Rudy Kruger approached the celebrations at the Berlin Wall with a feeling of intense spite. Far too many people were having fun. Rudy hated that.
The crowds around the section of the wall which ran through Checkpoint Charlie made him particularly angry. ‘Who are these people to rejoice in their sudden freedom?’ he whispered through gritted teeth. Rudy had already made one fortune smuggling goods and people from the East to the West and was hoping to make many more. ‘Now all the little bastards have to do is walk through the holes. The wall is like a summer fog.’
He stood on the outside of the crowd spitting rage and muttering venom. Did these people not know Rudy had a penthouse flat and three extremely expensive women to pay for? A monthly mortgage on all four properties. Now his one source of income had died, all in the space of a few weeks.
He recalled the television pictures of the would-be refugees clambering onto trains, smashing the windows and clinging to the frames not caring whether they cut themselves with the broken glass. There were pictures of those who had fallen off and lost limbs as the trains had run over them. Rudy had roared with laughter. He had expected the communist guards to pump the fare-dodging passengers full of bullets when they arrived at the next station. You could not escape from the Reds. That was the great guarantee about them. Not unless you dealt in dollars and bought them the western goods they so cherished. Now the slavering lips belonged to the whole population. They would regret it. Rudy knew nothing good lasted in this world.
Suddenly his mood lightened. He saw a fat balding man in his forties jumping up and down. He was wearing a pathetically worn black leather jacket and stroking his girlfriend as though frightened she would quickly lose him in the crowd in favour of a more prepossessing specimen. Poking out of his right-hand pocket was a large expensive-looking wallet. It was bulging. Rudy sensed it was full of dollars.
With the agility of a fox tearing across a field in pursuit of a rabbit, he slipped through the crowd and lifted the wallet out of the man’s pocket. Within a matter of seconds he had removed the cash and credit cards and had managed to drop the empty wallet into a rubbish bin. Rudy had been right. It had been stuffed full of dollars. Large denomination notes as well. He felt pleased. A little of the hatred subsided from his heart.
Rudy turned around and made his way back to the Kurfurstendamm. He would celebrate his good fortune in the warmth of a good bar while leaving the fools to waste their expensive champagne at the wall.
Anthony Marshall saw the pickpocket at work through the binoculars he was training on Checkpoint Charlie from his hotel bedroom. ‘Smart guy,’ he said to himself. ‘Good operator. I could do with recruiting that man.’ He laid the binoculars on the table beside the window and turned to face his friend. Mr Marshall had been in Berlin for nearly a week on unofficial business.
Unlike many of his friends in the military he knew only too well that the advent of satellite television and videos would sound the death knell for communism. ‘People are fundamentally greedy,’ he told his subordinates. ‘They would rather die than give away their grandmother, but they would happily sell her for the right price.’ Not that these people had needed satellite television to activate their greed. All they had to do was turn on their own sets and in some cases make an adjustment to the aerial and they were able to see through the grandiose promises of seventy years of communist propaganda.
Marshall turned away from the window and towards his friend who was sitting with a face of stone watching the same scene on television.
‘It’s a bit of a surprise to the rest of the world, is it not?’
The thickset man with the heavy shoulders slumped further into the cushions on the hotel sofa.
‘A bit more of a surprise to us on the other side of the curtain.’
‘We will have to do some serious talking.’
‘This is the end of the Soviet Union you know.’
‘Probably. But not necessarily the end of communism.’
‘Fuck communism.’
‘Take heart, Yuri. We have plenty of time.’
‘The creeping tide of capitalism will wash over this little country and drench our sacred shores.’
‘Let’s hope it doesn’t drown the gold bars hidden in the cellar of your dacha.’
The man looked away and spat on the floor. ‘We should think seriously about our future. Now.’
Thursday 31 May 2007
TEATIME
The tea trolley bumped along the corridor and the huge woman pushing it winced as her ‘complaint’ hit her in the side for the fiftieth time that day. She would just have to live with it. She had no money left for visiting doctors.
It seemed to the woman that the corridors grew longer every day, just to spite her. Although some of the young men and women who worked in the Pentagon were kind there were many, many more who did not even have the time to talk to her. They would grunt unintelligible words as they thrust pies, bananas, cakes, chocolate bars in front of her and pointed a loaded finger to indicate whether they wanted tea or coffee from the clearly-marked urns. She once thought of taking off the silly labels and forcing them to speak, if only for them to avoid being given the wrong drink.
This morning was no different. She considered it a good day if ten out of a hundred people spared a quick kind word. Surely they could see she was in pain. Norah Grant never let it pass through her mind how wealthy were these serious souls in this forbidding building. As she passed their Porsches, Mercedes, BMWs, Lamborghini Diablos and even the occasional Rolls Royce on her way to the bus stop she would think of a bird she had heard singing on her way into work and wonder what kind of day it had enjoyed.
‘Too much dwelling on your own misfortunes is a recipe for the evil one to dunk another sodden biscuit of hate in your cup of tea, just out of spite,’ she was constantly telling friends of hers who seemed to do nothing but moan.
In fact, it was probably true to say that on this morning just like all the others, but particularly on this morning, Norah Grant with all her ailments, her restless family and her mean chances of a happy carefree life, was the most optimistic soul in the whole of the Pentagon complex.
All Norah had to worry about was being ill, poor and the wrong colour. All Gerald Kenworthy had to worry about was exposure in The National Enquirer, rapidly followed up by The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Herald and every other important newspaper in the land, let alone the television stations. He would be ruined. All because of a stupid childhood friendship which had gone wrong.
As National Security Advisor Gerald had an office in the Pentagon as well as one in the White House. As a forty five year old he was doing well with a home on either coast and a holiday cottage in the Florida Keys. Unlike so many others of his age group he also had a flourishing although not ecstatically happy marriage and two beautiful and intelligent children. There was little more Gerald could ask for. And it reminded him of the day eighteen years earlier when he had none of those things and had been a struggling bond salesman wondering where the next deal was coming from. As he had been worrying that his life was over before it had even really started in had walked Robert Harding the Third, brandishing the slight nick on his left cheek and calling it a scar from a bullet fired in anger in Vietnam. It was the only blemish on an otherwise perfect face and although Gerald had been told about it by mutual friends it had still aroused feelings of intense anger when he saw it for real.
Robert was everything Gerald was not. It hurt that Robert was telling the truth about his one war injury. It was exactly what you might expect from the man. The one injury everyone always asked about which caused no physical blemish nor pain but allowed the owner to recount again and again how brave he was. Right now Gerald wished he had been the soldier with the rifle aimed at Robert. He most certainly would not have missed.
At the time he had also been healthily impressed when Robert had walked through the door. The feelings of jealousy he now recalled were more like boyhood worship of a particularly brave senior boy. Gerald had taken Robert out to lunch and they had rapped over old times as though they had been the best of friends they never had been. It was only later Gerald discovered the real reason why Robert had come searching for him as though he was a long lost buddy.
Robert was floating a company and needed to raise a million dollars in capital. The company was a real one, a small engineering operation he had taken over from a dead uncle, with an annual turnover of eighty thousand dollars and about ten thousand dollars profit. Not quite in the big league. So Robert had printed some brochures, created some lies, hired a devious press officer and started a tale of total bullshit which had taken in every single person he had talked to. Now he needed a driver to take his cartload of bullshit into the heart of Wall Street and Gerald was promised enough money to keep him off work for a quarter of a century.
Gerald, who was an incompetent man, had worked unusually hard and they had floated the company at an enormous profit. Not surprisingly it had died eighteen months later and they had managed to blame everyone but themselves. Fortunately no one had discovered that the house they had built had foundations of sand, quicksand at that. At least, no one had discovered the fact until right now when Gerald was occupying the most important office of his political career.
The caller had been far too well informed for Gerald to brush him off, although he had done that with a faint hope nothing more would be heard. It seemed to Gerald that the facts had been provided by someone who had sat on them until the time had been right.
Robert, of course, was nowhere to be found. Gerald left a whole string of messages on a nationwide set up of answering machines and secretaries. He still had no reply and the caller had promised to ring again that evening. Gerald could not concentrate on anything at all. He wished Robert would call back and tell him what to do. Gerald was like a floundering schoolboy who has been pushed into the deep end of a swimming pool the moment his friends heard him tell them he could not swim. Right now Gerald wondered whether he was going to be left to drown.
It seemed to the woman that the corridors grew longer every day, just to spite her. Although some of the young men and women who worked in the Pentagon were kind there were many, many more who did not even have the time to talk to her. They would grunt unintelligible words as they thrust pies, bananas, cakes, chocolate bars in front of her and pointed a loaded finger to indicate whether they wanted tea or coffee from the clearly-marked urns. She once thought of taking off the silly labels and forcing them to speak, if only for them to avoid being given the wrong drink.
This morning was no different. She considered it a good day if ten out of a hundred people spared a quick kind word. Surely they could see she was in pain. Norah Grant never let it pass through her mind how wealthy were these serious souls in this forbidding building. As she passed their Porsches, Mercedes, BMWs, Lamborghini Diablos and even the occasional Rolls Royce on her way to the bus stop she would think of a bird she had heard singing on her way into work and wonder what kind of day it had enjoyed.
‘Too much dwelling on your own misfortunes is a recipe for the evil one to dunk another sodden biscuit of hate in your cup of tea, just out of spite,’ she was constantly telling friends of hers who seemed to do nothing but moan.
In fact, it was probably true to say that on this morning just like all the others, but particularly on this morning, Norah Grant with all her ailments, her restless family and her mean chances of a happy carefree life, was the most optimistic soul in the whole of the Pentagon complex.
All Norah had to worry about was being ill, poor and the wrong colour. All Gerald Kenworthy had to worry about was exposure in The National Enquirer, rapidly followed up by The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Herald and every other important newspaper in the land, let alone the television stations. He would be ruined. All because of a stupid childhood friendship which had gone wrong.
As National Security Advisor Gerald had an office in the Pentagon as well as one in the White House. As a forty five year old he was doing well with a home on either coast and a holiday cottage in the Florida Keys. Unlike so many others of his age group he also had a flourishing although not ecstatically happy marriage and two beautiful and intelligent children. There was little more Gerald could ask for. And it reminded him of the day eighteen years earlier when he had none of those things and had been a struggling bond salesman wondering where the next deal was coming from. As he had been worrying that his life was over before it had even really started in had walked Robert Harding the Third, brandishing the slight nick on his left cheek and calling it a scar from a bullet fired in anger in Vietnam. It was the only blemish on an otherwise perfect face and although Gerald had been told about it by mutual friends it had still aroused feelings of intense anger when he saw it for real.
Robert was everything Gerald was not. It hurt that Robert was telling the truth about his one war injury. It was exactly what you might expect from the man. The one injury everyone always asked about which caused no physical blemish nor pain but allowed the owner to recount again and again how brave he was. Right now Gerald wished he had been the soldier with the rifle aimed at Robert. He most certainly would not have missed.
At the time he had also been healthily impressed when Robert had walked through the door. The feelings of jealousy he now recalled were more like boyhood worship of a particularly brave senior boy. Gerald had taken Robert out to lunch and they had rapped over old times as though they had been the best of friends they never had been. It was only later Gerald discovered the real reason why Robert had come searching for him as though he was a long lost buddy.
Robert was floating a company and needed to raise a million dollars in capital. The company was a real one, a small engineering operation he had taken over from a dead uncle, with an annual turnover of eighty thousand dollars and about ten thousand dollars profit. Not quite in the big league. So Robert had printed some brochures, created some lies, hired a devious press officer and started a tale of total bullshit which had taken in every single person he had talked to. Now he needed a driver to take his cartload of bullshit into the heart of Wall Street and Gerald was promised enough money to keep him off work for a quarter of a century.
Gerald, who was an incompetent man, had worked unusually hard and they had floated the company at an enormous profit. Not surprisingly it had died eighteen months later and they had managed to blame everyone but themselves. Fortunately no one had discovered that the house they had built had foundations of sand, quicksand at that. At least, no one had discovered the fact until right now when Gerald was occupying the most important office of his political career.
The caller had been far too well informed for Gerald to brush him off, although he had done that with a faint hope nothing more would be heard. It seemed to Gerald that the facts had been provided by someone who had sat on them until the time had been right.
Robert, of course, was nowhere to be found. Gerald left a whole string of messages on a nationwide set up of answering machines and secretaries. He still had no reply and the caller had promised to ring again that evening. Gerald could not concentrate on anything at all. He wished Robert would call back and tell him what to do. Gerald was like a floundering schoolboy who has been pushed into the deep end of a swimming pool the moment his friends heard him tell them he could not swim. Right now Gerald wondered whether he was going to be left to drown.
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