St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(111)
How many pairs of shoes had he actually polished in his lifetime? he wondered. He sat under a lamp near the window, working the nugget carefully into the leather with a small piece of cloth torn from an old singlet. Would the sound of his brush buffing the leather wake Rebecca? He decided to gently shine the surface of his shoes with more of the old singlet just in case. As he worked the folded fabric over the leather his mind went back over the past few months, over the people he had met and the horror and the pain.
He looked out through the curtains, into the darkness. Out there was Gerhardt Scheiner’s city. He and Scheiner had been on opposite sides but now they shared the same pain, the pain of war and of a daughter lost, or in Scheiner’s case not lost but gone all the same. They had both escaped their wars almost unscathed too, until the very end at least.
Berlin stopped polishing, the folded scrap of cloth in his right hand poised just above the toe of the shoe. Scheiner had said that, he remembered, said it out by the woodpile on that Monday morning, said that he had made it to the very last days of the war unscathed, until the bunker and the Russian flamethrower and his admission to a Lazarette, a military hospital. Berlin put the shoe down on the carpet. He had seen that word, Lazarette, in Scheiner’s records and he suddenly recalled he had seen it on more than one page.
FIFTY-SEVEN
The grey envelope from the military records office was in a zippered section in the front of his suitcase. Shoe polish on Berlin’s thumb left a black mark on the front of the envelope as he pulled it out. Back under the lamp he carefully looked through the photocopied pages. The hinges of the hall cupboard squeaked as he opened the door. He fumbled in the dark to find the overcoat pocket with the German-English dictionary and left the cupboard door ajar.
It took an hour and while the translation wasn’t anywhere near perfect it was good enough. Obergefreiter Gerhardt Scheiner had been admitted to a military hospital on 25 April 1945 with extensive burns to the face and upper body but there was an earlier record of him being taken to hospital. That was on 23 November 1943, with Scheiner suffering from blast injuries during a night bombing raid. Had his Lancaster been flying that night? Berlin wondered. The injuries listed were severe and included a badly fractured right hip and thigh. They sounded like the kind of injuries that would most definitely leave a man with a limp, but probably still able to perform his duties as an anti-aircraft gunner. Back in Melbourne Gerhardt Scheiner had shown no evidence of a limp, or any injuries to his legs as he paced his living room. He’d said the scarring from the flamethrower was his only wartime injury but being blown up in an RAF air raid definitely wasn’t the kind of thing a man might forget.
Berlin opened the curtains wide and stood and stared at the still-scarred city laid out below him. What must it have been like down there in 1945, in the last days of April as the victorious Red Army closed in for the kill? As he’d wandered the streets that afternoon still-visible bullet holes and craters gouged out of the stone buildings by shellfire had told a small part of the story but the rest was unimaginable. Or could he imagine it? Did it happen at night, perhaps during a Red Army artillery bombardment or the aftermath? A limping man in the uniform of an anti-aircraft gunner encountering a man in the black uniform of the SS, a uniform that would mean summery execution if the wearer was captured by Russian soldiers bent on vengeance for what had been done to their motherland.
Did the SS man make Obergefreiter Scheiner undress first? That would be easiest. Did they exchange uniforms, perhaps? After that, one more gunshot and one more corpse in that blazing hell of death and destruction wouldn’t be noticed. Did he use the same pistol, the one he used on the snow-covered road in Poland? He would have taken Scheiner’s Soldbuch, his paybook, from the body along with his ID tags and any other identification or personal items. Did he leave his own papers with the body? Berlin wondered.
But now a man out of his SS uniform, a man dressed as a low-ranking anti-aircraft gunner, would have no authority, no power to resist the Feldgendarmerie, the military police. No power to stop being forced at gunpoint to join a scratch combat company, to be handed a rifle, herded into a makeshift bunker to fight to the last against the Russian tanks and flamethrowers.
Berlin slipped the photocopies back into the envelope. What did he really know for certain, what could he prove and what good would it do in any case? Would he tell Rebecca, or just leave this particular ghost at rest? Should he tell Lazlo perhaps? Lazlo who had friends with special talents and access to certain items that would be hard to trace. He dropped the envelope into the waste paper bin by the desk,then changed his mind and put it back into his suitcase.
Charlie Berlin stood by the hotel window in the darkness, imagining the wail of air-raid sirens and the lights of the city blinking out one by one. The clouds had gone and he looked up at the night sky. Were there ghosts up there too, he wondered, twenty thousand feet above him? Ghosts of the great fleets of bombers, of Lancasters and Halifaxes and Wellingtons and the ghosts of thousands of frightened young men and boys. Were they up there still, circling above the Big City? Circling high above Berlin, up there forever and ever in a bomber stream without end.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to Ben Ball and Kirsten Abbott at Penguin for their continued and much appreciated support, to Jo Rosenberg for her clear and insightful suggestions at the editing stage, and to the Penguin design team for a series of striking and evocative new covers.