The Elegant Lie

…

The Minerva bar, where Carter was due to meet the quartermaster sergeant, was tucked away down a narrow street called Pliniusstrasse. Tall, steep-roofed buildings with scallop-fringed slates cast heavy shadows on all but a sliver of road. Several of the shopfronts were closed with metal shutters, even though it was the middle of the day.

But the Minerva was open. Dance music blared into the street. Inside, a heavily made-up woman, stripped to the waist and wearing a white silk skirt which came down almost to the floor, was performing what looked like some kind of flamenco dance. Several men sat around at tables that had green and white checked tablecloths, leering at the woman’s breasts.

A US Army soldier was leaning up against the bar, his back to the woman, tilting a glass of honey-coloured liquid back and forth. He wore a short jacket patched with his sergeant’s chevrons, a wound stripe at the bottom of his sleeve and three gold bars below them, to indicate a year and a half’s continuous overseas service. His hair was grey and his cheeks looked dry and pink. When Carter walked over to the sergeant, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the dark, the man slid the drink away, allowing him to see the cloverleaf tattooed on the top of his right hand. Then Carter knew for certain it was Galton.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ said the sergeant.

A moment later, Carter was back on the street and the nerve-jangling music was already fading from his ears.

‘What did you think of the dancing girl?’ asked Galton.

‘I didn’t really have time to pay attention,’ replied Carter.

‘That’s a pity,’ said Galton. ‘She’s got talent.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Oh, I know so. She’s my wife.’

Carter glanced at him. ‘Jesus,’ he said.

Galton laughed. ‘One thing you have to learn about this place, and by that I mean this whole godforsaken country, is that you’re either buying or you’re selling, and that absolutely everything is for sale. That’s why you came to see me, after all. It’s the only way people can survive. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either starving or already dead. Nobody wants it that way, and maybe it will change some day, but right now that’s the way it is.’

The two men walked along the road that ran beside the city’s botanical garden. Galton strode quickly, facing straight ahead, but his pale blue eyes shifting nervously as he noted everything in his path. At the entrance, Galton turned into the gardens and only then did his pace slacken. There were high brick walls around the gardens and Carter was surprised to see that, far from being filled with exotic plants and trees, the whole place had been converted into a giant vegetable patch. A man wearing a rubber apron and the long-brimmed, field-grey wool cap of a former Third Reich soldier was using a fire hose to water a small field that had been planted with lettuce.

At a bench on the far side of the lettuce field, Galton sat down and stretched his arms, suddenly relaxed. For now, Carter stayed on his feet.

The location for their meeting had been well chosen. No one could get near them without being noticed, and their voices would be drowned out to all but each other by the swish and patter of water raining down as the old soldier played the hose back and forth across the lettuce patch.

‘They didn’t tell me anything about you,’ said Galton, ‘except that we spoke the same language.’

‘That ought to be enough,’ replied Carter.

‘I figured I’d be meeting with the buyer, but you don’t look like some big spender to me. My guess is you are working for a German, and this guy is smart enough to know I wouldn’t work with him if he came to me on his own. That’s why he sent you as a middleman. Am I right?’

Carter said nothing.

‘All right.’ Galton turned away and spat towards the miniature forest of lettuces. ‘Then at least guarantee me that your buyer is legit.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean can he pay? I don’t want to show up to a meeting and have you, or somebody else, whining in my face about how they’re running short on cash or trying to renegotiate the deal.’

‘He is not that kind of guy,’ said Carter, finally taking a seat beside Galton.

‘So you can vouch for him?’

‘I wouldn’t be here otherwise.’

‘Well, good’◦– Galton aimed a finger at Carter◦– ‘because if there are any problems, you’re the one I’m going to hold responsible.’

Their conversation paused as a woman passed by, pushing a pram whose wheels creaked with rust, and followed by two wide-eyed little boys in clunky boots which were too big for them. Seeing his uniform, the boys stopped and stared at the sergeant. The mother walked on a few paces, then turned and hissed at them. The boys snapped out of their trance, and ran to catch up with her.

The men went back to their discussion.

‘So what are you looking for, anyway?’ asked Galton.

‘The usual stuff,’ replied Carter. ‘Food. Candy. Medicine. Cigarettes. Soap.’

‘I got plenty of that, at least for now, but you need to understand that I don’t know how long I can keep the gravy train running. American bases are closing all over the zone we used to occupy, and this has given me an opportunity, but it’s not one that I’m going to be able to hold on to forever.’

‘How does it work?’ asked Carter.

‘The warehouses for the few bases that are remaining open are already filled to capacity. This means that literally hundreds of pallets of material are being shipped to storage areas which are being rented out wherever we can find them.’

‘Why not ship them back stateside?’ asked Carter.

The sergeant laughed. ‘They don’t want them! Some of the stuff only just got here. By the time it goes all the way back to America, it will either have expired or else whatever it is will have been replaced by newer equipment. In the last year alone, changes in the regulation of tunic patterns meant I had to destroy over a thousand perfectly good uniforms.’

‘Destroy them?’

‘Burned them! Those were my orders. So what I’m trying to tell you is that tonnes of material is basically getting blown to the winds while we get ourselves untangled from this country. It’s going to stay locked up in warehouses until people either forget about it altogether or else decide that they don’t want it anymore.’

A sudden, momentary spray of water from the hose rained down on them. They looked back at the old soldier, who smirked at them to show he had done it on purpose.

Galton swiped his hands across his sleeves to wipe away the droplets. He smiled back at the gardener, but his eyes stayed cold and hostile. ‘If this had been five years ago,’ he muttered through clenched teeth, ‘that would have been a flame thrower in his hands, and I bet he would have had the same shit grin on his face as he does now.’

Carter returned to business. ‘Tell me what you can deliver, and I’ll get the message across.’

‘All right.’ Galton sat forward and rubbed his face with his big, pink hands. ‘Let’s say two hundred packets of American cigarettes◦– Camels, Chesterfields, Lucky Strikes◦– whatever I can get my hands on. And five cases of canned fruit◦– it’ll probably be peaches and pears◦– and I can also get you twenty pounds of coffee. The real stuff. That comes in one-pound cans.’

‘And the cost?’ asked Carter.

‘The price is eight thousand marks. That’ll get you everything I mentioned and maybe a little bit more.’

‘It’ll need to happen soon.’

‘Let’s say the day after tomorrow at noon, on the corner of Bachemerstrasse and Stelzmannstrasse. That’s close to the Lindenburg hospital. There’ll be a blue delivery van with yellow writing on it. I’ll be sitting in the passenger seat. You’re going to get into the driver’s seat, hand me the money, and then I’m going to get out and walk away. You’re going to drive the van to wherever you need to go to unload it. Then you’re going to drive it back to the Lindenburg hospital and leave it in the parking lot reserved for delivery vehicles. You got all that?’

‘I’ll tell him what you said.’

‘I’ll wait for half an hour,’ said Galton. ‘If you don’t show, don’t come back to me later with a mouthful of excuses, because it won’t make any difference. It’ll be the last you’ll ever see of me.’

They walked out of the garden.

The old soldier had finished watering the lettuce patch. Now he was coiling up the hose, looping it over his shoulder so that he looked like a man being crushed by a python.

They were on the street now, about to go their separate ways. ‘I have to know,’ said Galton. ‘What are you doing here? In Germany, I mean. You aren’t a soldier. I can see that. But I’m guessing you might have been one, so why didn’t you go home?’

‘I have nothing to go home to,’ Carter told him.

For a moment, Galton’s expression changed and he looked lost, as if he suddenly couldn’t recall how he came to be here, standing in this place. ‘You and me both,’ he said.

After his meeting with Galton, Carter travelled out to Dasch’s compound in the Raderthal district. He took a bus as far as Höningerplatz, the end of the line, by which time it was just him and the driver. As he stepped out onto the cobbled square, Carter couldn’t even tell what Höningerplatz used to look like. Now it was nothing more than a large circle of smashed bricks and masonry, amongst which several enterprising people had constructed little shops selling brooms and buckets and shaving brushes. One stall was run by a man with no legs. He sat on the pavement at a table whose legs had also been removed, with his wares laid out in front of him◦– razor blades, combs and nail clippers.

From there, Carter walked south along a path called the Leichweg, with the wide expanse of a cemetery spreading off to his right; stone angels, some of them fingerless, others handless and others with their arms gone altogether, looked down from shrapnel-pocked pedestals upon the tilted gravestones.

Dasch’s compound stood at the intersection of Leichweg and Militärstrasse, a wide road that ran in an arc around the southern edge of the city. Carter arrived just as Dasch and Ritter were piling into the Tatra. Teresa stood off to one side, arms folded, studying Carter as he wiped the sweat from his face after the walk from Höningerplatz.

‘Come!’ shouted Dasch, beckoning to Carter. ‘We’re taking a little trip.’

‘Are you certain it’s a good idea,’ asked Teresa, ‘bringing him along?’

‘It’s a brilliant idea!’ Dasch told his daughter. ‘I know, because it’s mine. Now get in, Mr Carter’◦– he gestured at the cramped back seat of the car◦– ‘or we will be late for our appointment.’

With Ritter at the wheel, Dasch up in front and Carter wedged into the back, the Tatra skimmed along the main road that ran down the western bank of the Rhine, passing from the devastated suburbs of Cologne into the hilly countryside to the south. Ritter and Dasch were puffing away at cigars, filing the car with so much smoke that Carter finally wound down his window, sending a cloud of grey billowing out onto the road.

Carter told them about his meeting with Galton.

‘Perfect!’ boomed Dasch. ‘I will have the money ready.’

‘How do you know this man?’ asked Ritter. ‘Have you ever worked with him before? Is he known to the authorities?’ He seemed to be winding up for another barrage of questions.

Carter wasn’t sure that he could answer them this time, at least not to Ritter’s satisfaction, and he felt his throat tighten with fear.

This time it was Dasch who saved him. ‘What does it matter,’ he demanded, brandishing his cigar in Ritter’s face, ‘as long as he gets the job done? It’s my money, after all. Why must you always be so suspicious of everyone and everything? You’re worse than Teresa sometimes!’

Just outside Bonn, Ritter cut in from the highway, circling around the city towards the town of Bad Godesberg. At a village called Ippendorf, which was nothing more than a tiny cluster of houses clinging to a shred of pastureland, Ritter turned off the main road and they began to climb into a thickly wooded area which, according to the road signs, was called the Kottenforst.

The tarmac surface of the road quickly gave way to dirt, which gave way to mud, and eventually the car was just slipping along through potholes. They passed a sign with a skull and crossbones painted on it, as well as the word ‘Tollwut’◦– rabies.

Dasch turned and grinned at Carter. ‘That keeps away the spectators,’ he said.

Carter looked out at the forest. The branches of large trees growing on either side of the narrow road met in a tangled archway above their heads, cutting out most of the light.

He glimpsed a clearing up ahead and, a moment later, the car emerged into a large, open area, about three times as wide as a football field and maybe six times as long. Here, the trees had been cut back and the ground made level. Off to one side, about a third of the way down, he could just make out the arching metal roof of a large, camouflaged building with two huge sliding metal doors at the front, both of which were closed.

Ritter pulled over at the edge of the clearing, a short distance from the building.

The passengers climbed out.

‘What is this place?’ asked Carter.

‘It used to be the private airstrip of Franz Wendel, a military governor in southern Poland during the war, who had a holiday home around here. It was his idea to put up rabies warning signs.’

‘And now?’

Dasch held his arm out towards the building that was set back among the trees. ‘It is the haven of my pride and joy,’ he said.

As they entered through a side door, what Carter saw so stunned him that for a moment he found it impossible to breathe. A C-54 cargo plane, complete with what appeared to be Canadian markings on the sides and on the wings, filled up the giant hangar. Dozens of wooden boxes, each one the size of a milk crate, were being loaded into the plane’s storage bay by men who barely glanced at the newcomers as they went about their task.

Dasch slapped Carter on the back, as if to dislodge something that had got caught in his throat. ‘You seem a little pale!’ he laughed.

‘Where the hell did you get this?’ asked Carter.

‘That is an interesting story,’ said Dasch. Putting his hands in his pockets, he strolled around the aircraft, pausing now and then to examine the splintery wooden crates that were being loaded aboard.

Carter followed behind, forcing his mind through the cloud of confusion that had enveloped him since he walked into the hangar, and to concentrate on every detail he could see. Wilby will want to know everything, thought Carter, if he doesn’t drop dead from a heart attack when I tell him what Dasch has got his hands on.

‘In the spring of 1945,’ explained Dasch, ‘a Royal Canadian Air Force transport plane loaded with medical supplies set off from Kilmarnock airfield in Scotland, bound for an airfield just outside Oslo, Norway. Crossing the North Sea, it encountered an ice storm, which ran it off course. It overshot its destination and crossed into Sweden, where it made an emergency landing at Bulltofta airbase. By then, Bulltofta had become a parking lot of Allied as well as German planes, some of which had landed there in emergencies and others which had flown there deliberately to escape the war. Regardless of which country they belonged to, all of the planes were impounded and their crews sent to live in separate military barracks until the war was over. When the war did end, three months later, the aircrews were all sent home and most of the planes were destroyed. Due to a misunderstanding between the Canadians and the Swedish about its condition, this C-54 was initially slated for scrap. By the time the mistake had been cleared up, paperwork showed that the plane had already been junked. In fact, when the plane took off for the Arctic city of Kiruna, where it was to be stripped of usable parts and its aluminium frame recycled in a furnace, it travelled south instead, across the Baltic, landing on a frozen lake in northern Germany. The pilots were two deserters from the German air force, who had managed to avoid forced repatriation by the Swedes to an area now under Russian control. Once the plane had landed, its wings and engines were dismantled and the aircraft was put into hiding until a suitable buyer could be found. And that buyer turned out to be me. I had heard about this plane, but at first I didn’t believe the story. It took me two years to track down the men who had stolen it. They were working in a cement factory in Poland. They had all but given up hope that their great adventure would ever pay off, and you should have seen their faces when I offered not only to buy the plane but also to hire them as its pilots.’

‘And what are you going to do with it?’ asked Carter.

‘Tonight, we will be making our first delivery by air. I told you I would need that bigger map up on my wall!’

Just then, they were startled by a crash.

One of the loaders had been handing a crate through the side door of the plane. The man who stood in the doorway had taken the crate from him, but lost his grip and dropped it. The crate had fallen several feet to the concrete floor of the hangar and its glass contents had shattered.

‘Damn you!’ roared Dasch.

The man who had dropped the crate stared in terror at Dasch, his hands still clasping the air where the crate had been only a second before. ‘I’m sorry,’ he stammered. ‘It was an accident.’

Dasch walked towards him and then suddenly stopped.

Carter wondered for a moment if he was going to pull a gun.

But Dasch just stood there, rooted to the spot. ‘An accident may be the reason,’ he said, his voice low and threatening, ‘but it is not an excuse.’

‘There is always some loss,’ said Ritter, trying to calm his master. ‘Every businessman knows that. Garlinsky will understand.’

Dasch turned and stared at him. ‘You may be right about the loss,’ he said, ‘but as for Garlinsky understanding, I wouldn’t be so sure about that.’

By now, a puddle of liquid had formed around the crate, one corner of which had splintered with the impact of its fall. Carter could smell alcohol.

The man who caused the accident had clambered down from the plane and now picked up the crate. Broken glass shifted inside. More liquid poured out over his legs. ‘I don’t think they’re all broken,’ he said. ‘Mr Dasch, what would you like me to do?’

‘Put it aside,’ ordered Dasch, ‘and see if you can finish your job without ruining anything else.’

Waddling under the weight of his burden, the man carried the crate over to a corner of the hangar, set it down and returned to his work, head bowed and silent as he walked by.

Dasch walked over to the puddle, dipped a finger into the liquid and touched it to his lips. ‘Scottish whisky,’ he said. ‘Apparently, the Russians acquired a taste for this stuff when it was brought to them as gifts by British sailors delivering supplies to the Arctic port of Archangel, on what they called the Murmansk Run.’

‘This plane is flying to Russia?’ Carter asked in amazement.

‘Not quite that far, my friend, but close enough that you might hear their balalaika music.’

A man jumped down from the cargo door, a clipboard hugged against his chest. He was one of the pilots and wore an olive green gabardine flight suit, the cuffs tucked into a pair of black sheepskin-lined flight boots. ‘We have a small problem, Mr Dasch,’ he said.

‘What problem?’ asked Dasch.

‘As you know, sir,’ explained the pilot, ‘since there appears to be no provision for refuelling once we land, we are carrying our own gasoline for the return journey. This has taken up a significant portion of our cargo space but, more importantly, it has also limited the weight of cargo we can carry. According to my calculations’◦– he held out the clipboard◦– ‘if we try to load every case on board, we will be dangerously over our weight limit for the kind of flying we are going to have to do. If we unloaded some of the crates—’

‘No! You’ll already be one short!’ Dasch pointed to the corner of the hangar, where the crumpled box was still leaking whisky. ‘You could unload some of the fuel.’

For a moment, the pilot’s face froze. ‘Then we would not have enough to make it home.’

‘Surely there must be some place where you can refuel,’ said Dasch.

The pilot thought for a moment. ‘There is a small commercial airstrip not far off our route. Planes come and go from there all the time. The man in charge is an old friend of ours. He can sell us fuel and make sure our plane is not recorded on the manifests. But it might mean a delay in our return.’

‘How much of a delay?’

‘A day. Perhaps two.’

‘I think I can spare you that long,’ said Dasch.

It took another hour to load the plane and for the pilots to conduct their pre-flight check. By then the sun had gone down, and the deep and sleepy green of the pines all around them vanished into coal-black silhouettes.

When the great doors of the hangar were finally rolled back, the stars were already out, balancing like Christmas ornaments upon the jagged treetops.

Dasch walked outside, followed by Ritter and Carter. It was cold, and a light wind rustled through the tops of the pines, filling the air with a hiss like running water, as if the moonlit runway were, in fact, the ruffled surface of a lake.

The engines of the plane fired up, exploding from the cavern of the hangar. The wedge-shaped chocks beneath the wheels were pulled away and, by the glow of a light in the cockpit, Carter could see the pilot and co-pilot, their heads cocooned in flying helmets, eyes fixed upon the instrument panel in front of them.

The cockpit light was extinguished and then the plane began to move, the great buzz saws of its propellers flattening the grass as it manoeuvred out of the hangar.

‘I meant to bring champagne!’ Dasch shouted over the bone-rattling thunder of the engines. He took Carter gently by the arm. ‘See if you can find an unbroken bottle in that crate. We ought to celebrate with something, after all.’

Carter made his way back into the hangar. The main lights had been switched off, and only a few bare bulbs along the walls lit the huge space. The men who made up the ground crew had already set off on their bicycles down the road that led out of the forest, clattering on metal rims for lack of rubber tyres.

Carter knelt down in front of the box. The lid had been nailed shut, but the drop had jarred it partly open and it required only a little effort to remove the wooden slats covering the whisky bottles, which had been packed in straw. Three of the nine bottles on the top had shattered, and Carter had to be careful as he moved aside the jagged shards of broken glass. The smell of the whisky drilled into his senses with a sharp mustiness that reminded him of new leather. He noticed that one of the slats had split in such a way as to reveal a hollow centre. No wonder it snapped, thought Carter, if they’re going to use such cheap materials. He prised it back carefully to avoid getting splinters in his wrist as he lifted out one of the unbroken bottles. The fragile slat snapped again where it had been nailed to the body of the case, coming away so suddenly that Carter almost lost his balance as he crouched there in the dimly lit corner of the hangar. As he regained his balance, something fell to the floor just by his feet. Glancing down, he realised it was a bundle of money. At first he thought it had tumbled from his pocket but, as he picked it up, ready to stash it back into his coat, he realised that the money wasn’t his. It was too crisp. Too new. In fact, it wasn’t even German currency. Peeling away one of the notes from the bundle, he found himself squinting at a Russian twenty-five-rouble note, its bluish-green tint underlaid by corn-pollen yellow, showing the face of Lenin on one side, and the hammer and sickle crest of the Soviet Union cupped between two sheaves of wheat, as if by hands at prayer. Fanning his thumb through the stack, he saw that they were all twenty-five-rouble notes. He picked up the broken piece of wood and shook it, and another slab of money slid out into his hand. Studying the wood, he could see that the slat had been cut in half, hollowed out and glued back together before being sanded so that the seams were almost invisible.

Carter looked around him in case someone else might have seen. But there was no one else in the hangar, and the attention of Dasch and Ritter was taken up by the plane, which had come to a stop at the beginning of the runway. Off to one side, Carter could see the tiny orange sun of Dasch’s cigar.

Carter’s pulse was thumping in his neck as he pocketed the bills. He rose to his feet and was halfway out of the hangar before he remembered the whisky. He spun around and ran back to grab a bottle, arriving at Dasch’s side just as the C-54’s wheels left the ground. For a moment, it looked as if the plane wasn’t going to clear the trees, but then it wobbled into the sky and, keeping close to the ground, soon vanished beyond the saw-toothed horizon where the runway dissolved into the blackness of the forest.

Dasch turned to Carter, his teeth starkly white in the darkness as he smiled. ‘You almost missed it,’ he said.

Carter handed over the bottle.

The cork was soon removed and the whisky passed around.

‘I wonder how much the Russians pay for this,’ Dasch said. ‘I ought to start making it myself.’ He took a drink, growling at the fire in his belly, then pressed the bottle against Carter’s chest.

Carter took it from him and knocked back a mouthful, but his mind was racing so fast that he barely tasted the alcohol. Smuggling whisky he could understand, but why hide Russian money in the crates? Dasch obviously had no idea about the roubles, so why keep it secret from him? Why hide one crime inside another? It made no sense to him at all.

When the droning of the plane’s engines had faded at last into the night, Ritter and Carter slid the hangar doors shut and returned to the car, where Dasch was already waiting.

For a while, as the car slipped along the muddy track, nobody spoke. Only when they turned again onto the main road back to Cologne, mud from the wheels spattering against the cowlings, did somebody finally talk.

‘Well, Mr Carter,’ said Dasch, ‘what do you think of my new toy?’

‘You were right about needing a bigger map,’ replied Carter.

‘My thoughts exactly,’ replied Dasch, and he lit up another cigar.