A Good German

CHAPTER ONE

The war had made him famous. Not as famous as Murrow, the voice of London, and not as famous as Quent Reynolds, now the voice of the documentaries, but famous enough to get a promise from Collier’s (“four pieces, if you can get there”) and then the press pass to Berlin. In the end, it was Hal Reidy who’d made the difference, juggling the press slots like seating arrangements, UP next to Scripps-Howard, down the table from Hearst, who’d assigned too many people anyway.

“I can’t get you out till Monday, though. They won’t give us another plane, not with the conference on. Unless you’ve got some pull.”

“Only you.” Hal grinned. “You’re in worse shape than I thought. Say hello to Nanny Wendt for me, the prick.” Their censor from the old days, before the war, when they’d both been with Columbia, a nervous little man, prim as a governess, who liked to run a pen through their copy just before they went on the air. “The Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment,“ Hal said, the way he always did. ”I wonder what happened to him. Goebbels poisoned his own kids, I hear.“

“No. Magda,” Jake said. “The gnädigefrau. In chocolates.”

“Yeah, sweets to the sweet. Nice people.” He handed Jake the traveling orders. “Have a good time.”

“You should come too. It’s a historic occasion.”

“So’s this,” Hal said, pointing to another set of orders. “Two more weeks and I’m home. Berlin. Christ. I couldn’t wait to get out. And you want to go back?”

Jake shrugged. “It’s the last big story of the war.”

“Sitting around a table, divvying up the pot.”

“No. What happens when it’s over.”

“What happens is, you go home.”

“Not yet.”

Hal glanced up. “You think she’s still there,” he said flatly.

Jake put the orders in his pocket, not answering.

“It’s been a while, you know. Things happen.”

Jake nodded. “She’ll be there. Thanks for this. I owe you one.”

“More than one,” Hal said, letting it go. “Just write pretty. And don’t miss the plane.”

But the plane was hours late getting into Frankfurt, then hours on the ground unloading and turning around, so it was midafternoon before they took off. The C-47 was a drafty military transport fitted out with benches along the sides, and the passengers, a spillover of journalists who, like Jake, hadn’t made the earlier flights, had to shout over the engines. After a while Jake gave up and sat back with his eyes closed, feeling queasy as the plane bumped its way east. There had been drinks while they waited, and Brian Stanley, the Daily Express man who had somehow attached himself to the American group, was already eloquently drunk, with most of the others not far behind. Belser from Gannett, and Cowley, who’d kept tabs on the SHAEF press office from a bar stool at the Scribe, and Gimbel, who had traveled with Jake following Patton into Germany. They had all been at war forever, in their khakis with the round correspondent patch, even Liz Yeager, the photographer, wearing a heavy pistol on her hip, cowgirl style. He’d known all of them one way or another, their faces like pins in his own war map. London, where he’d finally left Columbia in ’42 because he wanted to see the fighting war. North Africa, where he saw it and caught a piece of shrapnel. Cairo, where he recovered and drank the nights away with Brian Stanley. Sicily, missing Palermo but managing, improbably, to get on with Patton, so that later, after France, he joined him again for the race east. Across Hesse and Thuringia, everything accelerated, the stop-and-go days of fitful waiting over, finally a war of clear, running adrenaline. Weimar. Then, finally, up to Nordhausen, and Camp Dora, where everything stopped. Two days of staring, not even able to talk. He wrote down numbers-two hundred a day-and then stopped that too. A news-reel camera filmed the stacks of bodies, jutting bones and floppy genitals. The living, with their striped rags and shaved heads, had no sex.

On the second day, at one of the slave labor camps, a skeleton took his hand and kissed it, then held on to it, an obscene gratitude, gibbering something in Slavic-Polish? Russian? — and Jake froze, trying not to smell, feeling his hand buckle under the weight of the fierce grip. “I’m not a soldier,” he said, wanting to run but unable to take his hand away, ashamed, caught now too. The story they’d all missed, the hand you couldn’t shake off.

“Old home week for you, boyo, isn’t it?” Brian said, cupping his hands to be heard.

“You’ve been before?” Liz said, curious.

“Lived here. One of Ed’s boys, darling, didn’t you know?” Brian said. “Till the jerries chucked him out. Of course, they chucked everybody out. Had to, really. Considering.”

“So you speak German?” Liz said. “Thank god somebody does.”

“Berliner deutsch,” Brian answered for him, a tease.

“I don’t care what kind of deutsch it is,” she said, “as long as it’s deutsch.” She patted Jake’s knees. “You stick with me, Jackson,” she said, like Phil Harris on the radio. Then, “What was it like?” Well, what was it like? A vise slowly closing. In the beginning, the parties and the hot days on the lakes and the fascination of events. He had come to cover the Olympics in ‘36 and his mother knew somebody who knew the Dodds, so there were embassy cocktails and a special seat in their box at the stadium. Goebbels’ big party on the Pfaueninsel, the trees decked out in thousands of lights shaped like butterflies, officers swaggering along the footpaths, drunk on champagne and importance, throwing up in the bushes. The Dodds were appalled. He stayed. The Nazis supplied the headlines, and even a stringer could live on the rumors, watching the war come day by day. By the time he signed on with Columbia, the vise had shut, rumors now just little gasps for air. The city contracted around him, so that at the end it was a closed circle: the Foreign Press Club in Potsdamerplatz, up the gloomy Wilhelmstrasse to the ministry for the twice-daily briefings, on up to the Adlon, where Columbia kept a room for Shirer and they gathered at the raised bar, comparing notes and watching the SS lounging around the fountain below, their shiny boots on the rim while the bronze frog statues spouted jets of water toward the skylight. Then out the East-West Axis to the broadcasting station on Adolf Hitler Platz and the endless wrangling with Nanny Wendt, then a taxi home to the tapped telephone and the watchful eye of Herr Lechter, the blockleiter who lived in the apartment down the hall, snapped up from some hapless Jews. No air. But that had been at the end.

“It was like Chicago,” he said. Blunt and gritty and full of itself, a new city trying to be old. Clumsy Wilhelmine palaces that always looked like banks, but also jokes with an edge and the smell of spilled beer. Sharp midwestern air.

“Chicago? It won’t look like Chicago now.” This, surprisingly, from the bulky civilian in a business suit, introduced at the airport as a congressman from upstate New York.

“No, indeed,” Brian said, mischievous. “All banged about now. Still, what isn’t? Whole bloody country’s one big bomb site. Do you mind my asking? I’ve never known. What does one call a congressman? I mean, are you The Honorable?”

“Technically. That’s what it says on the envelopes, anyway. But we just use Congressman-or Mister.”

“Mister. Very democratic.”

“Yes, it is,” the congressman said, humorless.

“You with the conference or have you just come for a look-in?” Brian said, playing with him.

“I’m not attending the conference, no.”

“Just come to see the raj, then.”

“Meaning?”

“Oh, no offense. It’s very like, though, wouldn’t you say? Military Government. Pukkah sahibs, really.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Well, neither do I, half the time,” Brian said pleasantly. “Just a little conceit of mine. Never mind. Here, have a drink,” he said, taking another, his forehead sweaty.

The congressman ignored him, turning instead to the young soldier wedged next to him, a last-minute arrival, no duffel, maybe a courier. He was wearing a pair of high riding boots, his hands gripping the bench like reins, face white under a sprinkling of freckles.

“First time in Berlin?” the congressman said.

The soldier nodded, holding his seat even tighter as the plane bounced.

“Got a name, son?” Making conversation.

“Lieutenant Tully,” he said, then gulped, covering his mouth.

“You all right?” Liz said to him.

The soldier took off his hat. His red hair was damp.

“Here, just in case,” she said, handing him a paper bag.

“How much longer?” he said, almost a moan, holding the bag to his chest with one hand.

The congressman looked at him and involuntarily moved his leg in the tight space, out of harm’s way, turning his body slightly so that he was forced to face Brian again.

“You’re from New York, you said?”

“Utica, New York.”

“Utica,” Brian said, making a show of trying to place it. “Breweries, yes?” Jake smiled. In fact, Brian knew the States well. “Fair number of Germans there, if I’m not mistaken.”

The congressman looked at him in distaste. “My district is one hundred percent American.”

But Brian was bored now. “I daresay,” he said, looking away.

“How did you get on this plane anyway? I understood it was for American press.”

“Well, there’s Allied feeling for you,” Brian said to Jake.

The plane dropped slightly, not much more than a dip in a road, but evidently enough for the soldier, who groaned.

“I’m going to be sick,” he said, barely opening the bag in time.

“Careful,” the congressman said, trapped.

“Just get it out,” Liz said to the soldier, a big-sister voice. “That’s it. You’ll be all right.”

“Sorry,” he said, half choking, clearly embarrassed, looking suddenly no older than a teenager.

Liz turned away from the boy. “Did you ever meet Hitler?” she asked Jake, the question bringing the others with her, as if she were drawing a privacy curtain in place for the soldier.

“Meet, no. Saw, yes,” Jake said. “Lots of times.”

“Up close, I mean.”

“Once,” he said.

A sultry early evening, coming up from the Press Club, the street almost in shadow, but the new Chancellery still catching the last of the light. Prussian moderne, the broad steps leading down to the waiting car. Just an aide and two guards, curiously unprotected. On his way to the Sportpalast, probably, for another harangue against the devious Poles. He stopped for a second near the bottom stairs, looking down the empty street at Jake. I could reach into my pocket now, Jake had thought. One shot, put an end to all of it, that easy. Why hadn’t anyone done it? Then, as if the thought had carried like a scent, Hitler raised his head and sniffed, anxious as prey, and looked back at Jake. One shot. He held the look for a second, assessing, then smiled, just a twitch of the mustache, lifted his hand in a languid heil of dismissal, and headed toward the car. Gloating. There was no gun, and he had things to do.

“They say the eyes were hypnotic,” Liz said.

“I don’t know. I never got that close,” Jake said, shutting his own, making the rest of the plane go away.

Not long now. He’d go to Pariserstrasse first. He saw the door, the heavy sandstone caryatids holding up the balcony over the entrance. What would she say? Four years. But maybe she’d moved. No, she’d be there. A few more hours. A drink at the cafe down the street in Olivaerplatz, catching up, years of stories. Unless they stayed in.

“Pleasant dreams?” Liz said, and he realized he was smiling, already there. Berlin. Not long now.

“We’re coming in,” Brian said, his face at the little window. “God. Come have a look.”

Jake opened his eyes and jumped up, a kid. They crowded around the window, the congressman at their side.

“My god,” Brian said again, almost in a hush, silenced by the view. “Bloody Carthage.”

Jake looked down at the ground, his stomach suddenly dropping, all his excitement draining away like blood. Why hadn’t anyone told him? He had seen bombed cities before-on the ground in London, ripped-up terrace houses and streets of glass, then Cologne and Frankfurt from the air, with their deep craters and damaged churches-but nothing on this scale. Carthage, a destruction out of the ancient world. Below them there seemed to be no movement. Shells of houses, empty as ransacked tombs, miles and miles of them, whole pulverized stretches where there were not even walls. They had come in from the west, over the lakes, so he knew it must be Lichterfelde, then Steglitz, the approach to Tempelhof, but landmarks had disappeared under shifting dunes of rubble. As they dropped lower, scattered buildings took shape, smashed but there, a few chimneys sticking up, even a steeple. Some kind of life must still be going on. A beige cloud hung over everything- not smoke, a thick haze of soot and plaster dust, as if the houses could not quite bring themselves to leave. But Berlin was gone. The Big Three were coming to divide up ruins.

“Well, they got what they deserved,” the congressman said suddenly, a jarring American voice. Jake looked at him. A politician at a wake. “Didn’t they?” he said, a little defiantly.

Brian turned slowly from the window, his eyes filled with scorn. “Boyo, we all get what we deserve. In the end.”

Tempelhof was a mess around the edges, but the field had been cleared and the terminal itself was still there. After the tomb city they’d seen from the air, the airport seemed dizzy with life, swarming with uniformed ground crews and greeters. A young lieutenant, full of hair and chewing gum, was waiting at the foot of the stairs, picking out faces as they disembarked. The sick soldier had staggered down first, running off, Jake guessed, for the men’s room.

“Geismar?” The lieutenant stuck out his hand. “Ron Erlich, press office. I’ve got you and Miss Yeager. She on board?”

Jake nodded. “With these,” he said, indicating the cases he’d been lugging off the plane. “Want to give me a hand?”

‘What’s she got in there, her trousseau?“

‘Equipment,“ Liz said behind him. ”You going to make cracks or give the man a hand?“

Ron took in the uniform, with its unexpected curves, and smiled. “Yes, sir,” he said, giving a mock salute, then picked up the cases in one easy movement, impressing a date. “This way.” He led them toward the building. “Colonel Howley sends his regards,” he said to Liz. “Says he remembers you from his days in the ad business.”

Liz grinned. “Don’t worry. I’ll take his picture.”

Ron grinned back. “You remember him too, I guess.”

“Vividly. Hey, careful with that. Lenses.”

They went up the gate stairs behind the congressman, who seemed to have acquired an entourage, and into the waiting hall, the same tawny marble walls and soaring space as before, when flying had been a romance. People had come to the restaurant here, just to watch the planes. Jake hurried to keep up. Ron moved the way he talked, breezing a path through the gangs of waiting servicemen.

“You missed the president,” he said. “Went into town after lunch. Had the whole Second Armored lined up on the Avus. Quite a picture. Sorry your plane was so late, that’s probably it for town shots.”

“Wasn’t he at the conference?” Liz said.

“Hasn’t started yet. Uncle Joe’s late. They say he has a cold.”

“A cold?” Jake said.

“Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Truman’s pissed, I hear.” He glanced at Jake. “That’s off the record, by the way.”

“What’s on?”

“Not much. I’ve got some handouts for you, but you’ll probably throw them away. Everybody else does. There’s nothing to say till they sit down, anyway. We have a briefing schedule set up at the press camp.”

“Which is where?”

“Down the road from MG headquarters. Argentinischeallee,” he said, rolling it out, a joke name.

“Out in Dahlem?” Jake said, placing it.

“Everything’s out in Dahlem.”

“Why not somewhere nearer the center?”

Ron looked at him. “There is no center.”

They were climbing the big flight of stairs to the main entrance doors. “As I say, the camp’s right by MG headquarters, so that’s easy. Your billet too. We found a nice place for you,” he said to Liz, almost courtly. “Photo schedule’s different, but at least you’ll get out there. Potsdam, I mean.”

“But not press?” Jake said.

Ron shook his head. “They want a closed session. No press. I’m telling you this now so I don’t have to hear you squawk later, like the rest of them. I don’t make the rules, so if you want to complain, go right over my head, I don’t care. We’ll do the best we can at the camp. Everything you need. You can send from there, but your stuff goes through me, you might as well know.”

Take looked at him, forced to smile. A new Nanny Wendt, this time with gum and get-up-and-go.

“Whatever happened to freedom of the press?”

“Don’t worry. You’ll get plenty of copy. We’ll have a briefing after every session. Besides, everybody talks.”

“And what do we do between briefings?”

“Drink, mostly. At least that’s what they’ve been doing.” He turned to Jake. “It’s not as if Stalin gives interviews, you know. Here we go,” he said, swinging through the doors. “I’ll get you out to your billet. You probably want to clean up.”

“Hot water?” Liz said.

“Sure. All the comforts of home.”

In the driveway the congressman was being bundled into a requisitioned Horch with an American flag painted on the side, the others into open jeeps. Beyond them, at the end of the drive, were the first houses, not one of them intact. Jake stared, everything emptying out again. Not an aerial glimpse anymore; worse. A few standing walls, pitted by artillery shells. Mounds of debris, broken concrete and plumbing fixtures. One building had been sliced through, a strip of wallpaper hanging off an exposed room, scorch marks around the window holes. How would he ever find her in this? The same dust he’d seen from the plane, suspended in the air, making the afternoon light dull. And now the smell, sour wet masonry and open earth, like a raw building site, and something else, which he assumed was bodies, still lying somewhere under the rubble.

“Welcome to Berlin,” Ron said.

“Is it all like this?” Liz said quietly.

“Most of it. If the roofs gone, it was bombs. Otherwise, the Russians. They say the shelling was worse. Just blew it all to hell.” He threw the bags into the jeep. “Hop in.”

“You two go on ahead,” Jake said, still looking at the street. “Something I want to do first.”

“Hop in,” Ron said, an order. “What do you think you’re going to do, get a taxi?”

Liz looked at Jake’s face, then turned to Ron and smiled. “What’s the rush? Take him where he wants to go. You can give me a tour on the way.” She patted the camera slung around her neck, then put it up to her eye, crouching down. “Smile.” She snapped his picture, busy Tempelhof behind.

Ron glanced at his watch, pretending not to pose. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

“A little tour,” Liz said, wheedling, snapping a few more. “Isn’t that part of the service?”

He sighed. “I suppose you want to see the bunker. Everyone wants to see the bunker, and there’s nothing to see. The Russians don’t let you in anyway, say it’s flooded. Maybe Adolf’s floating around down there, who knows? But it’s their sector and they can do what they want.” He smiled back at Liz. “You can get the Reichstag, though. Everybody wants a picture of that and the Russians don’t care.”

“You’re on,” she said, lowering the camera.

“If I can get us there. I know the way from Dahlem, but—”

Liz jerked her thumb toward Jake. “He used to live here.”

“You navigate then,” Ron said, shrugging, and motioned Liz into the jeep. “You can ride up front.” Another grin.

“Lucky me. Just keep your hands on the wheel. The whole U.S. Army’s got this problem with their hands.” Jake paid no attention, the flirting a harmless buzz beside him. Some people had emerged from one of the piles of rubble, two women, and he watched them pick their way carefully over the bricks, listless, as if they were still shell-shocked. In the July heat they were wearing overcoats, afraid to leave them home in the basement of the ruined house, where everything, maybe even themselves, must be open for the taking. What had it been like these last few months? Carthage. Maybe she was like these two, burrowed in somewhere. But where? He realized for the first time, looking at the women, that he might not find her at all, that the bombs must have scattered people too, like bricks. But maybe not. He turned to the jeep, suddenly anxious to get there, a pointless urgency, as if everything that could have happened to her had not already happened.

He lifted himself into the back, next to Liz’s cases.

“Where first, the bunker?” Ron said to Liz, who nodded. He turned to Jake. “Which way?”

Not where he wanted to go, but stuck with it now, a favor to Liz. “Turn right at the end.”

Ron let out the clutch. “Don’t bother taking notes. Everybody says the same thing anyway. Lunar landscape. That’s the big one. And teeth. Rows of decayed teeth. AP had rotting molars. But maybe you’ll come up with something original. Be nice, something new.”

“How would you describe it?”

“Can’t,” Ron said, no longer flip. “Maybe nobody can. It’s-well, see for yourself.”

Jake headed them north on the Mehringdamm, but they were forced to detour east and in minutes were lost, streets blocked off or impassable, the whole map redrawn by debris. Five minutes back and already lost. They threaded their way through the ruins, Ron glancing back at him as if he were a broken compass until, luckily, another detour put them on the Mehringdamm again. A cleared stretch this time, which would get them to the Landwehrkanal, an easier route to follow than the unpredictable roads. Only the major streets had passable lanes, the others reduced to winding footpaths, when they were visible at all. Berlin, a flat city, finally had contours, new hills of brick. There was no life. Once he spotted children skittering over the rubble like crickets, and a working detail of women reclaiming bricks, their heads wrapped in kerchiefs against the dust, but otherwise the streets were quiet. The silence unnerved him. Berlin had always been a noisy city, the elevated S-bahn trains roaring across their trestle bridges, radios crackling in the apartment block courtyards, cars screeching at red lights, drunks arguing. Now he could hear the motor of the jeep and the eerie creaking of a single bicycle ahead of them, nothing else. A cemetery quiet. At night it would be pitch dark, the other side of the moon. Ron had been right-the unavoidable cliche.

At the Landwehrkanal there was more activity, but the smell was worse, raw sewage and corpses still floating on the water. The Russians had been here two months; had there been so many to fish out? But there they were, bodies stuck on the piles of the wrecked bridges or just suspended face down in the middle of the canal, held in place by nothing but the stagnant water. Liz had dropped her camera to hold a handkerchief over her mouth against the smell. No one said a word. Across the water, Hallesches Tor was gone.

They followed the canal toward the Potsdamer bridge, which took traffic. At one of the footbridges he saw his first men, shuffling across in gray Wehrmacht uniforms, still in retreat. He thought, inevitably, of the night he’d seen the transports set out for Poland, a big public display down the Linden, square-jawed faces out of a newsreel. These were blank and unshaven and almost invisible; women simply walked around them, not looking up.

There were landmarks now-the Reichstag in the far distance, and here in Potsdamerplatz the jagged remains of the department stores. Wertheim’s gone. A burned-out truck had been pushed to the side, but there was no traffic to block, just a few bicycles and some Russian soldiers leading a horse-drawn wagon. The old crowded intersection now had the feel of a silent movie, without the jerky rhythm. Instead, everything passed by in slow motion, even the bicycles, wary of punctures, and the wagon, plodding down a street as empty as the steppes. How many nights of bombing had it taken? Near the truck, a family sat on suitcases, staring into the street. Maybe just arrived at Anhalter Station, waiting for a phantom bus, or too tired and disoriented to go on.

“You have to feel sorry for the poor bastards,” Ron said, “you really do.”

“Who, the Germans?” Liz said.

“Yeah, I know. Still.”

They turned up the Wilhelmstrasse. Goering’s new Air Ministry, or its shell, had survived, but the rest of the street, the long line of pompous government buildings, lay in sooty heaps, their bricks spilling into the street like running sores. Where it had all started.

There was a crowd near the Chancellery, an unexpected popping of flashbulbs. Scattered applause.

“Look, it’s Churchill,” Liz said, grabbing her camera. “Pull over.”

“Guess they all want the tour,” Ron said, pretending to be bored but staring nevertheless at the stairs, starstruck.

Jake got out. Just where Hitler had stood smiling. Now it was Churchill, in a light summer uniform, cigar clenched in his teeth, surrounded by reporters. Brian next to him. How did he get here so fast? But Brian’s corklike ability to bob up everywhere was legendary. Churchill was stopping on the stairs, disconcerted by the applause. He raised his fingers in a V sign, a reflex, then dropped them, confused, aware suddenly of where he was. Jake glanced at the crowd. It was British soldiers who were applauding. The Germans stood silently, then moved away, embarrassed perhaps by their own curiosity, like people at an accident. Churchill frowned and hurried to the car.

“Let’s take a look,” Jake said.

“You out of your mind? And leave a jeep full of cameras?” Churchill’s car was pulling away, the crowd following. Ron lit a cigarette and sat back.

“Go ahead. I’ll hold the fort. Bring me a souvenir, if there’s anything left.”

There were Russian guards at the entrance, squat Mongols armed with rifles, but they seemed to be no more than a show of force, since people went in and out at will and there was, in any case, nothing to guard. Jake led Liz past the entrance hall with its gaping roof, then down the long reception gallery. Soldiers roamed through the building, sifting through the wreckage for medals, something to carry away. The huge chandeliers lay in the middle of the floor, one of them still suspended a few feet above the litter. Nothing had been cleared away. It was somehow more shocking than the bomb damage outside, the visible fury of the final assault, a destructive madness. Furniture smashed to pieces, its upholstery ripped open by bayonets; paintings slashed. Drawers looted and then flung aside. In Hitler’s office, the giant marble desktop was overturned, its edges chipped away for keepsake fragments. Papers everywhere, stamped with muddy boot marks. All the disturbing evidence of a rampage. The Mongolian horde. He imagined the guards outside shouting as they raced through the halls, ripping and grabbing.

“What do you think these are?” Liz said, holding up a fistful of cards, blank pieces of stationery edged in gold, the Nazi eagle and swastika engraved at the top.

“Invitations.” He fingered one. The Fiihrer requests your presence. Tea. Boxes of them. Enough to last a thousand years.

“Just like Mrs. Astor,” Liz said, stuffing a few in her pocket. “That’s something, isn’t it?”

“Let’s go,” he said, unsettled by the mess.

“Just let me get a few shots,” she said, taking a picture of the room.

Two GIs, hearing English, came over to her and handed her a camera.

“Hey, how about it? Do you mind?”

Liz smiled. “Sure. Over there by the desk?”

“Can you get the swastika in?”

A massive ornamental swastika, lying face down on the floor. They each planted a leg on it, one slinging his arm over the other’s shoulders, and grinned at the camera. Kids.

“One more,” Liz said. “The light’s bad.” She clicked, then looked at their camera. “Where’d you get this, anyway? Haven’t seen one of these since the war.”

“You kidding? They’re practically giving them away. Try over by the Reichstag. Couple of bottles of Canadian Club should do it. You just got in, huh?”

“Just.”

“How about I buy you a drink? I could show you around.”

“Now, what would your mother say?”

“Hey.”

“Easy,” she said, then nodded toward Jake. “Besides, he gets mean.”

The GI glanced at Jake, then winked at her. “Maybe next time then, babe. Thanks for the picture.”

“There’s one for the books,” she said to Jake as the GIs moved away. “I never thought I’d get picked up in Hitler’s office.”

Jake looked at her, surprised. He had never thought of her being picked up at all. Now he saw that, scrubbed of combat dirt and bluff, she was attractive. “Babe,” he said, amused.

“Where’s the bunker?” ‹›“There, I guess.” He pointed through the window to the back courtyard, where a group of Russian soldiers stood guard. A small concrete blockhouse, a scarred, empty patch of ground. The two GIs were being turned away but offered cigarettes around until the guards stepped aside to let them take a picture. Jake thought of Egypt, the valley of bunkers where the pharaohs had gone to ground, in love with death. But even they hadn’t taken their city with them.

“They say he married her at the end,” Liz said.

While the Russians ran wild overhead, the very last hour.

“Let’s hope it meant something to her.”

“It always does,” she said lightly, then glanced at him. “I’ll come back. I can see you’re not in the mood.”

Everybody wants to see the bunker, Ron had said. The last act, right down to the ghoulish wedding and finally, too late, the one shot. Now a story for the magazines. Did Eva have flowers? A champagne toast, before they put the dog down and Magda murdered her children.

“It’s not a shrine,” Jake said, still looking out the window. “They should bulldoze it over.”

“After I get my picture,” Liz said.

They moved back into the gloom of the long gallery. There were the broken-up chairs again, stuffing bursting out of the bayonet slashes. Why had the Russians left it like this? Some kind of barbarous lesson? But who was here to learn it? GIs were taking pictures by the fallen chandeliers, oblivious tourists. Near the wall was a heap of medals, thrown out of drawers. Iron Crosses. When Jake bent over to pick one up, a souvenir for Ron, he felt like a gravedigger scavenging through remains.

The uneasy mood followed him up the street, the mountains of rubble no longer an impersonal landscape but the Berlin he’d known, a part of his life knocked out too. At the corner, Unter den Linden was gray with ash. Even the Adlon had been bombed.

“No,” Ron corrected him. “The Russians burned it, after the battle. No one knows why. Drunk, probably.” ‹›He looked away. But what was a building, compared to the rest of it? The hands you couldn’t shake off. Across the square, the Brandenburg Gate was standing, but the Quadriga had skidded off its mount, like a chariot overturned in a race. Red flags and posters of Lenin were draped on the columns, hiding some of the shell holes. As they passed into the Tiergarten he could see a large crowd milling in front of the Reichstag, GIs exchanging their bottles of Canadian Club, Russian soldiers examining wristwatches. Some of the Germans, like the two women near Tempelhof, wore overcoats in the hot afternoon, presumably to hide whatever they’d brought to sell. Cigarettes, tins of food, antique porcelain clocks. The new Wertheim’s. A few young girls in summer dresses were hanging on to soldiers’ arms. In front of the Reichstag, its charred walls covered with Cyrillic graffiti, soldiers were posing for pictures, another stop on the new tourist circuit.

At the park he hit bottom. Buildings, like soldiers, were expected casualties of war. But the trees were gone too, all of them. The dense forest of the Tiergarten, all the winding paths and silly, tucked-away statues, had burned down to a vast open field littered with dark charcoal stumps and the twisted metal of streetlamps. The jeep was heading west along the Axis, and in the far distance, over Charlottenburg, the last of the sun had turned the sky red, so that for a moment Jake could imagine the fires still burning, glowing all night to guide the bombers. A fragment of one had fallen, and a single propeller stuck up out of the ground, a surreal piece of junk, like those old refrigerators and rusting tractor parts you sometimes saw on the front yards of poor farms.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Liz said, “look at them.”

A landscape full of people, moving slowly all around them. Suitcases. Clothes tied up in bundles. A few handcarts and baby carriages. The movement of exhaustion, one step at a time. Old people, and families with no bags at all. Displaced Persons, the new euphemism. No one begged or called out, just trudged past. Going where? Relatives in a cellar? A new camp, delousing and a bowl of soup and no further address? Stunned to find, in the heart of the city, a wasteland worse than the one they had left. Yet they were moving somewhere, a survivors’ trek, just like the ones in the old engravings, wandering through the burned landscape of the Thirty Years’ War. ‹›It wasn’t supposed to end this way, Jake thought. But how else? Parades? Berlin as vibrant as ever, with the Nazis taken away? How else? The odd thing was, he’d never imagined it ending. There’d been no life outside the war, just one story that led to the next and then another. And now the last one, what happens when it’s over. You go home, Hal had said. Where he hadn’t been in ten years. So he’d come back to Berlin, another DP in the Tiergarten. Except he was in a jeep, flying past the stragglers, with a sassy girl taking pictures and a driver lighting another cigarette worth a meal. The people on foot merely glanced at them without expression, then kept going. He realized, with an unexpected lurch, that what they saw was a conqueror, one of the priapic teenagers and souvenir hunters, not a homecoming Berliner. That delusion was gone now too, with everything else.

But something must be left. Years of his life. People survived, even this He ordered Ron to turn at the Victory Column and aimed them down toward the flak towers at the zoo, his eyes still cataloguing the missing. The Kaiser Wilhelm Church, its steeple blown away. Kranzler’s in bits. More people now. The Kurfiirstendamm smashed but recognizable. No glass in the storefronts or the display boxes along the sidewalks, but occasional buildings, roulette winners in the bombing. Left down the Fasanenstrasse.

“This is out of our way,” Ron said.

“I know. I want to see something,” Jake said, his voice edgy, expectant.

A right past the Ludwigkirch, a route he could follow blindfolded, after all the nights in the blackout. The chestnut trees were gone, so that the street seemed in a kind of unnatural glare, clear all the way to Olivaerplatz.

“Stop here,” he said suddenly. They had overshot it, because there was nothing there. For a moment he simply stared, then got out of the jeep and walked slowly over to the pile of rubble. Nothing. Five stories, collapsed, the light brown facade lying now in slabs. Even the heavy wrought-iron-and-glass door had been blasted away. Crazily, he looked around for the caryatids. Gone. A washbasin perched on one of the mounds of broken plaster.

“Is this where you lived?” Liz said, her voice loud in the deserted street. He heard a camera click.

“No,” Jake said. “Someone else.”

They’d only come here a few times, when Emil was away. Afternoons, the leafy branches outside making patterns on the drawn shades. Sheets damp with sweat. Teasing her because she covered up afterward, pulling the sheet over her breasts, even as her hair lay tangled and moist on the pillow, as illicit as the warm afternoon, the room where they shouldn’t be, their time together.

“You didn’t mind before.”

“That was before. I can’t help it. I’m modest.” She met his eyes, then started to laugh, a bed laugh, intimate as touch. She turned on her side. “How can you joke?”

He fell down next to her. “It’s supposed to be fun.”

She put her hand along the side of his face. “Fun for you,” she said, but smiling because the sex was playful, part of their other excitement, getting away with something.

The early days, before the guilt.

He walked toward a small pathway in the debris. Maybe someone was still living in the cellar. But the path led nowhere. There was nothing but rubble and the cloying smell. Whose body? A stick with a piece of paper was wedged in the broken bits of plaster like a grave marker. He bent down to read it. Frau Dzuris, the fat woman on the ground floor, evidently still alive, had moved. A street he didn’t recognize in Wilmersdorf. Frau Dzuris is now residing — the quaint, formal language of a receiving card. He took out his notebook and jotted down the address. A nice woman, fond of poppyseed cakes, whose son worked at Siemens and came to lunch every Sunday. The things you remember. He turned back to the jeep.

“Nobody home?” Ron said.

Jake stopped, then let it go and shook his head. “Not here, anyway.” But somewhere. “How do they find anybody? With all this?”

Ron shrugged. “Bush telegraph. Ask the neighbors.” Jake looked at the empty street. “Or message boards. You see them at the corners. ‘Request information on the whereabouts of-you know, like a Miss Lonelyhearts club.” He caught Jake’s expression. “I don’t know,” he said, still airy. “They do, though, somehow. If they’re alive.”

An awkward silence. Liz, who’d been watching Jake, turned to Ron. “Your mother raise you or did you just get this way by yourself?”

“Sorry,” he said to Jake. “I didn’t mean—”

“Skip it,” Jake said wearily.

“Is this what you wanted to see? It’s getting late.”

“Yes, this was it,” Jake said, climbing back into the jeep.

“Okay, Dahlem,” Ron said.

Jake took a last look at the rubble. Why had he expected anything to be here? A cemetery. “Is there really hot water? I could use a bath.”

“That’s what everybody says,” Ron said, cheerful again. “After. It’s all the dust.”

Their billet was a large villa in Gelferstrasse, a suburban street behind the Luftwaffe headquarters on Kronprinzenallee that now housed the Military Government. The Luftwaffe buildings were in the same style as Goering’s ministry, gray streamlined masonry, here with decorative eagles jutting out of the cornices, poised for flight, but the compound bristled with American flags, flapping on the roofs and the aerials of cars lining the driveway. There was damage here too, burned-out patches where houses had been, but nothing like what they had just seen, and Gelferstrasse itself was in fairly good shape, almost peaceful, some of it still shaded by trees.

Jake had never spent much time in Dahlem, whose quiet streets, away from the center, reminded him of Hampstead, but the relief of seeing houses standing, with their traditional tile roofs and brass knockers, made it seem more familiar than it was. Most of the win-dowpanes were still missing, but the street had been swept free of glass, tidied up, and the smell that had followed them through the city was finally gone, the bodies swept away too in the general house-cleaning.

The villa was a three-story pile of pale yellow stucco, not as lavish as the millionaire mansions up in Grunewald but substantial, the home probably of a professor from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute a few streets away.

“I had to give the congressman the master bedroom,” Ron said, an innkeeper leading them up the stairs, “but at least you won’t have to double up. I can switch you later,” he said to Liz. “He’s only here a few days.”

“Hit and run, huh?” Liz said.

“Nobody stays for long, except the MG personnel. They’re all on the second floor. One more flight. Dinner’s at seven, by the way.”

“Where do the enlisted men stay?”

“All over. Mostly barracks down in the old Telefunken factory. Some over by Onkel Toms Hutte,” he said, pronouncing it in English.

“Uncle Tom’s Hut?” Liz said, amused. “Since when?”

“Since always. Their name. They like the book, I guess.”

Jake’s room must have belonged to the daughter of the house. There was a single bed with a pink chenille spread, floral wallpaper, and a vanity with a round mirror and pink ruffled skirt. Even the blackout drapes had been backed with pink fabric.

“Sweet.”

“Yeah, well,” Ron said. “Like I said, we can switch around in a few days.”

“Never mind. I’ll just think virginal thoughts.”

Ron grinned. “That’s one thing you won’t have to worry about in Berlin.” He turned to the door. “Just leave any laundry on the chair. They’ll pick it up later.” And then, with a click, he was gone, taking his breeze with him.

Jake stared at the frilly room. They who? A house staff to fetch and carry, one of the spoils of victory. What had happened to the girl, requisitioned out of her pink cocoon? He walked over to the glass-topped vanity. A trace of powder, but otherwise cleared off, all the jars and tubes swept into some case on the way out. Idly he opened the drawers, empty except for a few publicity stills of Viktor Staal with pinholes in the corners, presumably no longer her dreamboat. But at least she’d had a room to leave. What about Lena? Did she pack her perfume bottles and compacts and get out in time, lucky, or linger until the roof caved in?

He lit a cigarette and walked over to the window, unbuttoning his shirt. The yard below had been dug up to make a vegetable garden, but the rows had become a muddy tangle, tramped over, he supposed, by the Russians foraging for food. Still, you could breathe here. The wounded city, just a few miles away, had already begun to fade, hidden by the trees and suburban houses, the way an anesthetic blotted up pain. He should have taken notes. But what was there to say? The story had already happened. From the looks of it, building by building, old men and teenagers sniping from doorways. Why had they held out? Waiting for the Americans, he’d heard. Anyone but the Russians. The peace will be worse — Goebbels’ last warning, the only one that came true. So, the final madness. Whole streets on fire. There’d been roving packs of SS, hanging boys from lampposts as deserters. To make an example. In the camps they’d killed people right up to the last hour. Here they’d even turned on their own. Not war anymore, a bloodlust.

Jake hadn’t filed a real story in two months, not since the camps; he had been waiting for Berlin. Now he felt that Berlin would defeat him too, that all the copy would end in Ron’s lunar landscapes and decayed teeth, inadequate attempts at scale. He had run out of words. personalize it. Not the thousands, just one. She’d be here. It wasn’t too much to hope for, one survivor. He looked again at the garden. Near a shed in the back, a gray-haired woman was hanging wet clothes over an improvised line of rope. A hausfrau.

“But what are you going to do?” he’d said. “Come with me. I’ll arrange it. I’ll get you out.”

“Out,” she said, dismissing it, the word itself improbable. Then she shook her head. “No, it’s better.” She’d been sitting at her dressing table, still in her slip, perfectly made-up again, her nails red. “I’ll be a hausfrau,” she’d said almost casually, putting on lipstick. “A good German hausfrau.” She lowered her eyes. “Not this, all the lies.”

“They’re not lies,” he’d said, putting his hands on her shoulders.

She looked up at his face in the mirror. “The lies to him.”

Down below, the gray-haired woman had spotted him in the window. She hesitated, then nodded in a servant’s bow and picked up the wicker basket. He watched her cross the muddy yard. Personalize it. What had her war been like? Maybe she’d been one of the faithful, shouting her lungs out at the Sportpalast, now doing laundry for the enemy. Or maybe just a hausfrau, lucky to be alive. He crossed over to the bed, dropping his shirt. What did it matter either way? Losers’ stories. Back home they’d want the glamour of the conference, Truman horse-trading with Stalin, the great world they’d won, not the rubble and the people in the Tiergarten with the future knocked out of them.

He took off the rest of his clothes and wrapped a towel around his waist. The bathroom was at the end of the hall, and he opened the door to a rush of steam and a surprised yelp.

“Oh.”

Liz was in the tub, her breasts barely clearing the soapy water, wet hair swept back from her face.

“Don’t you knock?”

“Sorry, I—” he said, but he didn’t move, watching her slide down into the tub, covering herself, her flesh as pink as the vanity ruffle.

“Have a good look?”

“Sorry,” he said again, embarrassed. A soft woman’s body, without the uniform and gun holster, now hanging on a peg.

“Never mind,” she said, smiling, a veteran of shared tents and field latrines. “Just keep your towel on. I’ll be out in a sec.”

She plunged her head into the water to rinse, then smoothed her hair back and reached for a towel.

“You going to turn around, or do you want the floor show too?”

He turned his back to her as she stepped out. A splash of water and a rustling of cloth, the sounds themselves intimate.

“I suppose I should take it as a compliment,” she said, wrapping herself in a robe. “You never noticed before.”

“Sure I did,” he said, his back to her.

“Uh-huh.” He could hear the water running down the drain in gulps. “Okay, decent.”

She was in a silk wrapper, toweling her hair. He looked at her, then cocked his head like the young GI at the Chancellery.

“How about I buy you a drink later?”

“With my clothes on? Can’t. I’m busy.”

“That was fast. Not young Ron?”

She grinned. “I wouldn’t have the strength.” She fixed the towel around her head in a turban. “Just business. Have to see a man about a duck. I’ll take a rain check, though.” She nodded at the tub. “Better run your water. It takes a while.” She gathered her things slowly from the stool, then sat down.

“Are you staying?”

“Jake? Tell me something. That business this afternoon-who was she?”

“Why a she?”

“Because it was. What’s the story? You know I’ll get it out of you eventually.”

“No story,” he said, turning on the taps. “She went back to her husband.”

“Oh,” she said, “that kind of story. She left you?”

“I left Berlin. Dr. Goebbels’ request. There was an attitude problem.”

“I’ll bet. When was this?”

‘ ’Forty-one. Did me a favor, I suppose. A few months later and I’d have been stuck.“ He waved his hand to take in the city. ”In all this.“

“So only she got stuck.”

He looked at her for a moment, then went back to adjusting the taps.

“She stayed with her husband,” he said flatly.

“I wouldn’t have,” she said, trying to be casual, a light apology. “Who was he? One of the master race?”

He smiled to himself. “Not too masterful. He was a teacher, actually. A professor.”

“Of what?”

“Liz, what is all this?”

“Just making conversation. I don’t often get you at a disadvantage. The only time a man will talk is when he has his pants off.”

“Is that a fact.” He paused. “Mathematics, since you ask.”

“Math?” she said, laughing slightly, genuinely surprised. “An egghead? Not very sexy.”

“It must have been. She married him.”

“And slept with you. Mathematics. I mean, a ski instructor or something I could understand—”

“He did ski, as a matter of fact. That’s how they met.”

“See,” she said, playing, “I knew it. Where was this?”

He glanced at her, annoyed. Another woman’s magazine piece, the encounter on the slopes, as wistful as Eva Braun’s last glass of champagne.

“I don’t know, Liz. Does it matter? I don’t know anything about their marriage. How would I? She stayed, that’s all. Maybe she thought they’d win the war.” The last thing she thought. Why say it? He turned off the taps, annoyed now with himself. “My bath’s ready.”

“Were you in love with her?”

“That’s not a reporter’s question.”

She looked at him and nodded, then stood up. “That’s some answer.”

“This towel is coming off in two seconds. You’re welcome to stay—”

“Okay, okay, I’m going.” She smiled. “I like to leave a little something to the imagination.” She gathered up her things, slinging the holster belt on her shoulder, and went to the door.

“Don’t forget the rain check,” he said.

She turned to him. “By the way, a piece of advice? Next time you ask a girl for a drink, don’t tell her about the other one. Even if she asks.” She opened the door. “See you around the campus.” Contents — Previous Chapter / Next Chapter

CHAPTER TWO

Dinner was surprisingly formal, served by the gray-haired woman and a man Jake took to be her husband in a large corner room on the ground floor. A starched white tablecloth was set with china and wine goblets, and even the food-standard B rations of pea soup, stewed meat, and canned pears-seemed dressed up for the occasion, ladled out of a porcelain tureen with ceremony and garnished with a sprig of parsley, the first green Jake had seen in weeks. He imagined the woman snipping off pieces in the muddy garden, determined even now to keep a good table. The company, all men, was a mix of visiting journalists and MG officers, who sat at one end with their own whiskey bottles, like regulars in a western boardinghouse. Jake arrived just as the soup was being served.

“Well, here’s a sorry sight.” Tommy Ottinger, from Mutual, extended his hand. “When did you blow in?”

“Hey, Tommy.” Even balder than before, as if all his hair had migrated down to the trademark bushy mustache.

“I didn’t know you were here. You back with Murrow?”

Jake sat down, nodding hello across the table to the congressman, sitting between Ron, clearly on caretaking duty, and a middle-aged MG officer who looked exactly like Lewis Stone as Judge Hardy.

“No broadcasting, Tommy. Just a hack.”

“Yeah? Whose nickel?”

“Collier’s.”

“Oh,” Tommy said, drawling it, pretending to be impressed, “in depth. Good luck. You see the agenda? Reparations. You could nod off just thinking about it. So what do you know?”

“Not much. I just got in. Took a ride through the city, that’s all.”

“You see Truman? He went in this afternoon.”

“No. I saw Churchill, though.”

“I can’t use Churchill. They want Truman-how’s he doing? I mean, how the fuck do I know? He hasn’t done anything yet.”

Jake grinned at him. “Make something up. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

The serving man placed the soup in front of him, looking surprised when Jake thanked him in German.

“You know what he said today? In Berlin? ‘This is what happens when a man overreaches himself.’”

Jake thought of the miles of debris, reduced to the lesson for the day. “Who’s your source? Jimmy Byrnes?”

“Sounds just like Truman, don’t you think?”

“It will, if you use it.”

“Got to fill the air somehow. You remember.”

“The old graveyard shift.” The 2 A.M. broadcasts, timed for the evening news back home.

“Worse. They kept Berlin on Russian time, so it’s even later.” He took a drink, shaking his head. “The Russians—” He turned to Jake, suddenly earnest, as if he were confiding a secret. “They just went all to hell here. Raped everything that moved. Old women. Children. You wouldn’t believe the stories.”

“No,” Jake said, thinking of the bayoneted chairs.

“Now they want reparations,” Tommy said, rolling his deep radio voice. “I don’t know what they think’s left. They’ve already grabbed everything that wasn’t nailed down. Took it all apart and shipped it home. Everything-factories, pipes, toilets, for Christ’s sake. Of course, once they got it there they didn’t know how to put it back together, so I hear it’s all sitting on the trains, going to rust. Useless.“

“There’s your story.”

“They don’t want that either. Let’s not make fun of the Russians. We have to get along with them. You know. They’re touchy bastards.”

“So what do they want?”

“Truman. The poker game. Who’s a better player, him or Uncle Joe? Potsdam poker,” he said, trying it. “That’s not bad.”

“And we’re holding the cards.”

Tommy shrugged. “We want to go home and they want to stay. That’s a pretty good card.”

The serving man, hovering in a frayed suit, replaced the soup with a gray stew. Salty, probably lamb.

Tommy picked at it, then pushed it away and took another drink. “So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet. I thought I’d look up some people I used to know, see what happened to them.”

“Hearts-and-flowers stuff.”

Jake spread his hands, not wanting to be drawn in. “The poker game then, I guess.”

“In other words, sit around with the rest of us and do what Ron here says,” he said, raising his voice. “Right?”

“If you say so, Tommy,” Ron said, shooting him a wary look across the table.

“Handouts. We can’t even get near the place. Stalin’s afraid somebody’s going to take a potshot at him. That it, Ron?”

“I’d say he’s more afraid of being quoted out of context.”

“Now, who’d do a thing like that? Would you do that, Jake?”

“Never.”

“I can’t say I blame him,” the congressman said, smiling. “I’ve had a little experience in that department myself.” His manner was looser now, a campaign geniality, and Jake wondered for a second if the stiffness on the plane had been nothing more than fear of flying, better hidden than the young soldier’s. His wide tie, a dizzying paisley, was like a flash of neon at the uniformed table.

“You’re Alan Breimer, aren’t you?” Tommy said.

“That’s right,” he said, nodding, pleased to be recognized.

“War Production Board,” Tommy said, a memory display. “We met when I covered the trust hearings in ‘thirty-eight.”

“Oh yes,” said Breimer, who clearly didn’t remember.

“What brings you to Berlin?” Tommy said, so smoothly that Jake saw he was working, the line to Ron only a way of reeling Breimer in.

“Just a little fact-finding for my committee.”

“In Berlin?”

“The congressman’s been looking at conditions all over the zone,” Ron said, stepping in. “Technically, that includes us too.”

“Why not Berlin?” Breimer said to Tommy, curious.

“Well, industrial capacity’s your field. Not much of that left here.”

“Not much of that anywhere in our zone,” Breimer said, trying for a backroom heartiness. “You know what they say-the Russians got the food, the British got the factories, and we got the scenery. I suppose we have Yalta to thank for that too.” He looked at Tommy, expecting a response, then switched gears. “Anyway, I’m not here to see factories, just our MG officials. We’ve got General Clay tomorrow, right, lieutenant?”

“Bright and early,” Ron said.

“You’ll want to see Blaustein over in Economics,” Tommy said, as if he were helping to fill the schedule. “Remember him? He was the lawyer from Justice at the trust hearing.”

“I remember Mr. Blaustein.”

“On the other hand, you weren’t exactly best friends.”

“He had his ideas, I had mine,” Breimer said easily. “What is he doing here? ”

“Same idea. Decartelization. One of the four Ds.”

“Four Ds?” Jake said.

“Military Government policy for Germany,” Ron said in his briefing voice. “Demilitarization, de-Nazification, decartelization, and democracy.”

“And the least of these shall be decartelization. Isn’t that right, congressman?” Tommy said.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“American Dye and Chemical’s in your district. I seem to remember they held the North American Farben patents. I thought maybe you’d come over to see—”

He waited for Breimer to take the bait, but the congressman just sighed. “You’re barking up the wrong tree. Same one Mr. Blaustein kept barking up.” He shook his head. “The more successful a business became, the more he wanted to tear it down. I never did understand that.” He looked straight at Tommy. “American Dye’s just one business in the district, just one.”

“But the only one with a German partner.”

“That was before the war, Mr. -? Who did you say you were with?”

“Tom Ottinger. Mutual. Don’t worry, we’re off the record.”

“We can be on the record for all I care. I’m not here for American Dye or anyone else. Just the American people.”

Tommy grinned. “Now that makes me homesick. You forget people talk like that in Washington.”

“I’m glad you find us so funny.” He turned to Ron. “Well, I can see I’m not winning any votes here,” he said, an unexpectedly graceful exit. Then, unable to resist, he turned back to Tommy. “You know, it’s easy to attack business. I’ve heard it all my life, usually from people who don’t know the first thing about it. Maybe we ought to keep in mind that those companies, the ones you want to break up, won the war for us.”

“They almost won it here too. Now they’re war criminals. I wonder where the boys at American Dye would be if things had gone the other way.”

“That’s a hell of a thing for an American to say.” Tommy raised his glass. “But you’d defend to your death my right to say it.” He took in Breimer’s blank expression. “Oliver Wendell Holmes. Another troublemaker in the Justice Department.”

“No, Voltaire,” the Judge Hardy lookalike said mildly, the first time he’d spoken. “If he said it. He was probably misquoted too.” A sly smile at Tommy.

“Well, somebody said it,” Tommy said. “Anyway, it’s the right idea. Don’t you think?” he said to Breimer, his glass still raised.

Breimer stared at him for a moment, a politician assessing a heckler, then lifted his glass with a forced smile. “I certainly do. To the Justice Department. And to the gentlemen of the press.” “Bless their little hearts,” Ron said.

They drank, then Breimer turned back to Ron, placing his fleshy hand on a paper on the table. “But Clay’s a direct report to Ike,” he said, as if they had never been interrupted.

“That’s right,” Ron said quickly, before Tommy could jump in again. “The army’s here as support, but Military Government reports in to Ike. Technically, to the Allied Control Council. That’s Ike, Ismay, and Zhukov. We’re USGCC, U.S. Group, Control Council.”

He was drawing boxes on the paper, an organization chart.

“Control Council’s the final authority for the country, at least for the sign-off, but the real work’s here, in the Coordinating Committee. That’s Clay, as Ike’s deputy, and the other Allied deputies. Under Clay you’ve got your executive staff line, like Colonel Muller here,” he said, turning to Judge Hardy, who nodded.

“Nice to put a face on a box,” Breimer said eagerly, but Ron was already moving down the sheet.

“Then the functional offices-Political Affairs, Intelligence, Information Control, and so on.”

Jake watched the lines and boxes spread across the bottom of the page, a kind of bureaucratic family tree.

“The functional divisions down here are the ones that work with the Germans-Transport, Manpower, Legal, and so on.”

Breimer was studying the chart with care, familiar with the world as a pyramid of boxes. “Where does Frankfurt come in?”

“Well, that’s USFET, G-5, civil affairs.” ‹›“USFET. The army’s got more damned alphabet soup than the New Deal,” Breimer said, evidently his idea of a joke, because he looked up. Ron smiled obligingly.

“In other words, overlap,” Breimer said.

Ron smiled again. “That I couldn’t say.”

“No, you don’t have to.” He shook his head. “If we ran a business this way, we’d never make any money.”

“We’re not here to make money,” Muller said quietly.

“No, to spend it,” Breimer said, but pleasantly. “From the looks of things, we’ve got a whole country on relief and the American taxpayer footing the bill. Some peace.”

“We can’t let them starve.”

“Nobody’s starving that I can see.” ‹›Muller turned to face him, his expression grave and kindly, Judge Hardy lecturing Andy. “The official ration is fifteen hundred calories a day. In practice, it’s closer to twelve hundred, sometimes lower. That’s only a little better than the camps. They’re starving.” His voice, as precise and rational as one of Ron’s boxes, stopped Breimer short. “Unless they work for us,” he went on calmly. “Then they get a hot meal every day and all the cigarette butts they can scrounge.” He paused. “They’re the ones you see.” Jake glanced over at the serving man, quietly removing plates, and noticed for the first time his thin neck bobbing in its oversized collar.

“Nobody wants anybody to starve,” Breimer said. “I’m not a hard peace man. That’s that nut Morgenthau in Treasury.” He glanced over at Tommy. “One of your trust-busters, by the way. Wants to make ‘em all farmers, take the whole damn thing apart. Dumbest thing I ever heard. Of course, those people have their own agenda.”

“What people?” Tommy said, but Breimer ignored him, sweeping along.

“I’m a realist. What we need to do is get this country back on its feet again, not put ‘em on relief. Now, I’m not saying you people aren’t doing a fine job here.” This to Muller, who nodded dutifully. “I’ve been in Germany two weeks and I can tell you I’ve never been prouder to be an American. The things I’ve seen- But hell, look at this.” He pointed to the chart. “You can’t do much when you’re spread this thin on the ground. One group here, another in Frankfurt—”

“I believe it’s General Clay’s intention to combine the organizations,” Ron said.

“Good,” Breimer said, annoyed at being interrupted. “That’s a start. And here’s a whole other group just for Berlin.”

“Well, you know, the city’s jointly administered, so there’s no way around that,” Ron said, still on his chart. “The Coordinating Committee set up the Kommandatura to deal with Berlin. That’s Howley-we see him tomorrow after Clay.”

“Kommandatura,” Breimer said. “That the Russian name?”

“More international than Russian, I think,” Ron said, evading. “Everyone agreed to it.”

Breimer snorted. “The Russians. I’ll tell you one thing. We don’t get these people back on their feet, the Russians’ll come in, that’s for sure.”

“Well, that’s one way to stop the drain on the American taxpayer,” Tommy said. “Let Ivan pick up the tab.”

Breimer glowered at him. “That’s not all he’ll pick up. Well, have your fun, have your fun,” he said, sitting back. “I suppose I’m making speeches again and ruining the party. My wife’s always telling me I don’t know when to stop.” He gave a calculated smile, meant to disarm. “It’s just, you know, I hate to see waste. That’s one thing you learn in business.” He glanced again at Tommy. “To be a realist.” He shook his head. “Four Ds. We ought to be putting these people to work, not giving them handouts and breaking up their companies and wasting our time looking for Nazis under every bed.”

A plate crashed, like a punctuation mark, and everyone turned to the door. The old man, distraught, was looking at the floor, held at the elbow by the short, wiry American who had just bumped into him. For a second no one moved, suspended in a stopped piece of film, then the reel caught again and they tumbled forward into a kind of slapstick, the gray-haired woman rushing out, hands to her cheeks, the old man moaning, the American apologizing in German. When he bent down to help with the pieces, the files under his arm slid onto the floor in a heap of papers and broken crockery. More excited German, a fuss too elaborate, Jake thought, to be about a plate-the fear, perhaps, of losing a job with its one hot meal a day. Finally the woman shooed both men away from the china and, with a bow, pulled back a chair for the late arrival.

“Sorry, gentlemen,” he said to the quiet room, busy stacking files on the table. He had a terrier’s sharp nose and nervous energy, his face covered with a dark five-o’clock shadow he hadn’t had time to shave. Even the air around him seemed to be running late, his tie loosened from its open collar by the same hurried gust.

“Congressman, your three o’clock tomorrow,” Ron said wryly. Captain Teitel, Public Safety Division. Bernie, Congressman Breimer.“

“Pleased to meet you,” Teitel said quickly, extending his hand and almost colliding again with a plate of stew the serving man had brought. Jake watched, amused, as the old man hesitated behind him, waiting for a safe opening.

“Public Safety,” Breimer said. “That’s police?”

“Among other things. I’m de-Nazification-the guy wasting our time looking under the beds,” Teitel said.

“Ah,” Breimer said, unsure how to proceed. Then he stood.

“No, don’t get up.”

Breimer smiled, pointing to the tall soldier standing at the door. “My ride.”

But Bernie wasn’t ready to let go. “Frankfurt tells me you have a problem with the program,” he said, lowering his head as if preparing to ram.

Breimer looked down at him, ready for another heckler, but Tommy had wearied him. “No problem,” he said, mollifying. “Just a few questions. I’m sure you’re all doing a fine job.”

“We’d be doing a better one if we had more staff.”

Breimer smiled. “That seems to be the general complaint here. Everybody I meet wants another secretary.”

“I don’t mean secretaries. Trained investigators.”

The old man now slid the plate between them onto the table and backed away, as if sensing that they were squaring off.

“Well, we’ll talk about that tomorrow,” Breimer said, preparing to go. “I’m here to learn. Afraid I can’t do anything about personnel, though-that’s up to MG.”

“I thought you were writing some kind of report.”

Breimer held up a wait-a-second finger to his driver. “No. Just making sure we’re keeping our priorities straight.”

“This is apriority.”

Breimer smiled again, back on familiar ground. “Well, that’s what every department says. But you know, we can’t do everything.” He indicated the organization chart. “Sometimes I think we let our good intentions run away with us.” He put his hand on Bernie’s shoulder, an uncle giving advice. “We can’t put a whole country on trial.”

“No, just the guilty ones,” Bernie said, looking at him steadily.

Breimer dropped his hand, the easy get-away lost. “That’s right, just the guilty ones.” He looked back at Bernie. “We don’t want to start some kind of inquisition over here. The American people don’t want that.”

“Really? What do we want?” Bernie said, using the pronoun as a jab. ‹›Breimer stepped back. “I think we all want the same thing,” he said evenly “To get this country going again. That’s the important thing now. You can’t do that by locking everybody up. The worst cases, yes. Get the big boys and put them on trial-I’m all for it. But then we’ve got to move on, not chase all the small fry.” He paused, avuncular again. “We don’t want people to think a minority is using this program to get revenge.” He shook his head. “We don’t want that.” The voice of the Kiwanis Club lunch, bland and sure of itself. In the awkward silence, Jake could feel Tommy shift in his chair, leaning forward to see Bernie’s response.

“We’re an even smaller minority here,” Bernie said calmly. “Most of us are dead.”

“I didn’t mean you personally, of course.”

“Just all the other Jews in the program. But we speak the language, some of us-one of life’s little ironies-so you’re stuck with us. I was born here. If my parents hadn’t left in ‘thirty-three, I’d be dead too. Personally. So I think this is a priority.” He touched the pile of papers on the table. “I’m sorry if it interferes with economic recovery. As far as I’m concerned, you can file that under T for ’too bad.‘ I’m a DA back home, that’s why they tapped me for this. DAs don’t get revenge. Half the time, we’re lucky to get a little justice.”

Breimer, who had turned red during this, sputtered, “I didn’t mean—”

“Save it. I know what you mean. I don’t want to join your country club anyway. Just send me more staff and we’ll call it quits.” He pulled the chair beneath him and sat down, cocking his head toward the door. “I think your driver’s waiting.”

Breimer stood still for a moment, furious, then visibly collected himself and nodded to the quiet table. “Gentlemen.” He looked down at Bernie. “We’ll talk tomorrow, captain. I hope I’ll be better understood.”

The entire table watched him go. Jake looked around, waiting for someone to speak, feeling the room grow warmer, as if the quiet were letting in the sticky night air. Finally Muller, staring at his glass, said dryly, “He’s here to learn.”

Tommy smiled at him and lit a cigarette. “I wonder what he’s really doing here. Guy doesn’t take a leak unless American Dye tells him to go to the bathroom.”

“Hey, Tommy,” Ron said, “do me a favor. Lay off. I’m the one who gets the complaints.”

“What’ll you do for me?”

But the earlier mood was gone, replaced by something uncomfortable, and even Ron no longer wanted to play.

“Well, that was nice,” he said to Bernie. “We have to live with this guy, you know.”

Bernie looked up from his stew. “Sorry,” he said, still on edge.

Ron took a drink, looking at Tommy. “He seems to bring out the best in everybody.”

“Small fry,” Bernie said, imitating Breimer’s voice. “Whoever that is.”

“Anybody but Goering,” Tommy said.

“Small fry,” Bernie said again. “Here’s one.” He reached into the pile and pulled out a few buff-colored sheets. “Otto Klopfer. Wants to drive for us. Experienced. Says he drove a truck during the war. He just didn’t say what kind. One of the mobile units, it turns out. The exhaust pipe ran back into the van. They’d load about fifty, sixty people in there, and old Otto would just keep the motor running until they died. We found out because he wrote a letter to his CO.” He held up a sheet. “The exhaust was taking too long. Recommended they seal the pipes so it would work faster. The people were panicking, trying to get out. He was afraid they’d damage the truck.”

Another silence, this time so still that even the air around Bernie seemed to stop. He looked down at the food and pushed it away. “Fuck,” he said, embarrassed, then stood up, gathering his files, and left the room.

Jake stared at the white tablecloth. He heard the old man quietly clearing the plates, then the muffled scrape of chairs as Muller and the MG end of the table got up to leave. Tommy ground his cigarette into the ashtray.

“Well, I’ve got a poker hand waiting,” he said, subdued now. “You coming, Jake? Everybody’ll be there.”

The floating game of the war, still going on, press tents filled with smoke and battered typewriters and the steady slap of cards.

“Not tonight,” Jake said, looking at the table.

“Let’s go, Ron. Bring your money.” He stood up, then turned to Take. “Take a gun if you go out. The Russians are still all over the place. Once they get liquored up, it’s like Dodge City out there.”

But they’d be rowdy, roving the streets in packs, their good time its own warning. It was the others, the shadows gliding through the rubble, who’d pounce in the dark.

“Where was Breimer going?” he said to Ron.

“No idea. I’m the day shift. Let’s hope he gets laid.”

“Talk about punishing the Germans,” Tommy said, and then they were gone too and Jake was alone in the quiet room. He poured some more wine. The old man returned and after a quizzical look at Jake began emptying the ashtrays, carefully straightening the butts and putting them on a separate plate. Occupation currency.

“Would you like anything else?” he said in German, brushing the tablecloth.

“No. I’ll just finish this.”

“ Bitte,” he said, as polite as a waiter at the Adlon, and left.

Jake lit a cigarette. Had Otto Klopfer smoked in the cab while he ran the motor, listening to the thumps behind him? There must have been screaming, a furious pounding on the van. And he’d sat there, foot on the pedal. How could they do it? All the questions came back to that. He’d seen it on the faces of the GIs, who’d hated France and then, confused, felt at home in Germany. The plumbing, the wide roads, the blond children grateful for candy, their mothers tirelessly sweeping up the mess. Clean. Hardworking. Just like us. Then they’d seen the camps, or at least the newsreels. How could they do it? The answer, the only one that made sense to them, was that they hadn’tsomebody else had. But there wasn’t anybody else. So they stopped asking. Unless, like Teitel, the hook had gone in too deep. ‹›Jake looked around the empty room, still feeling the disturbance. Once, in Chicago, he’d worked the crime desk and the rooms had felt like this, the uneasy quiet that follows murder-the body covered but everything else disordered. He remembered the indifferent photographers, the policemen picking through the room dusting for prints, the numbed faces of the others, who didn’t look back at you but sat staring at the tagged gun in a daze, as if it had gone off by itself, and he realized suddenly that he had seen it all again today, that what the city had really become was not a bomb site but a vast scene of the crime. Shaken, waiting for someone to bring the stretcher and erase the chalk marks and put the furniture back. Except this crime wouldn’t go away, even then. There would always be a body in the middle of the floor. How could they do it? Sealing pipes, locking doors, ignoring the screams? It was the only question. But who could answer it? Not a reporter with four pieces in Collier’s. The story was beyond that, a twisted parody of Goebbels’ big lie-if you made the crime big enough, nobody did it. All the pieces he might do, full of local color and war stories and Truman’s horse-trading, were not even notes for the police blotter.

He got up from the table, his head thick with drink and the humid air. In the hall, the old man was standing in front of an open door, listening to the piano. Soft music, barely louder than the clock. When he saw Jake, he moved away, a concertgoer giving up his seat. Jake stood for a moment, trying to place the music-delicate, slightly melancholy, something nineteenth-century, like the house, a graceful world away from the abrasive dinner. When he looked through the door, he saw Bernie bent over the keys in a pool of dim light, his tight wavy hair just visible across the well of the piano. At this distance his body was foreshortened, and for a second Jake saw the boy he must have been, a diligent practicer, his mother eavesdropping down the hall. It’s something you’ll have all your life, she would have said. A nice boy, not gifted, who kept his eyes on the keys. Not yet a terrier, ready to take offense. But perhaps it was only the room, the first real Berlin room Jake had seen, with its tall stove in the corner, the piano near the window to catch the light. In the old days, there would have been cake with coffee.

Bernie kept his head down after he was finished, so that Jake was at the piano when he looked up.

“What was it?” Jake asked.

“Mendelssohn. One of the Songs Without Words”

“Beautiful.”

Bernie nodded. “Also illegal, until a few months ago. So I like playing it. Rusty, though.”

“Your audience enjoyed it,” Jake said, nodding to the hall where the old man had been.

Bernie smiled. “He’s just keeping an eye on the piano. It’s their house. They live in the basement.”

Jake took this in. “So that’s why the plate.”

“It’s all they have left. They hid it, I guess. The Russians took everything else.” He waved his hand at the room, which Jake saw now had been stripped of knickknacks, the afternoons of coffee cakes just his imagination. He looked down at the piano, covered in cigarette burns and water rings from wet glasses of vodka.

“We haven’t met. I’m Jake Geismar.” He held out his hand.

“The writer?”

“Unless there’s another one,” Jake said, pleased in spite of himself.

“You wrote the piece about Nordhausen. Camp Dora,” Bernie said. “Jacob. As in Jewish?”

Jake smiled. “No, as in the Bible. My brother got Ezra.”

Bernie shrugged. “Bernie Teitel,” he said, finally shaking Jake’s hand.

“So I heard.”

Bernie looked at him, puzzled, until Jake cocked his head toward the dining room. “Oh, that.” He looked away. “Bastard.”

“You really don’t want to join his country club, you know.”

Bernie nodded. “No. I just want to pee in his pool.” He stood up and closed the piano lid. “So what are you doing in Berlin?”

“The conference. Looking for a story, like everybody else.”

“I don’t suppose I could interest you in the program? We could use some press. Life was here. They just wanted to know how our boys were doing.”

“How are they doing?”

“Oh, fine, fine. Nobody fraternizes, so nobody gets the syph. Nobody loots. Nobody’s making a dime on the black market. Just handing out Hershey bars and keeping their noses clean. Any mother would be proud. According to Life.” He picked up his files to go.

Jake lit a cigarette and looked at him carefully through the smoke. A DA, not a boy playing Mendelssohn.

“What’s going to happen to Otto Klopfer?”

Bernie stopped. “Otto? Summary court. He’s not big enough for the Nuremberg team. Three to five, probably. Then he’ll be back driving a truck. But not for us.”

“But I thought you said—”

“We can’t prove the actual killing. No witnesses in the van. If he hadn’t sent the letter, we couldn’t prove anything. We’re sticklers for the law here. We don’t want to start an inquisition,“ he said, back in his dining room voice. ”We’d rather cut the Nazis a little slack.“

“Summary court-that’s you?”

Bernie shook his head. “We try to keep the foreign-born minorities out of court. In case they’re not-impartial. I’m just the hound. Right now I’m on the fragebogen” He touched the files. “Questionnaires,” he translated. “‘Were you a member of the party? BDM?’ Like that. They have to fill one out if they want a job, a ration card.”

“Don’t they lie?”

“Sure. But we have the party records, so we check. Wonderful people for keeping records.”

Jake stared at the bulky files, like a hundred message sticks in the rubble.

“Could you locate somebody with those?”

Bernie looked at him. “Maybe. If they’re in the American zone,” he said, a question.

“I don’t know.”

“The British files would take a while. The Russians—” He let it dangle, then said gently, “A relative?”

“Somebody I used to know.”

Bernie took out a pen and scribbled on a piece of paper. “I’ll see what I have,” he said, handing him an office number. “Come by tomorrow. I have a feeling my three o’clock will be canceled.” He left the piano, then turned back to Jake. “They’d have to be alive, you know.”

“Yes. Thanks.” He pocketed the address. “Can I buy you a drink?”

Bernie shook his head. “Have to get back to work.” He shifted the files under his arm, running late again.

“You can’t get them all,” Jake said, smiling a little.

Bernie’s face went hard. “No. Just one at a time. The way they did it. One at a time.” ‹›It took over an hour the next morning to find Frau Dzuris, in one of the crumbled streets not far from the British headquarters in Fehrbelliner Platz. Plaster had fallen off the front of the building, leaving patches of exposed brick, and the staircase smelled of mildew and slop buckets, the signs of a broken water line. He was shown to the second floor by a neighbor, who lingered in the hall in case there was trouble. Inside, the sounds of children, immediately silent after the knock on the door. When Frau Dzuris opened it, looking frightened, there was the faint odor of boiling potatoes. She recognized him, her hands fluttering to smooth her hair and drawing him in but the welcome was nervous, and Jake saw on the children’s faces that it was the uniform. Not sure what to do, she insisted on introducing everybody-a daughter-in-law, three children-and sat him at the table. In the other room, two mattresses had been pushed together.

“I saw your notice in Pariserstrasse,” he began in German.

“For my son. He doesn’t know we’re here. They took him to work in the east. A few weeks they said, and now look—”

“You were bombed out?”

“Oh, it was terrible. The British at night, the Amis in the day—” A quick glance, to see if she had offended him. “Why did they want to bomb everything? Did they think we were Hitler? The building was hit twice. The second time—”

The daughter-in-law offered him water and sat down. In the other room, the children watched through the door.

“Was Lena there?”

“No, at the hospital.”

“The hospital?”

“Not hurt. She worked there. The Elisabeth. You know the one, in Liitzowstrasse. I said it was God protecting her for her good works. You know, the others, in the basement, didn’t make it. Herr Bloch, his Greta, everybody. They killed them all.” Another glance. “Herr Bloch wouldn’t go to the public shelter. Not him. But I never trusted the cellar. It’s not deep enough, I said, and you see it wasn’t.” She had begun to wring her hands, and Jake saw the flesh of her upper arms hanging in folds, like strips of dough. “So many dead. Terrible, you can’t imagine, all night—”

“But Lena, she was all right?”

She nodded. “She came back. But of course we had to move.”

“Where did she go?”

“She had a friend from the hospital. After that, I don’t know. It was hit too, I heard. A hospital. They bombed even the sick.” She shook her head.

“But she didn’t leave an address?”

“With me? I was already gone. You know, there wasn’t time for addresses. You found whatever you could. Perhaps she had relatives, I don’t know. She never said. You can’t imagine what it was like. The noise. But do you know the strange thing? The telephones worked right to the end. That’s the thing I remember about Pariserstrasse. The bombs and everybody running and there was a telephone ringing. Even then.”

“And her husband?”

“Away somewhere. In the war.” She waved her hand. “They left the women for the Russians. Oh, that was terrible. Thank God I—” She glanced toward her daughter-in-law. “I was lucky.”

“But she must be somewhere,” Jake said.

“I don’t know. I told your friend.”

“What friend?”

“The soldier yesterday. I didn’t know what to think. Now I see. You didn’t want to come yourself, that explains it. You were always careful, I remember. In case Emil—” She leaned forward and put her hand on his arm, an unexpected confidante. “But you know, none of that matters anymore. So many years.”

“I didn’t send anybody here.”

She withdrew her hand. “No? Well, then, I don’t know.”

“Who was he?”

She shrugged. “He didn’t say. They don’t, you know. Just, how many are living here? Do you have milk cards for the children? Where did you work in the war? It’s worse than the Nazis. Maybe he was counting the dead. They do that, so you can’t use the name for the ration cards.”

“What did he say?”

“Did I know where she was living, had I seen Emil, that’s all. Like you.” She looked at him. “Is something wrong? We’re good people here. I have children to—”

“No, no. Nothing. I’m not here for the police. I just want to find Lena. We were friends.”

She smiled faintly. “Yes. I always thought so. Not a word from her,” she said, as if she still hoped for a chat over coffee. “So proper, always. Well, what does it matter now? I’m sorry I can’t help. Perhaps the hospital would know.”

He took out his notepad and wrote down the Gelferstrasse address. “If you do hear from her—”

“Of course. It’s not likely, you know. Many people left Berlin before the end. Many people. It was hard to find a place. Even like this. You see how we live now.”

Jake looked around the shabby room, then stood. “I didn’t know about the children. I would have brought some chocolate. Perhaps you can use these?” He offered her a pack of cigarettes.

She widened her eyes, then grabbed his hand and shook it with both of hers. “Thank you. You see,” she said to her daughter-in-law, “I always said it wasn’t the Amis. You can see how kind they are. It’s the British who wanted the bombing. That Churchill.” She turned back to Jake. “I remember you were always polite. I wish we were back in the American zone, not here with the British.”

Jake headed for the door, then turned. “The soldier yesterday-he was British?”

“No, American.”

He stood for a second, puzzled. Not an official, then.

“If he comes back, you will let me know? ”

She nodded, clutching the cigarettes, nervous again. “You’re sure there’s nothing wrong?”

Jake shook his head. “Maybe just another old friend. He might know something.”

“No,” she said, answering something else. “There was only you.”

A hospital would have records, Jake thought, but when he got there he saw that a fire had swept through that stretch of Liitzowstrasse, taking the Elisabeth and all its paper with it. Only a few walls were left, black and open to the sky, one of Ron’s decayed molars. A work brigade of women was clearing the site, handing pails of bricks along a line that snaked over the heaps of fallen beams and charred bed-frames. The breeze that had come up during the night was now a steady hot wind, blowing ashes, so that the women had had to cover their mouths with kerchiefs, like bandits. Jake stood for a while watching, trying not to notice the heavy stench that hung in the street. How long before one didn’t smell it anymore?

He wondered what she’d done here. Emil hadn’t wanted her to work, a traditional husband, so she’d left Columbia for idle afternoons at home. They’d had to take on Hannelore instead, a thick girl with inadequate English and, Jake assumed, a direct line to Nanny Wendt. But Lena still came to parties, until it became awkward to see foreigners and Emil asked her to stop, and then she only saw Jake. Had he ever suspected? Frau Dzuris didn’t seem to think so, but how could she know? There’d only been a few times in Pariserstrasse, when they couldn’t go to his place because Hal was there. Always careful, alert even to the flick of a curtain at a neighbor’s window. But Frau Dzuris had known somehow, maybe just from the look on their faces.

Emil, surprisingly, had been at the Anhalter when they’d all come to see Jake off, a defiantly raucous party, Hal and the rest of the gang guzzling champagne while Emil looked uneasily at the platform guards. Lena had given him flowers, the respectable send-off for an old boss, never meeting his eye until one of the party became sick and in the confusion of hustling him to the men’s room they’d finally had a moment together.

“Why did you bring him?” Jake said.

“He was there when they called from the office. I couldn’t come alone. How would it look?” She paused, looking down. “He wanted to come. He likes you.”

“Lena,” he said, reaching for her.

“No. No scenes. I want him to see me drink champagne and wave, like the others. Then we’ll take a taxi home and that’s the end.”

“I’ll come back,” he said, hurrying, hearing the loud bursts of English near the men’s room.

“No, you won’t. Not now,” she said simply, nodding toward all the uniforms on the platform.

“I’ll come back for you,” he said, looking at her until she raised her eyes again, her face softening, no longer public.

She shook her head slowly, glancing to see if the others were still away, then put her hand up to his cheek and held it there for a moment, her eyes on him, as if she were trying to memorize his face. “No. But think of me sometimes,” she said.

He stood there, just looking. “Lena,” he said, moving his face against her hand, but then she dropped it, a quick graze as she looked over his shoulder.

“My god, it’s Renate,” she said, pulling away. “They called her too? She’s crazy-it’s not safe for her.” He heard the platform noises again, the private second gone. When he turned, he saw Renate’s knowing sharp eyes, which had taken in Lena’s hand, the way they noticed everything. His best tipster, off the books because you couldn’t hire Jews. But she just smiled, pretending not to have seen.

“Hello, Joe, what do you know?” she said, American slang an endless joke.

“Hey, it’s Renate!” The boys back on the platform, surrounding them, Berlin closing in again. He tried to catch Lena’s eye, but she avoided him, hanging back with Emil, helping Hal pour champagne into cups. More drinks and jokes, Renate brazenly cadging a cigarette from a passing policeman with a flirtatious thank-you. Just to prove she could do it, while Hal looked on, appalled. With the train whistle, there was a final round of hugs, crushing the flowers. Emil shook Jake’s hand, looking relieved that the party was coming to an end.

“Any news on the visa?” Jake said to Renate, embracing her.

She shook her head. “Soon,” she said, not meaning it. Bright eyes, a head full of dark curls. The train attendant was closing doors.

“Jacob.” Lena’s voice, then her face next to his, a formal kiss on each side, light, leaving only the smell of her skin.

He looked at her, but there was nothing to say, not even her name, and the hands at his back were pushing him onto the train. He stood on the stairs as the train began to move, waving, hearing drunken auf wiedersehens, and when she took a step forward he thought for a second, wildly, that she would do it, run after the train and come with him, but it was only a step, a push from the crowd, so that the last thing he saw in Berlin was her standing still on the platform with Emil’s arm around her shoulder. ‹›The rubble women had stopped moving their pails, scrambling over the bricks to the middle of the building. One of them shouted down to the street, where another group picked up a stretcher from a cart and followed. Jake watched them lift a body out of the debris, turning their faces away from the smell, and swing it onto the stretcher as indifferently as if it were another load of bricks. The stretcher team plodded back, stumbling under the weight, then overturned it into a cart. A woman, her hair singed away. Where did they take the bodies? Some big potter’s field in the Brandenburg marshes? More likely a furnace to finish the burning. Renate would have died like that, her sharp eyes finally dulled. Unless she had somehow survived, become one of the living skeletons he’d seen in the camp, their eyes dull too, half alive. The crime so big that no one did it. But they’d kept records in the camps, the long roll calls. It was only here, under the bricks, that a numberless body could vanish without a trace.

He ran over to the cart and looked down. A stocky, faceless body; not Lena, not anybody. He turned away. This was as pointless as Frau Dzuris. The living didn’t vanish. Emil had been at the KWI-they’d know something. Army records, if he’d been in the war. POW lists. All it took was time. She’d be somewhere, not on a cart. Maybe even waiting for him in one of Bernie’s questionnaires.

Bernie, however, was out, called to an unexpected meeting, according to the message tacked on his office door, so Jake walked over to the press camp instead. Everyone was there, drinking beer and looking bored, the typing tables littered with Ron’s bland releases. Stalin had arrived. Churchill had called on Truman. The first plenary session would start at five. A reception had been arranged by the Russians.

“Not much, is it, boyo?” Brian Stanley said, a full whiskey glass in his hand.

“What are you doing here? Coming over to the other side?”

“Better booze,” he said, sipping. “I had hoped for a little information, but as you can see—” He let one of the releases fall to the bar.

“I saw you with Churchill. He say anything?”

“ ‘Course not. But at least he said it to me. Special to the Express. Very nice.”

“But not so nice for the others.”

Brian smiled. “Mad as hornets, they are. So I thought I’d poke around here for a bit. Stay out of harm’s way.” He took another sip. “There’s no story, you know. Can’t even get Eden. We ought to just pack it in, and instead there’s tomorrow to worry about. Want to see what our lot’s handing out?” He reached into his pocket and passed over another release.

“Three thousand linen sheets, five hundred ashtrays-what’s this?”

“Preparation for the conference. Last blowout of the war, by the size of it. Try getting a story out of that.”

“Three thousand rolls of toilet paper,” Jake said.

“All from London. Now, where’ve they been hiding it, you wonder Haven’t seen decent loo paper in years.” He took back the sheet, shaking his head. “Here’s the one, a hundred and fifty bottles of button polish. Broke, but still gleaming.”

“You’re not going to print this?”

He shrugged. “What about you? Anything?”

“Not today. I went into town. They’re still digging up bodies.”

Brian made a face. “I haven’t the stomach, I really haven’t.”

“You’re getting soft. It never bothered you in Africa.” ‹›“Well, that was the war. I don’t know what this is.” He took a sip from his glass, brooding. “Lovely to be back in Cairo, wouldn’t it? Sit on the terrace and watch the boats. Just the thing after this.” Drifting feluccas, white triangles waiting for a hint of a breeze, a million miles away.

“You’d be in London in a week.”

“I don’t think so, you know,” Brian said seriously. “It’s the boats for me now. ”

“That’s the whiskey talking. When a man’s tired of London—” Jake quoted.

Brian looked at the glass. “That’s when we were on the way up. I don’t want to see us go down. Bit by bit. It’s finished there too. Just the Russians now. There’s your story. And you’re welcome to it. I haven’t got the stomach anymore. Awful people.”

“And there’s us.”

Brian sighed. “The lucky Americans. You don’t need to count the loo paper, do you? Just streams out. What will you do, I wonder.”

“Go home.”

“No, you’ll stay. You’ll want to put things right. That’s your particular bit of foolishness. You’ll want to put things right.”

“Somebody has to.”

“Do they? Well, then, I anoint you, why not?” He put his hand on Jake’s head. “Good luck and God bless. I’m for the boats.”

“Don’t you guys ever work?” A voice coming up from behind.

“Liz, my darling,” Brian said, instantly hearty. “The lady with the lens. Come have a drink. I hear Miss Bourke-White’s on her way.”

“Up yours too.”

Brian laughed. “Ooo.” He got up from his stool. “Here, darling, have a seat. I’d better push off. Go polish my buttons. Probably the last time we get to sit at the high table, so we like to look our best.”

“What’s he talking about?” she said, watching him walk away.

“He’s just being Brian. Here.” Jake took out a match to light her cigarette.

“What have you been doing?” she said, inhaling. “Holding up the bar?”

“No, I went into town.”

“God, why?”

“Look at the message boards.” Charred bodies.

“Oh.” She glanced up at him. “Any luck?”

He shook his head and handed her a release. “The Russians are giving a banquet tonight.”

“I know. They’re also posing.” She looked at her watch. “In about an hour.”

“In Potsdam? Take me with you.”

“Can’t. They’d have my head. No press, remember?”

“I’ll carry your camera.”

“You’d never get through. Special pass,” she said, showing hers.

“Yes, I would. Just bat your baby blues. The Russians can’t read anyway. Come on, Liz.”

“She won’t be in Potsdam, Jake,” she said, looking at him.

“I can’t sit around here. It just makes it worse. Anyway, I still need to file something.”

“We’re taking pictures, that’s all.”

“But I’d be there. See it, at least. Anything’s better than this,” he said, picking up the release. “Come on. I’ll buy you that drink later.”

“I’ve had better offers.”

“How do you know?”

She laughed and got up from the stool. “Meet me outside in five. If there’s any trouble, I don’t know you. Understood? I don’t know how you got in the jeep. Serve you right if they hauled you away.”

“You’re a pal.”

“Yeah.” She handed him a camera. “They’re brown, by the way, not blue. In case you haven’t noticed.”

Another photographer was at the wheel, so Jake crammed in the back with the equipment, watching Liz’s hair flying in the wind next to the aerial flag. They drove south toward Babelsberg, the old route to the film studios, and met the first Russian sentry on the Lange Brucke. He looked at the driver’s pass, pretending to understand English, and waved them through with a machine gun.

The entire town had been cordoned off, lines of Russian soldiers posted at regular intervals up to Wilhelmplatz, which seemed to have got the worst of the bomb damage. They swung behind the square and then out the designated route along the Neuer Garten, the large villas facing the park wall looking empty but intact, lucky survivors. After Berlin, it was a haven, somewhere out of the war. Jake almost expected to see the usual old ladies in hats walking their dogs on the formal paths. Instead there were more Russians with machine guns, stretched along the lakeshore as if they were expecting an amphibious assault.

The Cecilienhof was at the end of the park, a big heap of stockbroker Tudor with brick chimneys and leaded windows, an unexpected piece of Surrey on the edge of the Jungfernsee. There were guards posted at the park gates, more menacingly correct but no more thorough than the first set on the bridge, then a long gravel drive to the palace forecourt, where MPs and British soldiers mingled with their Russian hosts. They parked near a row of official black cars. Through the opening to the inner courtyard they could see hundreds of red geraniums planted in the shape of a huge Soviet star, an ostentatious display of property rights, but before Liz could photograph it a liaison officer directed them around the building to the lawn that fronted the lake. Here, on the terrace next to a small topiary garden, three wicker chairs had been set out for the picture session. A small army of photographers and newsreel cameramen were already in place, smoking and setting up tripods and shooting uneasy glances toward the patrolling guards.

“As long as you’re here, you might as well be useful,” Liz said, handing Jake two cameras while she loaded a third. One of the guards came by to inspect the cases.

“So where are they?”

“Probably having a last-minute comb,” Liz said.

He imagined Stalin in front of a mirror, smoothing back the sides of his hair for history.

Then there was nothing to do but wait. He studied the building for details-the double-height bay windows with their view of the lake, presumably the conference room, the chimneys of patterned brick too numerous to count. But there was no story in any of it, just architecture. The lawn had been mowed, the hedges trimmed, everything as tidy as a set shipped down the road from the soundstages in Babelsberg. A few miles away, the rubble women were dumping bodies in a cart. Here a breeze was blowing in from the lake, the waves flashing in the sun like tiny reflectors. The view was lovely. He wondered if Crown Prince Wilhelm used to walk across the lawn, towel in hand, for a morning dip, but the past seemed as unlikely as Stalin’s comb. No sailboats now, just the Russian sentries standing back from the water, hands resting on their guns.

Churchill was first. He came onto the terrace in his khaki uniform, holding a cigar and talking to a group of aides. Then Truman, jaunty in a gray double-breasted suit, trading jokes with Byrnes and Admiral Leahy. Finally Stalin, in a dazzling white tunic, his short frame dwarfed by a circle of guards. There were a few informal shots as they shook hands, then a flurry of taking seats, aides crowding around to settle them in. Churchill handed a soldier his cigar. Truman tugged at his jacket so it wouldn’t ride up as he sat. Had the places been decided beforehand? Truman was in the middle, his wire-rimmed glasses catching the light each time he turned his head from one to the other. Everyone smiling, casual, as if they were posing for a group shot at a class reunion. Truman crossed his legs, revealing a pair of ribbed silk socks. The cameras clicked.

Jake turned when he heard the shout. Sharp, in Russian. Now what? A soldier at the lake’s edge was calling out, pointing at something in the water. Surprisingly, he waded in, wetting his boots, shouting again for help. On the terrace, some of the aides glanced toward the water, then turned back to the photographers, frowning at the interruption. Jake watched, fascinated, as the Russian soldiers began pulling a body to the shore. Another floater, like one of the bodies in the Landwehrkanal. But this one in uniform, indefinable at this distance. Still, more interesting than chimneys. He started down the lawn.

No one stopped him. The other guards had left their posts and were running toward the body, confused, looking toward the palace for instructions. The first soldier, wet now to the knees, was pulling the body up on the mud. He dropped the lifeless arm, then grabbed the belt for better leverage and yanked, a final heave to the grass. Suddenly the belt gave way, and Jake saw that it was a kind of pouch, ripped now and spilling open, the wind from the lake catching bits of paper and blowing them over the grass. Jake stopped. Not paper, money, bills whirling up then floating in the air like hundreds of little kites. The sky, a surreal moment, filled with money.

The Russians stood still for a second, amazed, then lunged for the bills, grabbing them out of the air. Another gust sent them higher so the guards now had to leap up, no longer soldiers but astonished children snatching candy. Everyone on the terrace stood to watch. A few of the Russian officers ran down to restore order, brushing past bills scattering across the lawn. They shouted to the guards, but no one listened, yelling instead to each other as they chased the flying paper, stamping the ground to hold down the bills, and stuffing them into their pockets. So much money, blowing like confetti. Jake picked one up. Occupation marks. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. So much money.

Now the photographers began to break ranks and head for the lake too, until the Russian officers turned on them, holding them back with pointed guns. But Jake was already there. He went over to the body. An American uniform, the torn money belt lying in the mud, some of the notes drifting back into the water. But what was he doing here? Floating in the Russian zone to the most heavily guarded lawn in Berlin. Jake knelt down to the body. A face sickly white and puffy from the water, the tag chain at his neck hanging to the side. He reached for the tags, then stopped, thrown. No need. Not just any soldier. The shock of a corpse you knew. The boy on the flight from Frankfurt, white-knuckled, clasping the bench in fear, his fingers outstretched now, shriveled.

It was then, stupefied, that Jake noticed the bullet hole, the dark matted fabric where the blood had been. Behind him men were still shouting in Russian, but suddenly he was back in one of those Chicago rooms, everything disrupted. The eyes were open. Only one riding boot, the other pulled away by the water. How long had he been dead? He felt the jaw, clenched tight. But there was no coroner to turn to, nobody dusting for prints. He felt the blunt tip of a gun in his back.

“ Snell,” the Russian commanded, evidently his one word of German.

Jake looked up. Another soldier, pointing a gun, was waving him away. As he stood, the other grabbed the camera, saying something in Russian. The first soldier poked the gun again until Jake raised his hands and turned around. On the terrace the Big Three were being hustled into the house, only Stalin still rooted to the spot, assessing, an anxious look like the one from the Chancellery steps. A sharp crack of rifle fire startled the air. A few birds bolted up out of the reeds. The men on the terrace froze, then hurried quickly into the building.

Jake looked toward the sound of the shot. A Russian officer, firing into the air to stop the riot. In the silence that followed, the guards stood still, watching the rest of the money blow toward the Neuer Garten, sheepish now, afraid of what would follow, their perfectly arranged afternoon turned squalid, an embarrassment. The officers ordered them into line and took back the notes. Jake’s Russian pointed again to the house. Lieutenant Tully, who was afraid of flying. Four Russians were picking him up, flinging the money belt onto his chest as if it were evidence. But of what? So much money.

“Can I have my camera back?” Jake said, but the Russian yelled at him and pushed him forward with the gun, back to the photographers. The lawn was swarming with aides now, directing everyone back to the cars like tour leaders. Apologies for the disruption, as if Tully were a drunk who’d spoiled the party. The Russian guards watched, sullen, their one piece of luck blown away.

“Sorry,” Jake said to Liz. “They took the camera.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t get shot. What were you doing down there?”

“It was the guy from the plane.”

“What guy?”

“Tully. The kid with the boots.”

“But how-?”

“Let’s go, let’s go.” A brusque MR “Fun’s over.”

They were herded behind the others to the car park. Before they reached the gravel, Jake turned, looking back toward the lake.

“What the hell was he doing in Potsdam?” he said to himself.

“Maybe he’s with the delegation.”

Jake shook his head.

“Does it matter? Maybe he fell in the lake.”

He turned to her. “He was shot.”

Liz looked at him, then nervously back to the cars. “Come on, Jake. Let’s get out of here.”

“But why Potsdam?” In the park, a few of the bills still bounced along the grass, like leaves waiting to be raked. “With all that money.”

“Did you get any?”

He uncrumpled the salvaged note in his hand.

“A hundred marks,” Liz said. “Lucky you. Ten whole dollars.”

But there’d been more. Thousands more. And a man with a bullet in his chest.

“Come on, the others have gone,” Liz said.

Back to the press camp to drink beer. Jake smiled to himself, his mind racing, no longer walking dazed through ruins. A crime. The way in. His Berlin story.