry about the first time. But I only have one chance. Suppose I do it wrong?
”

There was a cry for beer from another table. Uwe's son-in-law said he'd be back. Hanbury drank more water and devoured the sausage before starting on the bread. Having tapped and delivered a foaming tankard to a customer, the bartender returned. “It took a while before Uwe was dead. He blamed it on his lack of education.
If I knew more about dying, I might have managed it by now
, he said. He had a whole year to think about it. The time passed peacefully and that's how he died.”

“I remember Uwe knew something about music,” said Hanbury solemnly. “I once told him I liked listening to music. ‘Beethoven?' he asked. I said sure. He said he'd heard Beethoven was deaf. He believed that Beethoven, his whole life long, whenever he put a pen on paper to compose, probably thought he was drawing.”

“That's right,” said Uwe's son-in-law. “Tell me. You've got an accent. Foreigner?” Hanbury nodded. “How about that. It makes our place international. I'll have to tell Ilse.” He began to describe Uwe's funeral, saying the preacher had not been an attractive man, but had said nice things. The bartender was lost in thought for a while before rising to attend to new clients.

Hanbury finished the bread and water much relieved that, though Uwe might be gone,
The Tankard
was unchanged. Maybe he and Müller could make it their regular again.

The program of official calls to outfit the new consul with a stable of contacts was in full swing. In those early days Frau Carstens, briskly efficient, targeted Berlin's thoroughbreds.

Sturm, wagon-master, lay awake at night pondering his responsibilities. His was the delivery job: human cargo, an atmosphere of urgency, timely arrivals staged with solemnity. During the day shouts resonated in his mind:
Lights! Camera! Action!
The Opel roared along the avenues. It swerved and swayed, cutting BMWs and Mercedes Benzs recklessly down to size. He raced up to ornate buildings, stopped decisively, jumped out, ran around to open the consul's door, stood at attention, one hand lightly on the handle until the back seat cargo was gone up the steps and swallowed by oak doors. Throughout, his countenance was solemn. Remaining on guard beside the Opel he was fidgety and alert. He felt the pressure of making the logistics work. Herr Gifford demanded military precision.

The Chief of Protocol, at the top of Frau Carstens's list, proved difficult to pin down. First, the President of Poland prevented Hanbury
from having a half-hour. Then the Emperor of Japan took precedence. The King of Thailand came. An ayatollah from Iran and the Dalai Lama also bumped the appointment into the future. The consul bided his time. Frau Carstens' list of the city's finest pacers was long enough. It kept him going. Had Krauthilda known what was going on she would have cried:
Wow! Way to go, Tony! Way to hit the movers and the shakers!
Heywood, that self-styled, paternalistic grandee, would have been inspired too.
My boy, you know, I'm proud of you.

The continuous waiting for an opening in the schedule of the Chief of Protocol was like fishing – patience was needed to land this big one. The staff checked daily with Frau Carstens to see if there had been a nibble.

The picture of the city that emerged from the consul's many conversations was complex. In fact, he was overdosed with information. Frequently a discussion made sense only when he sat down afterwards with Gifford. Gifford knew about the purge of East German communist party hacks. And he made it sound as if he had personally studied the state cancer that was the Stasi. He explained the legal basis for hauling Honecker (and half a dozen other top communists) into court where they stood accused of practising a most exquisite totalitarian sport: randomly shooting defenceless people. Gifford was up on the planned departure of the Russians too: the victor of war retreating as an army in defeat. And he shed light on why it was that a migration was starting up between the two sides of the city: shabby Wessis heading East, newly well-heeled Ossis slinking into comfy Western flats. No doubt about it, when it came to sensing the currents in the diplomatic winds, the consulate administrator was a master.

Gifford didn't talk of this when he went home to Frieda. Whenever Earl referred to his work, Frieda used the opening to make a stinging accusation: they were not rich. She would remind him of his marital vow, the passionate promise to bedeck her with jewels. “Why can't you
wheel and deal like…like the businessmen?” she'd ask spitefully. “I love you, Giffy, but I like shopping too.” Being called
Giffy
in a Kreuzberg accent drove Earl crazy. It made him bite the folds in her neck. Frieda was big, but when he began his nibblings she discarded her clothes so fast it seemed she was fifty kilos lighter.

One evening, after an afternoon in which the consul had complained to him he was feeling numb because of sitting through a long monologue by the head of a social science research institute on East Germany's post-unification shocks, Gifford inadvertently remarked at home that he was having to fill in a lot of blanks for the new consul. “What a waste,” Frieda said. “Giffy, honestly, how can you think about a blank consul? What we need are some blank cheques.” Earl grabbed his wife's spreading haunches and whispered hoarsely, “I haven't forgotten the jewels, Frieda. You'll have them. The day is not far off. I promise.” Frieda's monumental hips were bare in no time.

Hanbury's call on a newspaper editor was one of the few that went sour. The consul was troubled by it, but Gifford said newspapers were like that. Ignore them, he counselled. Think of the distortions they print. The editor was a certain Dr. Anton Bülow who in the early, friendly moments of the consul's courtesy call made it clear he hankered after the simplicity of bygone days. A red cloth was wrapped around his neck and a pince-nez sat on his nose. Bülow had a habit of holding his head at a downward angle as he looked at his visitor over the lenses. He had a full head of hair and a mossy beard around his mouth, which made him look like Trotsky.

The consul, tutored for the interview by Frau Carstens, asked Bülow about the changing nature of the paper's readership now that the Wall was down.

Bülow was immediately chatty. The phenomenal thing, he said, was that nothing had changed. Wessis read the same papers as before; Ossis were doing likewise. In the newspaper market, he said, the Wall was up,
not down. It might even be marginally higher. Bülow digressed on more than forty years of ideological separation. Two German clans had come into existence, he claimed, in a complicated German which kept Hanbury on the edge of his seat trying to decipher it. “They were antagonistic and since we Germans thrive on having a common enemy,” he remarked, “we fortuitously supplied each other. It was a convenience we can't now seem to do without.”

Bülow liked to think his real strength was international affairs and he asked the consul about Canada, laughingly voicing the cliché about a mouse having to live next to an elephant. The consul replied this was changing. The mouse was learning how to assail the elephant, he said. There were some effective poison darts, for example the export of lumber, wheat and beef.

“It will ruin your environment,” prophesied the editor. “I've seen pictures of clear-cutting in British Columbia. It's pretty awful.” Hanbury said that cutting trees gave many ordinary people a living.

“But at what price?” asked Bülow thoughtfully, pursing his lips. They exchanged polite views for several more minutes, Bülow becoming excited. An eye behind the pince-nez began to twitch.

As Bülow's moralizing continued, something in the consul snapped. His voice became fractionally more aggressive. “I suspect you don't know our situation,” he said curtly. “You have no idea how many trees we have. We've got trees like you've got Deutsch Marks.
All
the trees in Germany wouldn't fill
one
of our national parks. We lose more trees every year through natural forest fires than get cut.”

Bülow didn't take this well. His lips now rolled like wringing hands. He talked about the forests of Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia and linked them to humanity's increasingly more bankrupt view of itself. In a haranguing voice, he admonished Canada for becoming the Brazil of the north. Pointedly, he asked, since Canada worked so hard at a world-wide image of being a white knight, why didn't it act like one?

A debate on culture, ethics and public morality was on. Hanbury got close to throwing in a few irrational asides on Nazi death camps, but thought the better of it and took another tack. “Not long ago,” he said, “I read that a major German bank absorbed a loss of maybe a billion marks as a result of bad decisions by its old-boy supervisory board. When criticized, the President said not to worry. For his bank this amount was
peanuts
.”

Bülow shrugged as if to say,
so what
?

“Take a small country in Africa, like Sierra Leone. A billion marks is maybe eight, nine times its GNP. Would a major German bank take advice on running its affairs from the finance minister of Sierra Leone?” Bülow looked puzzled. “It's the same with trees, Herr Bülow. When it comes to trees, Canada is like your biggest bank and Germany is down there with Sierra Leone.”

Bülow's lips stopped quivering, but the tick in his eye was growing worse. “May I quote you on that, Herr Konsul?” he asked in a toxic voice. “If you'll excuse me, I have urgent matters to attend to.” He gestured coldly to the door.

When Hanbury described the scene to Gifford, he wondered if he had gone too far. “It's not my role to get people's backs up,” he said. They were at the small table in Hanbury's office for the debriefing. Gifford always inquired into the most trivial aspects of the consul's conversations. No detail seemed unimportant. But now he sat there silently. “I guess I blew it,” Hanbury added.

“Not at all,” Gifford soothed. “Canada as Germany's biggest bank and Germany as Sierra Leone. Splendid analogy. It's time someone took the Bülows of this world on. They do so pontificate. My advice is, think no more about it. Now, if we are finished with that editor, I've been intending to raise another matter. Your house.” Hanbury sighed, saying it was an impossible subject.

“Identifying solutions to problems,” said the administrator, “is my job.” He clasped his hands and rested elbows on the table. “You've been in your house for several weeks. What's your opinion?”

“It's not exactly a residence. I had better accommodation when I was third secretary in San Francisco. I can't invite people there. They'd think I was representing Sierra Leone, maybe worse.” He thought about the cramped dining room, the bathroom showing signs of mildew (although the autumn damp had scarcely started) and the kitchen, so small that no self-respecting chef could be coerced to use it, not for five course dinners.

“Consuls from places like Sierra Leone live more luxuriously than you,” Gifford said brutally. He made a survey once which showed Third-World diplos lived in sumptuous comfort. The financing, he suspected, came through creative backroom deals, or diplomatic smuggling. Gifford often pondered the opportunities available to foreign representations to generate wealth. “Something ought to be done about your house,” he urged.

The consul agreed, but was at a loss.

“First, define the objective,” said the administrator. “With your status, your objective, I should think, would be a residence with a spacious entrance hall, a dining room for twenty-four, a drawing room for eighty, an ample kitchen. Upstairs, the private rooms and a wing on the side for guests. Is that a reasonable objective, Tony?” Hanbury agreed it amounted to the standard package. “Objective identified. Now modalities. We need four or five million.” The consul laughed, but Gifford was serious. The thumbs of his clasped hands began to twirl. His sweat was running. “It's not as much as it sounds. Real estate turnover in this city amounts to billions every year. A few million is a drop in the bucket. It is a tiny percentage of all those transactions.”

“I don't see the connection,” Hanbury replied stiffly. “I won't ask
for the money, Earl. I will not let headquarters have that satisfaction.” “I know a few people, Tony. I'll work on it. I'll prepare the ground.” “I doubt we could get a green light.” “I think we can.”

After numerous debriefings at the small table, Gifford had concluded the consul seldom spoke the last word, seldom summed up, or drew conclusions. An advantage of such silence was that it could be taken as consent. Gifford let the silence deepen. Hanbury studied the table top. What might he be looking at? Was he immersed in an immaterial world of abstract concepts? Or was he having a vision – of a curving driveway, a stately portico, an elegant vestibule, an ornate winding staircase? When the silence had continued long enough to spell out unending consent, the administrator got up. From the door he said, “The computerization project is doing well. I'll soon be asking for authorization to seek tenders.” He sounded harsh.

“Thank you, Earl. Good work. I'm pleased to hear it.” The consul sounded subdued.