Free The Berlin Crossing by Kevin Brophy Page B

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     and then, in the darkness, I followed him on the dirt path among the graves.
    The pastor’s son must have been watching out for us: the door of the cottage at the end of the churchyard swung open and Thomas
     Bruck stood there in the lighted doorway. By way of greeting he gave me a malevolent glare; in silence he switched on the
     flashlight he was carrying and led the way along the side of the little cottage into a small fenced-off back garden. Thomas
     unlatched a low, wooden gate in the fence and went on into a bare open space; fifty or sixty metres beyond lay the dark bulk
     of the pine forest.
    Even in the dark, Thomas’s step was sure. He flashed his torch along the bare earth until the beam fastened on a small wooden
     cross. The tiny cross bore neither name nor date; in the dim light of the torch it looked lost, orphaned.
    Nobody spoke. Just three overcoated men standing in silence around a bare wooden cross in the darkness of Bad Saarow.
    Pastor Bruck took a smaller torch from his pocket and switched it on. I blinked as he flashed it towards me; I saw Thomas
     blink too as the beam fell for a moment on him.
    ‘Thomas.’ There was a note of pleading in the pastor’s voice.
    His son made no attempt to hide his anger. For a long moment he glared at his father but then he shrugged and stooped over
     the earth beside the wooden cross.
    In the weak light of the torches I had not noticed that the earth here was disturbed, newly turned. Nor had I noticed the
     mound of fresh earth just beyond the beam of torchlight.
    ‘Help me.’ Thomas Bruck was looking at me with undisguised loathing.
    I knelt beside him.
    ‘There,’ he said, pointing to my right.
    Thomas was lifting an earth-covered board about the size of a door. I moved away from him and scrabbled with my fingers in
     the earth until I located the other end of the board. Together, stillon our knees, we raised it from the ground and laid it against the mound of freshly dug soil.
    Beneath the board was a shallow grave. I caught my breath, the smell of the soil as strong as dung. Above my own breathing
     I could hear the hoarse whisper of other times, other lives, insistent in this open trench. Pastor Bruck, standing above us,
     played the beams of both torches into the dark hole in the ground. Incongruous in the grave, a white plastic bag lay folded
     in the wet earth. Thomas took the bag from the grave, handed it to his father. The bag was folded a couple of times around
     something rectangular, like a small box, maybe a book.
    ‘We opened the grave earlier today.’ Pastor Bruck looked at me, then at Thomas. My eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness:
     I could see the pity in the priest’s face. ‘Thomas opened it, Herr Ritter.’
    ‘Thank you,’ I said. It didn’t take much to work out whose remains lay here in this unmarked spot.
    Thomas Bruck didn’t answer me, his expression grim as ever. Maybe he was still thinking about the brace on his father’s back.
    ‘This is yours, Herr Ritter.’ Pastor Bruck handed me the plastic bag.
    I took it gingerly. I pressed it between my fingers. Softish, like paper, or cloth. But solid.
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Pastor Bruck said. ‘Your mother gave it to me the last time I saw her.’ A weary smile. ‘Not like this,’ pointing
     to the plastic bag in my hands. ‘She gave me a cardboard box, for safe keeping, she said.’ He stopped, looking beyond us to
     the shadowy trees. ‘It was too dangerous for your mother to keep, I suppose; she had you by then, she had someone else to
     worry about.’
    ‘And who was going to worry about you?’ Thomas interrupted. ‘Tell me that, who?’
    ‘Thomas, Thomas.’
    His son snorted. In one movement he stooped, grabbed the board from the ground and hurled it into the open grave. Without
     another word he stormed off. We could hear the cottage door slam shut behind him.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I seem to have a gift for upsetting your