Jacko (24 page)

—Holy Christ, murmured Jacko. Suddenly it's great to be out of America eh.

By now we were over the Atlantic, and America's perverse computer mail lay behind us.

—There are cases, Dannie continued, where they call up each other and propose enslavement followed by murder. An FBI man punched himself into the network and caught two of them. They asked him to join them in a kidnapping.

—But what about Sunny? Jacko urged her, anxious to get to that and then sleep. What about women?

Dannie continued in that soft, forthright way.

—This psychiatrist agrees with the other guy we had: this is a case of enslavement too. Sunny's so circumspect at work. She goes obediently home. She
runs
home in fact, spelling all the way. The only time she turns up to speak to her father, he can't speak back and she's with a man, a minder.

Dannie's hand on Jacko's head at last became languid.

—He lets her go jogging here and there, but then he reclaims her. Classic slave-master stuff. The magazines publish a slave-master contract! How's that for the land of the free?

—Bloody appalling, said Jacko drowsily.

There was something so conjugal about the way they sat trading horrors on the edge of sleep. Was she still offering to wait for him, functionally, and for an exact slice of the night? With a view to improving him, was she still writing her memoir of their friendship? A missionary woman murmuring of slave magazines, she was proving Jacko's theories of her nation. The pressure of evil, remitting at the Brandenburg Gate, was still building in America's computer traffic.

On one of those determined grey mornings characteristic of England, we landed at Stansted near London. Every one of us who rose to disembark carried a refugee greyness in the face. Dannie gathered up our passports and went off to a shed to do business with British immigration and customs about our transit.

No official intruded on our activities as we heaved equipment and supplies across the tarmac to two smaller chartered aircraft. I remember a crate of Gunter's brother's tangerines cutting into my shoulder. Jacko carried a silver case of camera gear in each hand, and had more cylinders and cases clamped in his armpits.

Halfway across the concrete, on our passage between the newly provided aircraft and the one in which we had flown across the Atlantic, I saw the American journalist Al Bunker arguing with Gunter. Gunter seemed a much better, ruder colour than the American. He gestured with a well-rested man's vigour. Bunker appealed to us.

—Says he's not coming to Berlin.

—Makes sense, yelled Gunter. Bring my sonnerbitch brother out here to the West. Regent Street, Piccadilly, Soho …

Al Bunker said, Durkin's already got the promos running for tonight:
The Great German reunion
. You'll just damn-well have to come, Gunter.

A dark-eyed little fury, Dannie had just returned with our passports. She tore her way into our group with her elbows, and temporarily put the wad of our documents into her purse.

—Listen, Gunter, we've had enough of this fucking nonsense. Are you wanted by the East German police or something? House-breaking? Black market? Drug-pushing? What? What is it?

Gunter turned his eyes to her.

—This is sickness with Americans. First thing you think of is guilt, guilt, guilt!

—Listen to me. Listen. Don't talk to these men. Don't talk to Bunker or Jacko. They're too goddam kindly. Talk to me, fuck you, Gunter!

—This is not the way I speak to women, said Gunter, making a pious tuck in his mouth. American poor sonner-bitches put up with woman Hitler. Not me. I don't speak to women like this.

—You're talking to this fucking woman that way, you bloody Kraut prevaricator!

Of course she had picked that
bloody
up from Jacko. The Australian version of goddam. Bloody. Said to be ancient English By-Our-Lady. The imprecation to the Virgin found now on the lips of another, dangerous woman.

—You can put me in a hotel in West End, said Gunter. You bring my brother. Sweetness and light is all guaranteed! I take him to Harrod's and buy him beer.

It was touching that he believed Dannie might, by this sort of speech, be quietened and forced into retreat. She reached up and grabbed him by the collar of the shirt and shook him with a virulent little fist.

—Gunter, try to understand this. The fucking Berlin Wall is coming down in Berlin. It's not coming down in the West End of London. Do you catch the difference? You'll come to Berlin or I'll murder you here, right on this runway!

Then, smoothly, she had produced a little black revolver from her shoulder bag. Her protection against New York assaulters and intruders, brought without hindrance across the Atlantic.

I was transfixed by the sight of this weapon, and so I think was Al Bunker. But Gunter was not easily terrorized. Jacko could be heard chuckling, of course.

Gunter asked, Do I have a contract with you? Am I being paid? Does the land of freedom and home of the brave not allow liberty of movement to men named Gunter? Shit in your pistol, lady!

Jacko put down a camera tripod he was carrying. Hanging from it was one of those rolls of thick silver gaffer-tape which cameramen seemed to use for everything – marking clapper boards, sealing cartridges, providing a point on pavements or floors to show commentators where they were to walk to and stick each foot. Jacko unhooked this tape with one hand and with the other gave one of those deft, economic punches of the type he probably learned to deliver in his boyhood on Burren Waters. A perfect punch, say, to deliver to troublemakers at the Brahma Breeders Ball. Despite the breadth of my writing, I had led a fairly protected life. I'd rarely seen a pistol produced or a punch like this one thrown. I had very little experience of the way the legs gave way under a blow of this kind or how the interruption of the brain current produced so instant a collapse in so massive a frame.

Gunter fell sideways, a fall so dead that I feared he would crack his skull against the runway.

Jacko himself was now a man utterly undelayed by doubt. He bent and ran strands of the silver gaffer-tape around Gunter's legs. If Al Bunker and I seemed a little abashed at this fast action, Dannie didn't at all. She attended Jacko, a helpmeet.

—Get him upright, get him up, get him upright, she exhorted us.

Mumbling and stupefied, Gunter was hoisted and dragged towards one of the Berlin charters. I wondered about the British officials in the hut across the tarmac. But they must have been reading their
Daily Mails
. We all helped in the process of toting Gunter. His legs pinioned together and scraping monopedally on the tarmac, he must have looked, if there was anyone to see him, like television talent who had celebrated the historical rarity of this night too well. No one, not even Bunker and Dannie, both of whom came from such a litigious nation, seemed worried about legal action. But just in case, Jacko reassured them.

—Who's going to worry about him? He looks so bloody unreliable.

14

When, very soon after, our charter was rolling down Stansted's runway, Jacko ignored the
Fasten Seatbelt
sign and knelt at Gunter's feet, unwrapping the silver tape from around them. Gunter's head jerked backwards against his seat, and he looked down his sallow cheeks, trying to achieve a clear image of Jacko's moonface gazing up at him. He gagged, and Jacko held a sickbag for him.

—Feeling better, mate? asked Jacko, folding up the bag functionally when the spasm had passed. I think you had a little cerebral episode there. Bit of a blackout. Ought to watch your consumption of brandy!

—We are where?

—Going home, son. The big B. Berlin the bloody free, son. Whacko!

The chances of my saying anything passably clever on camera seemed to grow less as we sat sleepless above Europe's grey morning. The weak sun and the dun clouds below us did not look epochal. Punished for our late arrival, we were put to circling above the city. By the time we taxied up to the terminal, it was mid-morning, and Al Bunker was anxious about how he could hope to get Gunter south, reconciled with his brother, and edited and ready for transmission in time for that night's
Live Wire
.

The one hopeful aspect was that Gunter seemed reconciled to completing his journey. He landed docilely. We waited with him as Dannie concluded her negotiations with the few overworked customs and immigration officers who guarded Germany from marauders from the West. It was like 1945 in that regard I suppose – most of the forces of civil Germany turned to greet the Easterners.

Jacko and I saw Gunter and Bunker and Bunker's crew, and all the cases of Calvados and tangerines, into a hired Mercedes. Its driver was helpfully telling Bunker how impossible it was to get south towards Leipzig today. But it was clear that Al Bunker would get Gunter there somehow, perhaps not quite as fast as two genuine pirates like Dannie and Jacko, but with dispatch just the same. The driver's unwillingness had no chance of matching Bunker's frenzy. If he did not get the filmed reconciliation of Gunter and Gunter's brother back to Berlin and transmitted to New York by midnight, he would suffer video death. He would become a newsroom anecdote, a dark memory.

In that event, the question might be asked, What is he doing now?

—Selling imported cars, the last I heard.

Or engaged in some other form of nullity.

In our car, Dannie announced that she had managed to bully some rooms for us out of the Kempinski Hotel. How astounded would Hitler be to discover that so late in the twentieth century Polish Jewish girls like Dannie were gouging Berlin's best hotel rooms out of Aryan management? However, said Dannie, we had to double up. All the other news organizations were doing that. She'd share a room with Jacko.

Our driver's name was Raoul. He was a worldly young Alsatian who wore a bomber jacket and confessed to a French mother. He, Jacko, Dannie and – to do him justice – Fartfeatures, filling in for Clayton once again, seemed on first-name terms within seconds. Fartfeatures had been inoffensive and without complaint in the Perugia and on both planes. Now, however, he seemed less enthusiastic.

All of us discussed the traffic, how surprisingly light it was.

—Lots of people at home, just watching it all on TV said Raoul. If it's on TV, it means more than if they see it being there.

—Yeah, said Jacko, taking Raoul's reflection as praise for his chosen medium. Isn't that bloody great?

In such a little time, we were bowling up the Ku'damm, which, as a bewildered and fairly unworldly tourist, I had visited with my wife twenty years past. These flashy shops had seemed to me not glamorous, but a mean outcome to all that Nazi triumphalism, all that bombing. A cosmetic form of amnesia for the past, and a flippant condolence, not always in good taste, to all the German and other corpses.

Here today, people bundled in shabby overcoats were window shopping.

—'Ayseeds from the East, said Raoul.

And they did look like pasty-complexioned extras in a propaganda film about the inhumanity of Stalinism. Senator McCarthy and his descendants would have been pleased to see their enchantment and bewilderment in the face of the hydra-headed wonders of Western consumerism. I had a sense that the West might take some fairly glib messages from phenomena like this. As we drew up, Marx's grey children were also round the door of the Kempinski, which looked like the sort of grand hotel I had seen in the films of my childhood in which German generals entertained beautiful double-agents. The last time I had been here with Maureen, we hadn't been able to afford the Kempinski, but had had a cocktail there.

On the pavement not far from the front door, a young man dressed like Raoul was passing out something to the East German visitors, accepting bank notes from them – part of their reunion bonus – and handing out change in return.

—They're buying
Do Not Disturb
signs from that guy there, Raoul told us. They're like children.

—Jesus, said Jacko to Dannie and Fartfeatures. We've got to get some footage of that.

Fartfeatures nodded grudgingly and stared out at other facades across the street.

We filed into the big rococo lobby designed it seemed, like the outside, by some sly film designer for intense assignations and the loitering of spies. Dannie signed in for all of us with a few competent swipes of the pen. She turned from the reception desk talking.

—We've got to get over to the Brandenburg Gate for a direct transmission. Vixen Six's suspending normal programming and we're it. There's a satellite truck waiting out there for us, ordered by Durkin. Raoul's ready with the car. Fancy stuff like the
Do Not Disturb
signs later. You've just got time for a slash before we move out.

Again, it was strange to hear that item of Jacko-idiom,
slash
, rolled casually around Dannie's mouth so familiarly, like a wad of chewing gum. There was an aspect of claim to it too. It was a sign she meant to have Jacko. As she'd taken over his idiom, she meant to take him over.

Upstairs, Fartfeatures and I chose beds. I was relieved to find it a very big room because Fartfeatures' air of disengagement gave me the sense that somehow he would be a sloppy and noisy sleeper.

Soon we had refreshed ourselves and cleaned our teeth, and then we travelled with Raoul up the Ku'damm past the ritzy shops and their fringe of gaping Easterners, past the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church and the Tiergarten and Zoological Gardens. We turned then onto the broad Street of the 17th of June. Here, crowds of people, most of them young, many of them on the roadway, were pressing in one direction – towards the Wall and the Brandenburg Gate. They did not care if Raoul or other motorists honked them or threatened to run them over. They were under the influence of an ecstatic magnetism. Moving, if you like, in the always preferred German direction: eastwards. Dannie was so taken by a sense of this primal drift that she sat up straight and grabbed Jacko's wrist to incorporate him in her sense of celebration. Jacko half-smiled and patted her bird-boned forearm with the enormous fist he'd inherited from Stammer Jack.