Agent in Peril, page 28
The arrangements for the rendezvous Jack had made with Lotte already felt far more credible than those with Rainer. She felt more confident about this mission.
Basil had told her too how much he liked department stores. They must have been designed with agents in mind! All those different areas and corridors… internal staircases, multiple entrances and exits – you can’t go wrong!
It was twelve-twenty when she entered the store: the meeting was taking place on the third floor, so she took the stairs to the second floor and looked at the shoes for a while: she thought the selection in Berlin had been bad, but here it was far worse, just two or three styles, dour and overpriced, seemingly designed for women involved in manual work.
She arrived in the glove and scarf section on the third floor at exactly twelve-thirty. She assured the assistant who quickly approached her that she was just looking around and spent five minutes looking at the scarves: the selection not as depressing as with the shoes downstairs, but compared to Wertheim’s in Berlin, this place was a struggling corner store.
She became aware of a woman close to her and waited a minute before allowing herself to glance in that direction.
She’s a good ten years older than you, Sophia, mid-forties I’d say and not as slim as you – she’s shorter too. Her hair is quite short and is going grey and I told her to wear her dark brown coat with a blue scarf.
As far as she could tell the woman matched Jack’s description of Lotte so Sophia backed slowly away from the scarves and walked towards the gloves where the woman was now. She didn’t seem to have so much as glanced at her, but gradually the two of them edged closer. The woman was holding a pair of dark blue felt gloves.
‘Do you think these match my scarf?’
Sophia was about to say it was the wrong blue, but kept to the script.
‘I would say so, they’re very pretty.’ They looked like the kind of gloves her maid used to wear.
‘I was wondering about buying some brown ones.’
‘No, I’d say those are just right for you.’
They both turned and smiled at each other and the woman said very quietly that she was Lotte and was delighted to meet her and Sophia said likewise and maybe they could go somewhere quiet?
She followed Lotte out of the store, through a rear entrance and eventually onto Kirch Strasse, which turned out to bisect two large cemeteries, Catholics to the south, Protestants to the north – one of them closer to heaven, Sophia wasn’t sure which. Lotte entered the Protestant cemetery, eventually coming to a secluded area. They were all alone.
‘Did you have a good journey here?’
Sophia said she did, thank you, and asked how safe they were here.
‘I wouldn’t bring you somewhere I didn’t think was safe, would I? From here I can see the path we came down. It’s very quiet at this time of day. You have something for me?’
Sophia removed the Tatra box from her large handbag and placed it on the bench between them. She explained patiently how it worked – where to attach the lead to the antenna, turning on the battery et cetera – and Lotte took it all in, occasionally checking a detail and not looking confused or panicked as Rainer had done in Duisburg the previous day.
When Sophia had finished, she handed the tin and the umbrella to Lotte. ‘The location is the marshalling yard at Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck, I presume you know it?’
‘Of course. Whereabouts shall I place it?’
‘Somewhere as concealed as possible and ideally where the antenna can be put on a wall or a fence.’
‘It’s very well guarded, you know.’
Sophia shrugged. Those were her orders. ‘It must be in place by midnight, at the latest. Place it as close as possible to the marshalling yard. Will you be able to get there?’
Lotte said she’d find a way.
Sophia asked if she had any more questions and they ran through what she needed to do one more time and then Lotte said she really had to get back to work and suggested Sophia remained here for another ten minutes so they weren’t seen leaving together. They both stood up and Lotte hesitated for a moment and then shook Sophia’s hand, uncertainly at first and then with a much firmer grip.
‘I promise you I will do my very best.’
‘Thank you very much, Lotte.’
They stood in silence, each still holding the hand they’d been shaking, a long conversation that would never be started hanging over them.
‘I don’t know if you ever see the American – Jack. I imagine you can’t say one way or the other but if you ever see him or can get a message to him, please tell him I’ve always done my best.’
* * *
Sophia managed to get back into the hotel through the side door and back to her room without anyone noticing. She remained in her room until seven o’clock and then went down to reception where the man behind the desk told her there was a café opposite the post office where a respectable woman could eat alone.
She was back in her room by half eight, anxious whether Lotte would be able to place the device and what would happen if she was caught. The railway marshalling yard at Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck was at least two miles to the north and it was a large open area with no housing around it. When Basil and Noel had briefed her they’d said the target was surrounded by coal mines and factories and if any of the bombs missed their target then they wouldn’t go to waste.
She remained dressed. Her room was on the first floor and on the wrong side of the building and she doubted she’d see very much. She’d best be ready for a few hours in an air raid shelter.
* * *
Lotte arrived home early at the apartment she shared with her mother in Wanne on the east of Gelsenkirchen. It wasn’t too far from the marshalling yard but getting there would be very difficult.
She knew it wasn’t her place to argue or discuss the matter with the elegant woman who she thought could be from Berlin. She’d have preferred somewhere less remote, but long ago she’d realised what her place in society was and it wasn’t one where you argued with people. One did as one was told.
She made supper for her mother and ate very little herself as she listened to her mother tell her that she’d heard Goebbels on the radio giving a speech in Dresden and assuring people the war would be won by the end of the year and what did Lotte think?
‘I beg your pardon, Mother?’
‘You weren’t listening, were you? I asked if you think this war will be won by the end of the year?’
It had been some time since Lotte had argued with her mother. She nodded and said she certainly hoped so and they’d better get a move on because she needed to get her ready for bed.
Lotte had devised her plan on the way home from work. It wasn’t foolproof by any means, but it was the best she could come up with. She prepared her mother’s usual sleeping draught, but tonight doubled the dose. She’d done it before and it had had the desired effect. She would sleep soundly for the next twelve hours and certainly wouldn’t hear her daughter leave.
By nine-thirty Lotte had changed, the tin and the antenna concealed in a rucksack she wore under her jacket. She paused in the hallway, the apartment, which had been her home all her life, now silent apart from the constant rhythm of her mother’s gentle snores. She stepped into the small lounge, a room that could have been cosy but had a formal feel to it thanks to her mother’s menagerie of precisely placed pottery animals and her obsession with religious paintings, now joined by a large one of Hitler.
She looked at the photograph of her father in its silver frame, a handsome man, aged forty-three – a year younger than she was now – looking slightly awkward in his infantry uniform, taken just a few weeks before he was killed at Passchendaele in October 1917.
She opened her handbag and took out the small, slightly creased photograph of Georg, the only man she’d ever loved. He was just eighteen when he died, less than a year after her father, this time in the Battle of Amiens. For a while she’d had the photograph framed by her bedside, but her mother had made her remove it. She’d never approved of Georg, a man who believed in socialism rather than religion. Instead, Lotte carried Georg around with her, but to her eternal regret had glued the photograph to a piece of card to protect it, meaning his final message to her was lost forever.
She slipped out of the flat and headed west back into Gelsenkirchen, past the entrance to the Pluto mine and through Haverkamp. If she was stopped, she had her work identity card with her: the Buer synthetic oil plant was just north of the marshalling yard, on the other side of the canal. She’d also brought a file with her and her excuse would be that she’d forgotten to leave it with a manager for an early morning meeting.
At the end of Braubauerschaft she reached her second Protestant cemetery of the day. She entered it through a gap in the railings where it backed on to the railway line, just a hundred yards or so from the marshalling yard. The tracks seemed to be busy, workmen moving around and some soldiers too. This cemetery was smaller than the one she’d met the woman in earlier in the day. It was older too and more overgrown, which meant she could find somewhere to hide.
She could still hear noise from the railway so she waited until ten-thirty before heading back to the fence adjoining Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck passenger station, just east of the marshalling yard.
To her horror, the whole area was now teeming with soldiers, dozens of them patrolling the tracks, walking up and down, no more than three yards apart. She watched for a few more minutes but the patrols continued.
She’d warned the woman from Berlin that security was tight round here, but this was as intense as she’d ever seen it. There could be any number of reasons: reports of sabotage, an escaped prisoner or slave labourer, a tip-off maybe, or just routine security.
Whatever the reason, she realised she couldn’t get any closer to the marshalling yard. On the other hand, the elegant woman had said she should place it as close as possible to the yard and arguably the cemetery was close enough, so she set about rigging it up, her mouth moving silently as she repeated the instructions to herself: priming the device, attaching the lead to the socket in the box, turning on the battery…
She placed the box under a tree and managed to wedge the antenna over a bough which she just managed to reach standing on a broken gravestone.
She paused for a while, worried someone may have heard her but it was silent in the graveyard, apart from the rustling of the trees and shrubs around her and the noise from the railway in the near distance.
It was eleven o’clock when she decided to head home. She walked slowly in a crouching position, squeezing through the gap in the fence and round to the main road and her route home. But at the end of the narrow alley, she came to a halt. At least a dozen military trucks were parked just where she’d emerge, with soldiers milling around them, joking and smoking.
As she watched them, a train pulled into the station, its brakes squealing and piercing the still of the night. An officer had stopped just a few yards from her and was talking to someone else – it would be another hour before they could board, he said: he was tired of his men being kept waiting.
There was no question that they’d see her, so she crawled back into the cemetery and made her way cautiously to the main entrance, but as she approached Goethe Strasse there were more military vehicles parked up and dozens of soldiers hanging around the entrance, some sitting on the benches.
She’d prepared a story of sorts in case she was stopped on her way back: this time she’d say that she’d had to return to her office to collect the document. She was aware it sounded less than plausible but given there was nothing incriminating on her she may just get away with it.
But being stopped on the street was one thing, being seen coming out of the cemetery quite another. There was no question they’d search the cemetery and they’d be bound to discover the device and the antenna hanging from the tree. She couldn’t risk leaving the cemetery.
She must remain there, regardless of the consequences.
She felt a strange calm as she retreated back into the heart of the graveyard. She’d had a premonition it would end like this: that this was one task that was too fraught with danger, where she had little control over the risks she was taking.
She sat on the grass next to the tomb of a boy called Erich who’d died at the age of twelve in the last century. She thought of her father for a while, a gentle and very liberal man, and she wondered how he’d ended up with her mother and then thought that maybe her mother was as she was because she’d been widowed so young.
She removed the photograph of Georg from the handbag and could just make out some of his features in the little light there was: his shy grin, the beautiful sweep of his hair, the firm jaw – and so young, always so young. She thought as she so often did of the life they’d have had together, away from this town – he’d always promised that – maybe they’d even have travelled outside of Germany. Her dream had been to visit Italy. To her surprise she felt warms tears tickle down her face and soon she was sobbing and as hard as she tried, she couldn’t stop herself. She buried her face in her scarf, scared the noise of her crying may alert the troops.
She wiped the tears away with her scarf and now a shaft of moonlight caught Georg’s picture and she noticed that it was coming unstuck in one corner. She took out a hairpin and managed to wedge it into the gap, enabling her to peel the photograph away from the cardboard backing. And now for the first time in more than twenty years she saw his faded handwriting and his message.
You’ll always be in my heart
I’ll always be by your side
We’ll never be apart
She’d gasped when she read the message, which had somehow drifted from her memory years ago. She was still reading it when she heard the distant drone of aircraft. As they came closer, she realised they were approaching from the north and flying low. She felt the ground rumble under her, the vibrations becoming violent as the first bombs landed and she wondered what would happen to the bodies in the graves.
There was a blinding flash behind her and a series of enormous explosions and splinters from falling trees struck her like arrows. She clasped the photograph of Georg closer to her heart.
We’ll never be apart
* * *
Sophia had worried people may think she looked too prepared for the rush to the bomb shelter after the air raid siren sounded.
The fact that one of the guests was dressed and even wearing a beret was the least of people’s concerns though. It was a major air raid, even by Gelsenkirchen’s standards. As they crowded into the shelter someone remarked that this was the worst raid he’d seen and another asked him sarcastically how he could see anything and the other man replied that he knew full what he meant: the British were flying so low and the bombs were actually hitting the town this time and not the fields around it.
When Sophia looked up a woman was staring at her and Sophia realised, she may have been smiling, so she smiled again at the woman and offered her a biscuit and the woman thanked her and said she was too worried to eat. Her Hans was out there, she said. Sophia didn’t ask where ‘there’ was.
Sophia closed her eyes and rehearsed her journey tomorrow. It would be the Saturday and she knew trains were less frequent but she planned to catch an early one to Essen and from there to Düsseldorf, where Jack would be waiting for her because before leaving the hotel, she’d ring the number she’d memorised and leave a message about a niece coming to visit her uncle later that day.
She smiled once more as she thought of Jack. They may have to wait in Düsseldorf for a day or two until the Elfriede was heading south, but soon they’d be back in Switzerland, together again. The all-clear sounded around two-thirty and to her surprise she quickly fell asleep.
* * *
It was Sophia’s utter misfortune that the investigation in Duisburg into the bombing of the steelworks and the suspicious role the manager of the Prinzregent may or may not have had in it was passed by the Gestapo to the Kripo, the criminal police.
They had a reputation for being particularly sharp and methodical and it was a further misfortune that the investigation was led by Kriminaldirektor Klaus Braun, an experienced detective who’d been forced to retire in 1938 after being overheard telling colleagues he didn’t think politics and policing mixed well together. Now, needs must, and with so many detectives being conscripted, he was back.
At first Braun wondered quite what this was all about: it was odd that the hotel manager’s Daimler had been parked near the factory but nothing more than that and it was certainly odd that he’d then told the Gestapo an unlikely tale about one of his guests asking him to leave a metal box on some wasteland near the steelworks.
But Kriminaldirektor Klaus Braun, being Kriminaldirektor Klaus Braun, set about matters methodically. First, they’d find Frau Alma Walter and take it from there. Except there was no trace of Frau Alma Walter from Cologne and the address near the Volksgarten was one of a number of tenement blocks in Cologne destroyed the previous year. His colleagues at the Kripo in Cologne confirmed that according to their records and those in the Rathaus, there’d never been a Frau Alma Walter in the city.
Now Braun decided this was indeed suspicious. The Gestapo had insisted on interrogating the hotel manager themselves, which was something he didn’t like to think about too much, not so much because he was appalled at their methods – though he was, but he had learnt to keep quiet about that. It was more that he never quite trusted information gathered as a result of torture.
But the Gestapo assured him Rainer Kühn wouldn’t stop talking. He’d told them Frau Alma Walter was a British spy, although as far as he could tell, she was a Berliner. And he said he’d been recruited before the war by an American, who’d been back to visit him much to his surprise – well shock, actually – back in April. He’d been recruited against his will, of course; he’d made the most dreadful misjudgement, which he bitterly regretted, but now he was very happy to co-operate.
