Several minutes of ringing and knocking roused and brought sown the landlord, a very fat, elderly man with a patch over one eye, wearing a threadbare dressing gown. After giving him a Nazi salute and a loud `Heil Hitler', Gregory said in a disgruntled voice
`I'm on leave from Hamburg. My girl lives in this neighborhood and I'd planned to spend my leave with her. But she left her digs two days ago and her letter telling me where she's moved to must have missed me. Her bloody landlady either doesn’t know or won't tell me on account of a quarrel they had, end I've spent half the night trying to trace her without any luck. I'll find her tomorrow through mutual friends, but I've peen up since five this morning, so I want a room to sleep in.'
The landlord shook his head. `I'm sorry, Herr Reiter, I'd be pleased to oblige you. But the bombing has destroyed so many people's homes that every room I've got is taken.'
`Teufel nochmal!' Gregory groaned. `What hellish luck. Still, it can't be helped. As I'm nearly out on my feet I'll doss down on a sofa in your lounge.'
To that the landlord readily agreed, ushered him in and locked up again. As they passed through the saloon bar Gregory noticed two glass covers with Brцtchen under them and a jar of biscuits. Announcing that he would have a snack before going to sleep he asked the man to fix him a double brandy and Apollinaris.
While Gregory munched and drank they carried on a desultory conversation. The landlord asked how things were in Hamburg and Gregory told him that the bombing had been perfectly bloody. His companion replied that the bombing had been perfectly bloody in Berlin, too. Then, obviously for Gregory's benefit, he endeavoured, not very successfully, to say how convinced he was that the Allies would soon be driven out of France and the war brought to a victorious conclusion by the Fьhrer’s `Secret Weapons'.
Having eaten his fill Gregory asked the man what he owed him, then took out his wallet and paid. As he did so he fixed the landlord with a steady stare, silently daring him to ask for a ration slip. To ignore regulations of that kind would, he knew, be in keeping with his role as an S.D. trooper, and the man accepted his abuse of his uniform without comment. Eager to please, he offered to find a rug for Gregory to wrap himself in, but the night was warm, so Gregory told him not to bother. Five minutes later he had stretched out on a sofa in the inn Parlour and the landlord was on his way back to bed.
As an old soldier Gregory possessed the ability to wake near any hour on which he had set his mind and before he dropped off he set his mental alarm clock for half past five. Rousing at that hour he felt stale and shivery, but he found the cloakroom and a wash revived him. In there he also shaved in cold water and changed from the uniform into his own clothes, packing the uniform into the hold-all; but he stowed the shaving kit into one of his pockets.
In the bar, on the old principle that when in enemy territory one should live off the land, he helped himself to a pint flagon of Branntwein and stuffed his pockets with as many Brotchen and biscuits as he could get into them. Then, shortly before six o'clock, still carrying the hold-all, he quietly let himself out of the front door.
He had entered the capital from the north-east, and although he knew the centre of the city well his knowledge of the metropolitan area was only rudimentary. He was aware that its equivalent to London's East End lay in Moabit and Charlottenburg, and that the rich lived further out to the south and west, mainly in the exclusive suburb of Dahlem or on pleasant properties along the east bank of a long stretch of water known as the Havel, at the extremity of which lay Potsdam. But of Berlin north of the River Spree he knew nothing so, taking the sun for a guide, he headed south.
Now that daylight had come he found his surroundings more than ever depressing. Unlike the English and the Dutch, the Germans have never been keen gardeners so, although it was high summer, there was hardly a flower to be seen in front of the long rows of small houses and blocks of workers' flats. Here and there along the road there was a factory, to which men and women were now cycling up in droves to start on the day shift, or a line of still-closed shops. Every few hundred yards buildings had been reduced to rubble by the bombing, and several times he had to turn down a side street because the main road was closed owing to time bombs dropped in a recent raid.
Whenever he had to turn off course he veered to the west and, after a time, found himself in the broad Friedrichstrasse. Proceeding down it, he reached the bridge over the Spree. In The middle of the bridge he halted, put his hold-all on the stone coping and stood there for a while looking down at the river. As is always the case on a city bridge, several other loungers were doing the same thing. Having stood there for a few minutes, he made a gesture as though to take up the hold-all, but knocked it off the parapet. As it hurtled downwards and splashed into the river there came excited cries from the nearest bystanders. Gregory leaned over and stared down in apparent consternation. A few people moved up and commiserated with him. But there was nothing to be done. The hold-al1 had already sunk, and there was no possibility of its recovery.
With a glum face, which concealed his inward satisfaction, e turned away. He had now disposed of everything which could connect him with the affair at Malacou's cottage.
So far, so good. But he was still faced with two far more difficult problems-how to reach and cross a neutral frontier and, more difficult still, how to acquire the money to reach one.
Walking on, he came to the Unter den Linden, with its imposing blocks and three lines of fine trees. He found it sadly altered since he had last seen it in the winter of 1939. Bomb blast had torn great gaps in the trees, every few hundred yards there were railed-off craters, and during four and a half years of war the paint had peeled from the handsome buildings that lined it. Many of them had collapsed as a result of the air-raids, or had been burnt out.
Turning west, he decided to make a short tour of the principal streets in order to refresh his memory of the geography of the city. Strolling down the Wilhelmstrasse, he saw that Goebbels' Ministry, the Reich Chancellery and the huge block formed by Goering's Air Ministry all had chunks out of their upper storeys due to bombs. Had he still been wearing his stolen S.D. uniform he would never have dared to turn into the Albrecht Strasse, as in it was the H.Q. of the Gestapo, and from it officers were constantly coming and going, one of whom might have challenged him. But now that he was again in civilian clothes, with nothing to distinguish him from other ordinary Berliners, he passed the building with impunity, wondering only where his old enemy Gruppenfьhrer Grauber was at that moment.
By way of the Potsdamer Platz and the Hermann Goering Strasse he made his way back to the Linden where it ended at the Brandenburg Gate. Beyond it to the east lay the Tiergarten. That, too, was pockmarked by bomb craters with, between them, a veritable forest of long-barrelled ack-ack guns and batteries of searchlights. In a part of it in which the public were still allowed to walk, he sat down on a bench to consider his extremely worrying situation.
In Berlin every man and woman was an enemy. There was no-one from whom he could borrow money or secure any other form of help, and however carefully he endeavoured to conserve the small store of marks he had taken from the S.D. men's wallets they must be exhausted in the course of a few days. It therefore seemed that his only means of obtaining