London Match. Len Deighton

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       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 СКАЧАТЬ