Then We Take Berlin Read Online Free PDF Page B

Frank, I’ve never seen Nell.”
    “When were we last there together?”
    “Fifty-eight.”
    “So it was. My God. Time doesn’t fly, it gets launched from Canaveral.”
    “I didn’t go back at all between ’48 and ’51. In ’56 I was stuck in Tel Aviv monitoring traffic. Absolute waste of time. I damn near quit after that.”
    “Monitoring Russian airwaves is never a waste of time.”
    “This was Suez, Frank. A total cock-up, and I wasn’t monitoring Russian communications, I was monitoring yours.”
    “Yeah, well I guess that was pretty much the low point in the special relationship.”
    “From late ’58 to ’60 I was in Beirut. Now, that was fun. Pretending I was a stringer for The Times and eavesdropping on every indiscretion in the St. George’s hotel bar. Getting rat-arsed with Kim Philby. Each of us pretending we didn’t know. I don’t know how I kept a straight face. Regular trips home, the occasional hop to Athens or Rome. Cairo or Istanbul. Didn’t exactly restore my faith in the service, but it kept me on board for a couple more years. Then in ’61 I was back in Berlin for the last time.”
    “Before or after the wall?”
    “During. I flew out just a couple of days after they started putting up the barriers. In August. The British had me observe LBJ’s visit firsthand. I stayed on a month or so after that. When Steve mentioned the old lady hanging off the building in Bernauer Straße to us . . . well I was there. That was September ’61. I saw it happen. I saw her fall. Her name was Frieda Schulze.”
    “But she lived, right?”
    “Oh yes, she lived. But something in me died. It was watching her dangle, both sides tugging at her. I can’t translate it into precise words, but if ever there was a symbol, writ large, especially for me, that was it. It was then I knew it was all over. I went back home and put in my papers. They could hardly object. They’d called me up for two years in 1945 and got the best part of sixteen out of me.”
    “And since then? You glossed over that too.”
    “And I’ll gloss over it now.”
    “Things ain’t been so good?”
    “No, they haven’t.”
    “The low-heeled life of a gumshoe in a high-heeled country where nothing much really happens? A country where no one carries a gun, and what’s a gumshoe without a gun?”
    “You could put it like that.”
    “Divorces. You do divorces?”
    “Yes. I do divorces. I’m the guy who follows the errant lovers down to Brighton at a prearranged time and catches them in the glare of a flashbulb in a seaside hotel.”
    “Crummy.”
    “I can think of worse words for it. I can think of more accurate words for it, but yes, crummy will do.”
    “And yet you hesitate when Steve makes you the best offer you’ve had since you left the service.”
    Wilderness said nothing to this, waited while Spoleto waved for the check.
    “You see the guys at the centre table?” Spoleto said as he counted out dollars.
    “The one on the left’s George Plimpton. Edits the Paris Review . Guy next to him is Lee Strasberg, runs the Actors Studio, y’know . . . Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, Eli Wallach. The guy next to him . . .”
    “Is Norman Mailer. Frank, do you honestly think I wouldn’t recognise Norman Mailer? His first novel came out while we were all in Berlin. I read it. Eddie Clark read it. Didn’t you read it?”
    “Nah. I don’t want to read about the war. I never wanted to read about the war. Hell, I didn’t even go to see South Pacific . I was probably the only guy in New York who didn’t. Look over to your right. See the big feller, lots of dark hair. That’s the Broadway producer Arthur Cantor, one of the big wheels on the Great White Way. And do you know the woman he’s with?”
    Cantor was with two women, one of whom he most certainly knew. But he sensed that Frank had not recognised her and was referring to the other.
    Wilderness thought her face more than vaguely familiar—hair up, glasses, next-to-no