BERLIN WALL

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.’