Charity Page 2

  Jim stirred, as if my stare had disturbed his sleep. But his eyelids didn’t move. He made a noise; a deep breath and then a stifled groan that ended in a subdued nasal snort as he snatched his arm down under the blanket and resumed his sleep. Jim was tough and wiry but his appearance had never been athletic. Now his white face, with the vestigial eyebrows, made him look like a corpse prettified and readied for the relatives.

  Jim had picked up some kind of infection of the liver, or maybe it was the kidneys. The Russian hospital doctors said they could treat it, but, since their diagnosis varied from day to day according to what they were drinking with lunch, no one believed them. Some doctor the American embassy had on call wouldn’t give a diagnosis; he just advised that Jim shouldn’t be subjected to a plane trip. Rather than have him face any more treatment by Moscow’s medics, Jim’s American wife had wired the money for him to be evacuated by train and attended by a nurse. Jim’s wife was a woman with considerable influence. She had arranged that her father in the State Department sent a night-action fax to make sure the embassy people jumped to it. She wasn’t with us; she had to host a Washington dinner party for her father.

  Although the paperwork for Jim’s passage was being handled by the Americans, someone in London Central ordered that I should accompany him as far as Berlin. I was in Moscow at the time, and their message said it simply meant delaying my return by twenty-four hours. But going from Moscow to West Berlin by air was quite different to doing the same trip by train. By train I was going to encounter whole armies of nosy customs officials, security men and frontier police. Jim had a US passport nowadays, the nurse was Canadian and I was stuck with the German passport that I had used for my entry. With this cosmopolitan party I would have to cross Poland, and then travel across a large section of the German Democratic Republic, before getting to anywhere I could call home. Perhaps the people in London didn’t appreciate that. There was sometimes good reason to think pen-pushers in the Foreign Office in Whitehall were still using nineteenth-century maps.

  I was looking at Jim, trying to decide how ill he really was, when there came a sudden sound, like a shovelful of heavy mud hitting a wall. The compartment rocked slightly. With no lessening of speed, the express thudded the air and sped between some empty loading platforms, leaving behind no more than an echoed gasp and a whiff of burned diesel. The train was packed. You could feel the weight of it as it swayed, and hear the relentless pounding of the bogies. The compartments of the wagon-lit had been booked for weeks. The cheaper coach seats were all filled and there were people sleeping amid the litter on the floor and propped between baggage in the corridors. Five rail cars were reserved for the army: hardy teenagers with cropped heads and pimples. Their kitbags and rifles were under guard in the freight car. Returning to training camps after playing the sort of war games that didn’t include time for sleep. Exhausted draftees. The fighting battalions had forsaken rifles long ago. Rifles were only for clumsy youngsters learning to drill.

  Further back in the train there were East European businessmen in plastic suits and clip-on ties; shrivelled old women with baskets heavy with home-made vodka and smoked pork sausage; stubble-chinned black-market dealers with used TV sets crammed into freshly printed cardboard boxes.

  Coming half-awake, Jim stretched out a red bony foot so that his toes pressed upon the metal divider that formed the side of a tiny clothes closet. Then he grabbed the edge of the blanket, turned away and curled up small. ‘Don’t you ever sleep?’ he growled drowsily. So he wasn’t asleep and dreaming; he simply had his eyes closed. Perhaps that was the way Jim Prettyman had always fooled me. Long ago we’d been very close friends, one of a foursome made up with his petulant first wife Lucinda and my wife Fiona. We’d all worked for the Department in those days. Then Jim had been selected for special jobs and sent to work in corporate America as a cover for his real tasks. He’d changed jobs and changed wives, changed nationality and changed friends in rapid succession. He was not the sort of wavering wimp who let a good opportunity slip past while worrying who might get hurt.

  ‘There’s someone standing outside in the corridor,’ I told him.

  ‘The conductor.’

  ‘No, not him. Our bad-tempered conductor has assumed tenancy of compartment number fifteen. And he’s stinking fall-down drunk and will soon be unconscious.’

  ‘Slide open the door and look,’ Jim suggested. ‘Or is that too easy?’ His voice was croaky.

  ‘You’re the one who’s dying,’ I said. ‘I’m the security expert. Remember?’

  ‘Was there someone at the railway terminal?’ he asked, before remembering to try and smile at my joke. When I made no move to investigate the corridor noise he repeated the question.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Someone you recognized?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It could be the same goon I had sitting in the lobby of my hotel.’

  ‘Go man!’ said Jim wearily. He closed his eyes tight, and, with a practised gesture, bound his rosary round his wrist in some signal of benediction.

  I went to the door, undid the catch and slid it open, unprepared for the bright moonlit countryside that was painted like a mural along the uncurtained windows of the corridor. There was a man there, standing a few steps away. He was about five feet six tall, with trimmed beard and neat moustache. His woollen Burberry scarf struck a note of affluence that jarred with the rest of his attire: the trenchcoat old and stained, and a black military-style beret that in Poland had become the badge of the elderly veteran of long-ago wars.

  We looked at each other. The man gave no sign of friendliness nor recognition. ‘How far to the frontier?’ I asked him in my halting Polish.

  ‘Half an hour; perhaps less. It’s always like this. They are taking us on a long detour around the track repairs.’

  I nodded my thanks and went back into my compartment. ‘It’s okay,’ I told Jim.

  ‘Who is it? Someone you know?’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  ‘You may as well get some shut-eye too. Will the Poles come on and question us at the frontier?’

  ‘No,’ I said. Then, changing my mind: ‘Maybe. It will be all right.’ I wondered if the detour was really because of flood damage the way the press announcement said, or was there something at the frontier that the Soviets didn’t want anyone to see?

  I was regretting my ready agreement to take this train from Moscow back to my office in Berlin. I didn’t have diplomatic status; they had wanted to supply me with a letter with the royal coat of arms at the top, asking everyone en route to be kind to us. That too was a legacy of the FO’s nineteenth-century mentality. I had to point out to them that such a missive might look incongruous when carried by someone with a German passport accompanied by an American and a Canadian. I’d not objected to this task of escorting Jim, partly for old times’ sake, partly because I’d heard that Gloria would also be in Moscow at that time and the delay would give me two extra days with her. That was another fiasco. Her schedule was changed; she was leaving as I arrived. I’d only had time for one hurried lunch with Gloria, and that was marred by her interpreter arriving to collect her half an hour early, and standing over us with a watch in one hand, a coffee cup in the other, warning us about the traffic jams on the road to the airport. My brief moment with her was made more painful because she was looking more alluring than ever. Her long blonde hair was tucked up into a spiky fur hat, her complexion pale and perfect, and her large brown eyes full of affection, and devoted to me.

  Now I had plenty of time to regret my readiness to return by train. Now came the consequences. We were getting close to the Polish frontier, and I was not well regarded in the Socialist Republic of Poland.

  I had recognized the man in the corridor as ‘Sneaky Jack’, one of the hard men employed by our Warsaw embassy. I suppose London had assigned him to keep an eye on Jim. I had reason to believe that Jim’s head was filled with the Department’s darkest secrets, a
nd I wondered what Sneaky had been ordered to do if those secrets were compromised. Was he there to make sure Jim didn’t fall into enemy hands alive?

  ‘Where’s that bloody nurse?’ said Jim as I locked the sliding door. He turned over to look at me. ‘She should be here holding my hand.’ The nurse was a pretty young woman from Winnipeg, Canada. She was spending six months working in a Moscow hospital on an exchange scheme and had welcomed this opportunity to cut it short. She looked after Jim as if he was her nearest and dearest. Only when she was almost dropping from exhaustion did she retire to her first-class compartment along the corridor.

  ‘The nurse has had a long day, Jim. Let her sleep.’ I suppose he had sensed my anxiety. Jim had never been a field agent; he’d started out as a mathematician and got to the top floor via Codes and Ciphers. It was better if he didn’t know that Sneaky was one of our people. And it was bad security to tell him. But if Jim ran into trouble and Sneaky had to tell him what to do …? Oh, hell.

  ‘In the corridor … little fellow with a beard. If we hit problems, and I’m not close by, do as he says.’

  ‘You’re not scared, are you, Bernard?’

  ‘Me? Scared? Let me get at them.’

  Jim acknowledged my well-rehearsed imitation of my boss Dicky Cruyer by giving a smile that was restrained enough to remind me that he was sick and in pain.

  ‘It will be all right,’ I told him. ‘With an embassy man outside the door they won’t even come in here.’

  ‘Let’s play it safe,’ he said. ‘Get that nurse back here and in uniform, waving a thermometer or a fever chart or something. That’s what she’s here for, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure. If that’s what you want.’ I felt that a man in Jim’s situation needed reassurance but I was probably wrong about that as I was wrong about everything else that happened on that journey.

  I went along to find the nurse. I needn’t have worried about disturbing her sleep. She was up and dressed in her starched white nurse’s uniform, to which was added a smart woollen overcoat and knitted hat to keep her warm. She was drinking hot coffee from a vacuum flask. Bracing herself against the rock and roll of the train, she poured some into a plastic cup for me without asking if I wanted it.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘I must look a sight in this stupid hat. I bought it for my kid brother, but I’m freezing cold. They don’t have much heat on these trains.’

  I tasted the coffee. It was made with canned condensed milk and was very sweet. I suppose she liked it like that. I said: ‘I’ve done this lousy journey a million times and I’ve never had the brains to bring a vacuum flask of coffee with me.’

  ‘I brought six of these flasks,’ she said. ‘Vacuum flasks were about the only thing I could find in the Moscow shops that would make a useful gift for my aunts and uncles back home. And they all expect a souvenir. Can you believe that they don’t even have fridge magnets? I was looking for something with the Kremlin on it.’

  ‘Moscow is not a great spot for shopping,’ I agreed.

  ‘It’s a not a great spot for anything,’ she said. ‘Lousy climate, stinking food, surly natives. Getting out of there early was the best thing that happened to me in a long time.’

  ‘Not everyone likes it,’ I agreed. ‘Personally there are quite a few towns I’d be happy to cross off my itinerary. Washington DC for a start.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say that. I worked in Washington DC for over a year. What parties they have there! I loved it.’

  ‘By the way, the comrades who come climbing aboard at the frontier can be difficult about jewellery. I would tuck that sapphire brooch out of sight, if I were you.’

  ‘Oh, this?’ she said, fingering it on the lapel of her coat. ‘Mr Prettyman gave it to me. I wanted to wear it, to show him I appreciated it.’ Maybe she saw a question in my face, for she quickly added: ‘It was a little present from Mr and Mrs Prettyman. His wife was on the phone. She asked him to give it to me. They are determined to believe I saved his life.’

  ‘And you didn’t?’

  ‘I stopped the night-duty man cutting his appendix out, that night when he was admitted. It was a crazy diagnosis but I guess he would have lived.’ She paused. ‘But that night doctor was very crocked. And he was going to try doing it himself. The things I saw in that hospital, you would never believe. When I think about it, maybe I did save his life.’

  ‘How sick is he?’

  ‘He’s bad. These kind of infections don’t always respond to drugs … The truth is no one knows too much about them.’ Her voice trailed away as she fiddled with the pin of her brooch, concerned that she had revealed too much about her patient. ‘But don’t worry. If anything happened suddenly I could have him taken off in Berlin. The embassy people said Warsaw was not a good place.’ She held the brooch in the palm of her hand and looked at it. ‘It’s a great keepsake. I like the kooky daisy shape; I’ve always loved daisies. I really appreciate it, but do you really think some Russkie is going to risk his career? He’d look kind of crazy, wouldn’t he: snatching from a tourist like me a little silver-plated brooch with plastic sides and coloured brilliants?’ She grinned mischievously. ‘Want to look closer?’

  ‘I don’t have to look any closer,’ I said, but I took it from her anyway. ‘It’s not a flower, not a daisy, it’s an antique sunburst pattern. And that’s not black plastic, it’s badly tarnished silver, with yellow gold on the back. The big, luminous, faintly blue stone in the centre is a top-quality sapphire; maybe thirty carats. It’s been neglected: badly rubbed with scratches, but that could all be polished away. All those “coloured brilliants” that punctuate each ray of it are matched diamonds pavé set.’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

  ‘The fastening is a simple pin, without safety catches. It’s antique … well over a hundred years old. It’s worth a pile of money.’

  ‘Golly. Are you sure? Where did you learn so much about jewellery?’

  ‘Back in the Sixties, in Berlin, they were tearing down some old houses in Neustadt. The bulldozer pushed a wall down and found a secretly bricked-up part of the cellar. It was full of crates and metal boxes. My father was Berlin security supremo for the British. He had to take charge of it. He tried to get out of it but some of the valuables were marked with labels from the Reichsbank. That opened a whole can of worms …’ I stopped. ‘I’m sorry, I’m being a bore.’ I gave her the brooch.

  ‘No, you’re not. I want to hear.’ She was examining the brooch carefully. ‘I don’t know anything about the war and the Nazis, apart from what I’ve seen back home in movies.’

  ‘Gold, silver, coins, foreign paper money including pounds and dollars. And boxes of jewellery and antique cutlery and stuff; most of it solid silver. The Reichsbank labels made it political. The SS had stored their loot in the Reichsbank. So did Göring and some of the others. It could have been the property of the Federal Republic, or it might be claimed by the governments of countries the Nazis took over in the war. Some of the jewellery was thought to be part of the family jewels of the House of Hesse that were stolen by American soldiers in 1945. In other words no one had the slightest idea what it all was. The first job was to have it all listed and itemized, so the descriptions could be circulated. My father had three experienced Berlin jewellers going through it. It was in the old swimming hall in Hauptstrasse in Schöneberg. A big barn of a place, made of shiny white tiles, derelict at that time but still faintly smelling of chlorine and bleach. Folding tables from the army canteen were set up in the drained pool; the jewels and silver and stuff were all arranged on them and there were big printed numbers marking each item. I can see it now. There were cops sitting on the three-metre diving board looking down at us. My Dad told me to keep my eyes open and make sure the jewellers didn’t steal anything.’ I drank some coffee.

  ‘And did they steal anything?’

  ‘I was very young. I’m not sure if they did or not, but in those days Germans were scrupulously honest; it was one of the
aspects of Berlin I took for granted until I went elsewhere. These old jewellers showed me each piece before they wrote out the description. It went on for four and a half days. For me it was an intensive course in jewellery appraisal. But I’ve forgotten half of it. That stone is cut as der Achteck-Kreuzschliff. I only know the German word for it. I suppose it means an octagonal crosscut. The sapphire is a cushion cut; quite old.’

  ‘What happened to all the treasure?’

  ‘I’m not sure. What I remember is having to decipher the handwriting – some of it in old German script – and type it out, with eight carbon copies. It took me a week. And I remember how happy my father was when he finally got a signature for it.’

  ‘That’s quite a story,’ she said. ‘I’ve never owned real jewellery before. Now if you would kindly turn around and avert your eyes, I shall tuck my valuable brooch into my money belt.’

  The express slowed as we neared the frontier, and then, after a lot of hissing and puffing of brakes and machinery, crawled slowly into Soviet Russia’s final western outpost, where floodlamps on tall posts swamped the checkpoint area with dazzling light. Like foamy water, it poured down upon the railway tracks and swamped the land. A freight train, caked in mud, was still and abandoned; a shunting engine was steamy and shiny with oil. At its shadowy edge I could see the barrack blocks of the local frontier battalion and their guard towers. Under the fierce lighting, star-shaped shadows sprang from the feet of the sentries, railway officials, immigration and customs men. The lights illuminated every last splash of icy sludge on the army trucks that were awaiting the Soviet draftees. The soldiers alighted first, in a frenzy of shouting, saluting and stamping of feet. Then there came the noise of the army’s well-used railway cars being uncoupled and shunted off to a distant siding.