The Hidden War Read online

  ‘Doughnut, Charlie?’

  ‘Not this time, Marthe.’

  ‘What you bring me this trip?’

  ‘You sleep with me tonight?’

  ‘No I don’t!’

  ‘Then I bring you nothing.’

  ‘You English all the same: cheap arses.’

  The little green and white Customs VW saloon turned in our direction, so I quickly tossed her the package I’d wrapped before I’d set off. It disappeared instantly beneath the counter. Three pairs of stockings, some cigarettes, and a bar of chocolate I’d swapped from the Yanks. Marthe wouldn’t use them; she’d sell or trade them for what she really wanted, food for herself and her daughter.

  ‘See you at the club tonight?’

  ‘Sure thing, Charlie. Say eight-thirty.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Life goes on, doesn’t it?

  The club was called the Leihhaus, which means pawnshop, so at least you knew what you were getting into. It was an open club on one of the zone boundaries. Every nationality in the world fetched up there, most of them looking for a deal. The police patrols tended to give the open clubs a miss: they were like an unofficial no man’s land. A fortnight before, I’d got into a fight with a Russian there. He had taken a bite from my left ear. Now he was my best friend. His name was Gregor something, which finished with about six avitches. We called him Greg. He said that he had a couple of tons of amber to sell, looted from some imperial palace. That was way out of my league, so I agreed to introduce him to my pal Tommo. It wouldn’t be out of his league.

  Dave Thomsett was an American sergeant I knew. He worked for an acquisitions department of the United States Army Air Force down in Frankfurt. They acquired houses in Germany for his top brass to live in, and kraut servants and chocoladies to run them, that sort of thing. A chocolady was a girl who would do it for a bar of chocolate. I know that’s difficult for you to believe, but maybe you’ve never been that hungry. Tommo had spent a couple of weeks in Iceland in ’47. He told me they had hotdogoladies there. It made a change for them, from all the fish.

  I’ll tell you about Greg, as well. You’ve all heard these stories about nine feet tall Russians as broad as bears. He wasn’t one of those. He was the only man in uniform I’ve ever met who was smaller than me. I think that there was probably something the matter with him, because his head was large: out of all proportion to the rest of him. When he walked in with his cap on, it looked as if he was wearing an umbrella on his bonce, and you wanted to laugh. That was not a good thing to do, because when people laughed at him he either took a shot at them or tried to bite their ears off. He didn’t have a girlfriend; he had a boyfriend. The boyfriend was an American deserter, but a great cook. He cooked the greatest omelettes, but that was Americans for you: in Germany in ’48, they had most of the eggs.

  The amber deal wasn’t all that it was cooked up to be either. Red Greg didn’t sell the amber to Tommo. He sold Tommo the location of the amber. That was under a hundred and fifty feet of water in a lake in Germany. As it happened he’d come to the right person. Tommo was the only man I knew with the organizing ability to recover it. It was in the Russian Zone, which I thought could be a problem. Tommo thought it was cool. Anyway, it was their business, not mine. Greg the Red gave me a hundred and fifty occupation dollars for the introduction, and Tommo gave me the same for the business. Look, don’t let this worry you. We were all at it.

  People started dancing when the radio began to pump out Artie Shaw’s version of ‘the Beguine’. Greg had a new chocolady at his table. He probably had the franchise on her. He waved me over.

  ‘Here, Charlie. You wan’ a drink?’

  ‘Ta. Who’s your new pal?’

  ‘Magda. She’s a countess. You wan’ her?’ An improbable number of the chocoladies were countesses. The Russians, in particular, liked the idea. I shook my head. She was probably already poxed. I told you that I itched a bit, so who knows: maybe I was as well. The bottle on the table was French brandy . . . they came out from under the bar for anyone who could afford them. Magda polished a wineglass on her mothy fox fur, and sloshed some of the spirit into it for me.

  ‘What you bring?’ Greg demanded.

  ‘Coal, but it was all manifested.’

  ‘Pity. What else?’

  ‘American dollars and three parachutes.’

  ‘Used or unused?’

  ‘Unused. What do you think I am, Greg . . . some sort of black marketeer?’

  He thought that that was funny, and bellowed out a great laugh. As he did that he glared around the smoky room. Everyone he made eye contact with laughed for him; he had that sort of effect on people. Scared them shitless.

  ‘I take the parachutes. Give the dollars to the Austrian: he’s short. He’ll give you a better price than me.’

  I liked to get the business done at the start of the evening. Then I could relax.

  My pilot, Dave Scroton, mooched in an hour later. He was new to Berlin and looked unsure of himself. He’d flown Dakotas over Arnhem and survived, and appeared to know what he was doing . . . I’d flown three trips with him and had no complaints so far. He was bunking in one of the accommodation huts on the far side of the airfield; I hadn’t made my mind up where to sleep yet. I introduced him around. Red Greg asked him about his name.

  ‘You got an unfortunate name, Dave Scroton,’ he said. ‘People could mistake it for something else. Maybe you should change it.’

  ‘I already did. I used to be called William – I just never did like that.’

  That’s exactly when I began to like him. Greg bellowed his laugh again. Half the room joined him without knowing what they were laughing at.

  ‘You like girls or boys? We got both.’

  ‘Girls.’

  ‘You wanna countess? Magda’s a countess.’

  Magda moved an unlit cigarette in Dave’s direction, looking for a light, and she smiled. She was short an incisor, which was a pity, because it spoiled the picture – for a countess, that is.

  One thing I always liked about Marthe was her punctuality. She came up behind me, leaned down, put her arm around my shoulders and kissed me behind the ear. I could feel her breast against my back.

  ‘Missed me, lover?’

  ‘Of course I have.’

  Her next kiss was on my cheek and close to, but not quite at, the corner of my mouth. Our mutual affection must have been affecting and quite obvious to anyone looking. They would have been wrong, of course, but that was the point. Marthe and I had a non-aggression pact. As long as I didn’t push her too hard for a shag, I could sleep on a made-up bed on her sofa, and when she was with me the other men didn’t bother her, so she had a short holiday from whoring. At the same time, when I was with her, I didn’t get the chocoladies all trying to hit on me.

  Dave went outside with Magda an hour later. I saw him give Greg five US dollars . . . which was far too much. Magda would probably wheedle another three from him before they came back inside. I asked Marthe, ‘You want to eat here?’

  ‘There’s a new little Bavarian cafe just inside their zone: I think we’d be OK there.’

  Greg shook his head.

  ‘No. Dog meat. They have real dog meat. You don’ wanna eat there.’

  Marthe shrugged; then smiled . . .

  ‘OK. Here’s fine.’

  While we were waiting for a couple of plates of spiced vegetable stew Magda got up to go to wherever the girls go forty times a night. The music changed. Mary Martin’s heart suddenly belonged to daddy. I gestured at the radio and said, ‘This is good. What is it?’

  ‘The Cole Porter Hour . . . comes in from Frankfurt. Decadent Western propaganda.’ But Greg was grinning. The grin disappeared like it had never been there: he leaned over and grabbed my arm. He whispered, ‘I lied. That cafe will be hit by the Patrol tonight. They forgot to buy their bullets. You wouldn’t want to be there then with the wrong papers. Maybe your little woman gets locked up by the Patrol. Maybe worse.’

>   The cafes and clubs all bought bullets from an International Patrol; in other words paid protection money on the side. If they didn’t pay, they got raided until they did. A number of raids on the same premises tended to discourage the customers, and the proprietors usually got the message. Greg was right; their use of Marthe, or any chocolady they picked up there, would not have been gentlemanly.

  ‘Thank you, Greg.’

  ‘Think nothing. Empty bottle.’ He turned the brandy upside down. ‘Your turn.’ The waiter brought another bottle as soon as I looked at him. Greg asked, ‘You fly to the Middle East? Palestine or Istanbul?’

  ‘Not yet. Why?’

  ‘You bring back all the spices you can get in your aeroplane. Everyone wants spices to put in the shit we eat. We’ll clean up.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes; really. Better than cigarettes.’

  Greg’s boyfriend came out and sat with us after the joint had stopped serving. He sat in his grubby white chef’s outfit. Nobody seemed to mind. They held hands.

  Eventually Marthe and I walked home. The cobbles were wet, there were still precious few street lights and we gave a wide berth to an enormous bomb site on which a couple of cooking fires burned. Shadows moved around them. I had one arm around Marthe’s waist. My other hand, in the pocket of my flying jacket, grasped the butt of my revolver. It makes me smile today when the wankers on the TV talk of districts of Glasgow or Manchester as being rough. They don’t know they’ve been born.

  I got the sofa bed I told you about. Marthe shared her double with her daughter – Lottie was about five or six, I suppose. Halfway through the night Marthe came back into the sitting room. She was wearing men’s silk pyjamas with someone else’s embroidered monogram on the pocket. Her face looked softer with her hair combed out. She wrapped a blanket around herself and curled into my back. There was never anything more than that to it. Half an hour later the child squeezed between us. Everybody was looking for a family in 1948.

  Chapter Two

  I probably should have reminded you that I already had two children, neither of whom was mine . . . in a biological sense that is. Another thing about 1948 was that people were adopting each other like it was going out of fashion. In most cases responsible adults adopted the children. Trust me to get it back to front; as far as I could see my boys had adopted me. Dieter was about eight now – I wasn’t too sure: he was a German kid I’d found on a battlefield, holding tight on to the hand of his fourteen-year-old brother. The brother had probably been dead a day when I met them. Dieter adopted me soon after that. The other boy was Grace’s child. Grace was a girl I used to love; she’d abandoned her baby in a hospital in Bremen. What had I been supposed to do? Leave them in Germany on their own? They lived with my old Major and his woman in a south coast port called Bosham, and after a few false starts I saw them as often as I could. Sometimes they broke my heart: before my last trip Dieter had parcelled up all of his toys – which wasn’t that many – and asked me to take them to German kids who’d lost theirs. I couldn’t let him down, so I handed them in to the Red Cross station at Gatow. The gratitude of the German nation was pathetic. Dieter had the makings of a better man than me.

  When we flew back into Croydon Old Man Halton gave me a few days off. I rode the rattler down to Chichester, sharing the carriage compartment with a beautiful, stylishly dressed woman who defended herself with a bible. It was open on her lap throughout the trip. At least she didn’t mind me smoking. I was learning to love my pipe; whether I’d ever find a woman that loved it as much was another question. Now and again the woman crossed her legs, and smoked a cigarette, and I could see her stocking tops. She smiled to herself, but never took her eyes from the book, and flipped the pages. There was a spring in my step when I left the train. I caught the Green Line bus along the coast, got off at the Bosham junction, and walked in with my pack over one shoulder.

  I found James – Major James England – and Maggs walking hand in hand along the shingle. Little Carlo trailed them, towing a long piece of seaweed. He was singing a nursery song. Sometimes Maggs joined him in the chorus. He was the first to see me, turned, and ran with his arms outstretched. James and Maggs waited for me to scoop him up and reach them. Do you remember how good the faces of people pleased to see you are? Maggs kissed me on each cheek. She’d spent the war in Paris. James put his arm around my shoulders, and we all lurched back to their pub joined to each other.

  I asked, ‘Where’s Dieter?’

  Maggs said, ‘School, Charlie. It’s Thursday.’

  ‘How’s he doing?’

  ‘Very well, Charlie. Same as a fortnight ago. Don’t worry; I’ll tell you if he has a problem.’

  ‘I know you will,’ I told her, and gave her a squeeze.

  ‘Why don’t you walk up to the crossroads in a couple of hours, and meet him off the bus?’

  I did, and you should have seen his face.

  I gave James the sterling equivalent of the dollars I’d changed for him. He bought them from hard-up Americans in Chichester and I sold them on in Berlin. I’d never worked out precisely how the value increased every time they changed hands, but by each time I returned from Europe they had grown by about 15 per cent.

  Someone was building one of those funny little prefabs next door to the pub and restaurant.

  ‘You’re going to have neighbours soon,’ I told him.

  ‘Yes, Charlie.’

  ‘Do you know them?’

  He nodded. ‘Some ex-RAF type with a couple of orphaned kids . . . I haven’t told him about it yet.’

  It took me a few moments to cotton on: James and Maggs were building me a house. I hugged him because I didn’t know what else to do, and felt stupid. ‘Might as well, old fellow,’ he added. ‘We’re coining it in between us; didn’t you realize?’

  I probably sniffed before I asked, ‘Everything’s coming up roses?’

  ‘’bout time, I’d say.’

  Maggs could always bring us down to earth again.

  There was one other thing. Kate was parked between the pub and the pieces of the new house. She was a battle-scarred old Humber staff car, named after our driver’s wife, and James had crisscrossed Europe several times in her in 1944 and 1945. Theoretically she belonged to the army.

  ‘How did Kate get here?’

  ‘Les brought her down on his last visit.’

  ‘Don’t the army want her back?’

  ‘I don’t think they know she’s in the country yet . . . Les switched her plates with a wreck . . .’

  ‘So she’s legal?’

  ‘More or less. The papers I have pass for originals.’

  Good old Kate. I drove her and the kids up to Arundel for a picnic on Saturday: and walked a short section of the Roman road, and Dieter turned out to know more about the Romans than I did. I suppose that Kate wasn’t altogether a good thing. Carlo and Dieter slept in the back seat as we returned. The smell of Kate and the wash of the road noise had me remembering some of the things I’d seen in her in ’45, and some of the people who were no longer around. It sort of quietened me. James picked up on that when I got back, and after we’d put the boys to bed we drank until we fell off the bar stools. I’d always been quite good at that.

  A few days later it was time to pick up the pieces, and go back to Germany for the Old Man. We went back to cold old Europe in a draughty old Dakota the Old Man had probably got free with a packet of cornflakes. She was slow and she rattled. Scroton loved every rivet of her: he’d been flying things like that for years. She carried enough dents to distort the airflow, and one of her engines – they were Double Wasps I think, although I might be wrong – misfired now and again. When one of those big Yankee jobs misses it feels as if a giant has taken hold of a wingtip and given you a gentle shake. And the radio was crap. Scroton said that she was so perfect an example of her type that it was as if she was fresh off the production line.

  For me it had been hate at first sight. She still bore the wartim
e camouflage paint she’d started life with, although the national insignia had been painted out, and she bore our civilian registration in big, untidy black letters. They looked as if a child had scrawled them on. She had a faded squadron painting of a bint wearing a black conical hat, and nothing else, on her blunt nose.

  I’ve told you before that the Old Man had a name painted on all of his aircraft. This one just had three beautifully italicized Ws under one of her curves, and everyone called her Whisky, after the phonetic. I hated the way my radio shack filled with airborne dust particles every time someone opened the cargo door, I hated the silly little canvas seat I had to sit on, and I hated the way she flew with an exaggerated rocking motion that would have made Sir Francis Drake seasick. Whisky, I thought, was a right cow.

  Our engineer/nav on that trip was Crazy Eddie. I never learned his proper name.

  Pilots and radio men tended to swap around aircraft a lot; the engineers tended to stick to one. That made a lot of sense if you think about it. I was separated from the office they flew in, up front, by a threadbare curtain, which I pulled back and shouted at Eddie, ‘What’s the WWW mean then?’

  We were in front of the control tower running up the engines. They sounded rough to me, as if they were about to fall out of the wings. Dave and Eddie looked at each other’s faces, smiled rapturously and nodded a lot. They obviously had seriously lowered expectations as far as aircraft were concerned.

  ‘Work it out yourself, Charlie. I’ll give you a clue. The popsie on the nose never had a hat when she arrived. The Old Man painted that on personally. Sounds good though, doesn’t she?’

  Oh, I thought. I get it. I’m back in Wizard of Oz country, and we’re all sitting in the Wicked Witch of the West. I could have done without that.

  I said, ‘She sounds as if she’s dying. She sounds worse than the Old Man. Can we go home now, and try again tomorrow?’