Agent in Peril, page 15
Then she spotted movement in the foreground, three cars on the road, approaching the house. Very calmly, as if she was expecting them, she checked that her handbag was nearby and decided to put on her shoes. Soon there was shouting downstairs followed by loud knocking on the front door.
She put on her coat and pressed her ear against her door. A man was talking loudly in a Swiss German accent, demanding to be let in.
She heard Nikolai respond that this was not possible as this was a Soviet diplomatic property and therefore out of the jurisdiction of anyone else.
The voice replied that this property was not registered as a diplomatic one and therefore as a Swiss police officer he had every right to enter and if the gentleman standing behind him would mind putting away his gun, he’d be very grateful.
There was much shouting in Russian downstairs and then she heard Nikolai ask if they could come back later that afternoon. Through her window Sophia saw two Swiss policemen had made their way into the garden and were watching the house.
At that moment there was more knocking on the front door. The Swiss voice again. ‘We understand a German woman is in the house. We want to check if she’s here and give her the opportunity to come with us. Then we’ll leave.’
She heard footsteps running up the stairs and her door was opened. It was Svetlana, indicating she should follow her. Sophia moved back into the room, shaking her head. That was when the front door crashed open and amid the general commotion, she was sure she heard someone shouting in English. Svetlana slammed the door shut, but as she did so it was pushed open.
Along with a Swiss police officer were two other men in suits and the older of the two came towards her, a broad smile on his face and a hand held out in greeting.
‘Sophia von Naundorf? I can’t tell you how delighted I am to meet you. My name’s Basil Remington-Barber, by the way.’
Chapter 16
Dortmund, Germany
April 1943
Jack Miller must have visited Dortmund a dozen times in his previous life as a sport reporter-cum-British spy based in Berlin.
It was a convenient staging post for his espionage missions into the Ruhr: easily reached from Berlin and well connected to the other industrial cities in the region.
The city was home to Borussia Dortmund, a team with the habit of giving FC Schalke a good run for their money in the Gauliga Westphalia and Jack always enjoyed his visits to Stadion Rote Erde in the south of the city.
More to the point, Dortmund was a centre of the German steel and mining industries and it came as no surprise that Basil had shown him a long list of targets in the city: the Vereinigte and Hosch Eisen steelworks, the enormous marshalling yard at Verschiebahnhof, the Dortmund-Ems canal terminus.
Dortmund was also the home of some five hundred thousand souls, two of whom were of particular interest to him. If both were still around, then he could end his mission in triumph.
* * *
Jack knew he needed to move fast. He left his case at the left-luggage office by the bus station and hurried to the ironmongery on Johannes Strasse, arriving just minutes before it was due to close.
He realised he was taking a risk, but he desperately needed to contact the doctor he knew as Arthur. The ironmongery was the place where they always met. The owner was a contact of Arthur’s: a short man called Walter, with broad, square shoulders, his spectacles permanently perched on the top of his head. Jack had little to do with Walter other than a brief exchange when he entered the small, gloomy store. A mutual nodding of heads and Walter would say the nails he’d ordered had arrived, which would indicate all was well and Arthur was waiting for him in the small storeroom behind the counter.
But his visits were always arranged. It had been nearly two years since he’d been there, and he’d never turned up when Arthur wasn’t there. Walter didn’t recognise him at first and Jack stood with his back to the counter as Walter finished serving another customer.
When he left, Jack turned round and slowly a horrified look of recognition crept over Walter. He shook his head in disbelief and said he was to leave now.
‘I promise you, I’m not planning on hanging around, but I need to make contact with Arthur.’
Walter frowned as if he wasn’t sure who Jack was talking about.
‘Arthur – the doctor from the main hospital on Beurnhaus Strasse. I used to meet him here – you remember? I need to get a message to him. I tried phoning him, but the number didn’t work.’
‘I’ve not seen him for over a year and I hope I never see the bastard again. He owes me money. I was risking my neck letting you two meet here: I’d been a patient of Arthur’s; he’d saved my life and I reckoned I owed him a favour. But I thought it was just one meeting. After that, he paid me, and I only did it because of the money. You must go.’
‘How much does he owe you?’
Walter shrugged and Jack noticed he’d moved along the counter and his hand was now close to the telephone on it.
‘Here, take this.’ Jack placed two five-Reichsmark notes on the counter, away from the telephone.
Walter couldn’t help looking surprised and grateful. He grasped the money and put it in the top pocket of his overalls.
‘And you have no idea where Arthur is?’
‘Maybe at the hospital still, I don’t know and I don’t want to know. I just don’t want any trouble. I can’t believe you’ve come back here after all this time. You’re not German, are you?’
‘In case you have any clever ideas—’ Jack looked at the telephone ‘—then remember, you allowed us to meet here. You’d be in as much trouble as me. Understand?’
Walter said he did, and if he didn’t mind, it was time to close the shop. It would look odd if it was open past its closing time.
Jack left the shop and headed back to the centre, angry with himself for the way the visit to the ironmongery had turned out. It was the first time he’d had a conversation with Walter and he felt uneasy. He decided to go back to the shop, which was taking another big risk, but perhaps he could persuade Walter he had something against him, a letter maybe.
He turned back and reached the top of Johannes Strasse just as a black sedan pulled up outside the ironmongery and three men climbed out, all in the unmistakable attire of the Gestapo.
* * *
On his previous visits to Dortmund, he’d stayed at neat and tidy guest house on Kessel Strasse, close to the station and run by a pleasant woman whose husband had been killed in the Great War. Her daughter, Irma, helped her run the place.
Irma was one of the most beautiful girls he’d ever come across, although she was desperately shy and seemingly oblivious to her looks. Her mother was a devout woman, leaving early in the morning for Mass and making the return trip in the early evening. After a few visits, Irma became more relaxed in Jack’s company, and by late 1940 she would slip into his room as soon as her mother departed for church.
He’d be hard pressed to describe it as a romance, but he knew Irma had become obsessed with him and he believed she’d do anything he asked but after his close shave with Walter, he determined to be even more careful. He returned to Königswall, collected his case and walked to Brück Strasse where he checked into the Römischer Kaiser Hotel.
He left his case in the room, hid the Minox cameras and films between the bed frame and the mattress and headed to the market place where he spent ten minutes in the Ratskeller and then hurried towards Kessel Strasse.
He’d only just left the market place when three black sedans pulled up about fifty yards in front of him on Viktoria Strasse and around a dozen plainclothes men got out and quickly spread out on either side of the road. This was a common sight in Berlin: setting up a random checkpoint was one of the Gestapo’s ways of catching people unawares. Jack turned round: a group of uniformed policemen were blocking the other end of the street. Another group assembled ahead of him.
He carried on walking, making sure not to slow down or speed up.
The Gestapo man who stopped him looked bored and ignored his ‘good evening’ as he held his hand out impatiently for Jack’s papers.
When Hans Schumacher showed his Nazi Party membership card he waved it away, saying he’d not asked to see that, and Jack started to get worried, because a Gestapo officer who could be so dismissive of his Mitgliedskarte clearly meant business. Nor was he interested in his Neue Front cigarettes, but he did want to know why Herr Schumacher wasn’t serving the Reich.
Jack showed him the Kriegsmarine conscription letter and made the joke about being seasick, which the officer ignored.
‘Wait here.’ Jack waited by the side of the road, a few yards from an older woman in the same situation: both looked at each other. The woman seemed to be terrified.
Another officer came over. Something about the Hans Schumacher papers wasn’t right, he said. Jack asked what he meant.
‘You tell me: what are you doing here?’
He told him about the ship’s chandlers on Rheinallee and then began a story, which he wasn’t sure how he was going to end, about how the offices had avoided being bombed and the owner thought that was thanks to him because on the night of the raid he…
At that moment there was a commotion behind him and the Gestapo officer looked up. There was more shouting and someone must have called the officer’s name because he thrust Hans Schumacher’s papers into Jack’s hands and told him to wait there, before pushing past him and rushing down the street.
For a moment Jack stared at the papers. It was an inexplicable error of the Gestapo man to have returned his papers, but Jack didn’t plan to hang around to ask him why. To his left was an alley and within seconds he’d darted into it, hurrying through the dark web of narrow streets spinning off it before emerging onto Nikolai Strasse and then Kessel Strasse. As the guesthouse came into view he stopped dead in his tracks, taking two or three steps backwards, bumping into a man who told him to be careful.
It took up the whole of the small window on the ground floor, behind which was the neat lounge with its paintings of holy scenes and small potteries of Jesus and the display unit with the Dresden china tea set.
It was a black swastika flag set against a white circle and the scarlet red background. He crossed the road to find a safer position from which to observe the house, just in case there was some mistake, though for the life of him he couldn’t imagine what that could be.
He was in the doorway of the bread shop diagonally opposite the house when the two women walked past him. Unmistakably, it was Irma and her mother, both dressed in the uniform of the Frauenschaft, the Nazi women’s organisation: white tops, black ties, voluminous black skirts. Irma’s beautiful long hair was pulled back into a severe bun. They were laughing as they crossed the road, neither so much as glancing in his direction.
He hurried back to the hotel, where he lay on the bed and wondered how much longer his luck would hold. He’d managed to slip away from the Gestapo checkpoint on Viktoria Strasse and he’d avoided the guesthouse. It was Thursday tomorrow: he’d seek out the doctor and then make his way back to Switzerland. He may even be in Berne for the weekend. He felt his eyes getting heavy when there was a knock at the door and a woman’s voice announced it was the maid: she had brought more towels.
His hand was on the door-handle when it burst open. He felt a sharp pain to his head and everything went black and when he came to, he was pinned face down on the bed, a knee digging into his back and his wrists being forced into handcuffs.
When he was hauled up, he found himself facing the two Gestapo officers who’d questioned him on Viktoria Strasse. Around them, men were searching the room. One of the men demanding he give his real name and he said ‘Hans Schumacher’ before he was punched in the face and dragged out of the room.
* * *
Willkommen in der Hölle.
He didn’t need to be told where he was.
He knew of the Gestapo prison next to Steinwache police station by reputation, which was about as bad as it got in the Reich.
Steinwache wasn’t carefully tucked away in a suburb or isolated in the countryside. It was in the centre of Dortmund, just north of the main station, the goods yard visible from between the bars on the cell windows for those lucky enough – if lucky was the right word – to be in a cell with a view.
Willkommen in der Hölle was scrawled on parts of the walls where prisoners hoped the guards wouldn’t spot the slogan, though Jack reckoned the Gestapo were quite happy to encourage that image.
Willkommen in der Hölle was the greeting the other inmates muttered as he was dragged past them to his cell.
Willkommen in der Hölle: welcome to hell.
To his surprise they left him alone for a few hours after he was taken to the cell. He was also surprised to be given food: a bowl of thin stew, mostly carrots and gristle but it was warm and there was a piece of bread with it, which was more or less edible if he dunked it in the stew. He was given a chipped metal mug half full of tepid water and a narrow bed to sit on and he had enough time to take stock of his situation.
He was an optimist by nature – his prison metal mug was half full of water rather than half empty. Notwithstanding that, it was hard to see his predicament as anything other than dire. It could only be a matter of time before they discovered he wasn’t employed by the ship’s chandlers on Rheinallee and that the lodging house on Langenbeck Strasse didn’t know who he was. The identity Basil and Noel had given him wasn’t designed for close examination.
And then the Minox Riga cameras: he couldn’t remember how many he had left but they were bound to find them and the film he’d already taken. He was doomed and wondered if the best course of action was to confess now, to give them something, a name maybe, send them on a wild goose chase, anything to buy time – though even then it was pointless because he was in Dortmund, at the heart of the Reich, and there was no one to rescue him.
The next thing he knew, Sophia was at the door of his cell explaining there’d been a terrible misunderstanding and he was to come with her and behind her was a group of Gestapo officers, all acting very deferentially towards her and nodding at him in a shame-faced manner.
‘Get up, didn’t you hear me!’
He was woken from his sleep by a guard shaking him by the shoulder, the dream broken.
The interrogation was rough and unpleasant that night, but it seemed this was just the start, that far worse was to come.
They asked him to give his proper name and where he was from and what he was up to. He remembered the training he’d been given years ago in England, a wet and very unpleasant weekend where he’d been quite badly roughed up and by the end of it, he wondered whether it was an exercise at all, but it had been brutal enough for him to take notice of what they told him and now he realised it had been quite useful.
Most important of all, he remembered the advice of a sadistic little man with greasy hair and a leather jacket who’d actually slapped him very hard across the face and then sat him down and explained that under interrogation one should always listen to the questions he was being asked, because these would reveal how much they knew.
If you gave a package to a woman in a red coat the main post office then you’d expect them to ask about it – what was in the package, who was the woman… if they don’t ask, they don’t know. And never reply straight away: allow yourself enough time to give a considered answer.
They told him there was no Hans Schumacher from Mainz, certainly not one who matched his description, nor anyone of that name who was a member of the Nazi Party there. Or who worked for a ship’s chandler on Rheinallee or anywhere else in the city, for that matter.
And why had he escaped from Viktoria Strasse if he had nothing to hide?
Where had he got the false papers from?
They were still checking with the Kriegsmarine in Kiel, but they doubted that conscription letter was genuine.
Jack listened carefully to the questions. They didn’t seem to suspect he wasn’t German, and they hadn’t asked him about the cameras or the film, but he knew it was just a matter of time.
He was taken from the interrogation room to another cell, this one a damp, windowless room, which seemed to be below ground level. A single bulb in a metal grill cast a pool of weak, yellow light over the room.
He was pushed into it, his shins hitting a wooden plank chained to the wall that passed as a bed. It was only when he lay down that he became aware he wasn’t alone in the room.
He made out a dark shape on a bed on the other wall and then the shape coughed, a rasping, unhealthy noise, which only ceased when the shape sat up and stared at him for a while.
Eventually Jack said good evening and his name was Hans and the shape said nothing, though it nodded its head.
The cell was silent other than for the rasping breathing of the shape alongside him. In the disconcertingly long gaps between breaths, he could just make out muffled screams further down the corridor. He was now aware of the nasty bruise behind his ear and waves of nausea sweeping over him.
‘Are you from Dortmund?’
The shape had sat up and addressed him in a cultured voice.
‘No, I’m from Mainz.’
‘Mainz? I often wonder what Johannes Gutenberg would think of Germany now: the man responsible for the miracle of printed books and now the country is run by people who burn them. What do you think?’
Jack replied that he wasn’t really very political, and he was only here because of a misunderstanding and he hoped that in the morning he’d—
‘You don’t sound German?’
Jack was so shocked he didn’t reply and thought about how the sadistic little man in England with the greasy hair and a leather jacket had told him about the Germans’ habit of using stooges.
