Read Online World War Two Will Not Take Place by Bill James - Free Book Online Page B

creations in Steglitz. People needed accommodation, and they could get it in Lichtenberg behind such gorgeously unfancy, swiftly installed walls. Plain, utilitarian, grey-buff facades announced their honest purposeful purpose – shelter. This was how architecture should be. It recognized a job had to be done and did it. A crane swung an arm about for a couple of days a few years ago, dangling those destined jigsaw rectangles, and suddenly, out of nothing, homes arrived. Hitler often demanded living room for the German people, Lebensraum . Well, voilà, old cock! Plenty of living rooms here in neat, two and three storey developments.
    Mount had been brought up in Bath when not away at school. His mother still lived there for some of the year. You could get sickened by the saucy elegance and swank of all that smug Georgian stuff in piss-yellow local stone. Beau Nash, the eighteenth-century Welsh dandy-fop, delighted in Bath. Naturally he did. Curved streets – why? Flamboyant. Someone had had a bad attack of geometry: describe an arc and call it Royal Crescent.
    You didn’t get any of that malarkey in Lichtenberg. When they originally took on Toulmin as an agent, Mount and Nicholas Baillie secretly tailed him home one evening to check he lived where he said: standard courtesy for new chums, or those wanting to become chums. Mount fell for the construction style then, rhapsodized to Baillie about its clever practicality. Nick objected. He would . While doing an ink sketch of the frontage to mark out what they guessed to be the Eisen or Toulmin windows, he had sounded off with the stock arty chatter about concrete’s drab impersonality and the inherent slabbiness of slabs. The buildings looked jaily even without iron bars, he’d said. Anyone could tell he was stuck with standard, snobby Cambridge reverence for the pretty lines of King’s College. Of course slabs were slabby. Slabbiness kept winter out. Personality? Yes, they had personality – dutiful, protective, unpretentious, good at fitting in.
    Mount had memorized Baillie’s drawing and could identify what might be the windows of Toulmin’s apartment, just as Toulmin could identify his second floor flat in Steglitz, though Toulmin never had to signal a welcome with lights, because the rules of contact said Mount must not, repeat NOT, come calling, or even hang about the district. Visits might deeply imperil the host. And in usual conditions Mount wouldn’t have visited or even reconnoitred. Conditions, though, had become very un usual, hadn’t they? He thought he might have to break in and do a nose about. The apartment was the only concrete – concrete! – connection he had with Toulmin now. It gave a focus, of a sort. He didn’t know which sort, only that it seemed more precise than wandering around the Diplomatstrasse pavements near the Foreign Ministry.
    But the break-in must be a far-off prospect. It assumed he never saw Toulmin coming or going outside, and never managed a word or two. It also assumed the apartment remained dark at night. In a sense, Mount did want a signal from Toulmin’s lights. Of course, if the lights came on they wouldn’t necessarily prove Toulmin was present, or Toulmin alone. There might be a reception group, devoted to the Fatherland and Lugers, hoping to catch someone searching for him at one of the two most likely spots: his home and the Ministry.
    Mount began to list in his head further difficulties in this operation. He resumed the numbering:
    (3) The need to identify Toulmin’s apartment from inside the building arose because, when he and Bailey had checked Toulmin’s address, they decided it would be too obvious to follow him up stairs and along a corridor as far as his front door. It would have required them to stay impractically close. The fact that he’d gone into the building was enough. If he’d noticed them it could have made him feel not wholly