Katastrophe, page 10
Blood brothers by now, the pair of them were captured by the Russians in a draughty church within days of the Sixth Army’s surrender. It happened at dusk and they’d been marched separately at gunpoint into the gathering darkness. Schultz hadn’t seen Werner Nehmann since but he’d thought about him a great deal, partly because he loved the man’s spirit, his sense of mischief, and partly because he recognised the anger that lay beneath his many talents. Nehmann, he’d concluded, was a survivor.
This thought had been a source of comfort over the months to come, not least because Schultz himself had been so sorely tested. The NKVD, it turned out, knew a great deal about Abwehr Oberst Wilhelm Schultz, and wanted to put that knowledge to the service of the Revolution. From Stalingrad, under heavy escort, he’d been taken by train to Moscow. There, in a cheerless interrogation room at the Lubyanka Prison, it had been clear within days that Schultz was going to offer them nothing beyond his name, service number, and rank. At nights, between the interminable interrogations, he’d be taken back to his cell to review yet again the wisdom of staying mute, but when the moment came when they transferred him to another prison, he knew that his life was about to change. Lefortovo specialised in torture. At Lefortovo, they had ways of turning you inside out until you couldn’t recognise a single centimetre of your old self, physically or in any other respect. The specialists at Lefortovo, he’d been promised, would take you beyond pain.
They kept a resident wolf in a cage without a lock on the door. They spent hours working on your back and thighs and the soles of your feet, two of them in turn with rubber truncheons. They had a neat little trick that involved sudden blows with the flat of a hand on your neck, which then swells up and locks the jaw. They liked hauling in a woman or two and subjecting her to treatment that only you could stop. They kicked and beat you senseless all day and then flung a crazy, half-dead old man into your cell. His ravings would keep you awake all night and next morning you’d find yourself having coffee in an elegant office with an apparatchik who termed himself ‘The Magistrate’. And when even that didn’t loosen your tongue, they’d shrug, and drag you down to the basement, and turn you over to the Ukrainians. You knew already about the Ukrainians because they’d warned you about these people. Wild, they’d said. And inventive. And totally in love with pain.
Was this a fairy tale, a fantasy, yet another false promise the People’s Revolution couldn’t possibly deliver? Alas, no. There were four of them. They were dressed like male nurses: white smocks, rubber galoshes, little white caps that tied neatly at the back. The room where they worked was tiled, both the floor and the walls, more whiteness, and they nodded when you limped in, the mutest of greetings, not a word to suggest what might happen next.
Schultz remembered an old tip, a piece of street wisdom he’d passed on to others during his working career. In circumstances like this, he’d always advised, find something to concentrate on. It could be imagined, some conflated memory or other, or it could be real, either would do, but the trick was to focus on that one remembered face, that one solid object. In this case, Schultz knew he was in trouble because his mind had ceased to function properly and the only thing he could see was a bucket and a mop. The purpose of the bucket was only too obvious. Afterwards, someone would have to clean up.
A big wooden table stood in the middle of the tiled floor. Schultz was made to strip naked and lie full length on his back. Then, from an adjoining room, a long plank was produced. The plank was thick and bore a series of gouge marks. Two of the Ukrainians laid the plank the length of Schultz’s body, its roughness against his bare flesh. The upper end nudged his chin. He could still see. He could still watch the men disappearing again to the room next door, returning with a big axe and an even bigger lump hammer. One on either side of the table, they looked down at him, apparently awaiting a signal of some sort, and then – on a nod from the smallest of the group – they started on him.
Schultz had never forgotten what happened next. Down came the axe, the Ukrainian grunting with the effort, the blade biting into the timber, sending ripples of intense pain into every corner of Schultz’s body. Then, from the other Ukrainian, a blunter blow, no less powerful, this time from the face of the lump hammer. Then the axe again. Then the hammer, on and on, over and over, a torrent of blows that sent more pain, white-hot, scalding, liquid, the river from hell, an agony far worse than Schultz had ever conceived possible. Already he could feel the wreckage of his kidneys, of his belly, of the coils of intestine that led to his arse, everything he’d ever taken for granted, all of it shaken loose, ripping apart. No man could survive this, he told himself. Because no sane man would ever want to.
Two minutes? Ten minutes? Half an hour? He’d no idea. But his last memory was the face beside his, the face that belonged to the smallest man in the room. Heavy Ukrainian accent. Very simple message. Have you had enough? Will you talk to us now?
‘Da,’ Schultz had whispered. Yes.
*
Next morning, in Stockholm, Schultz awoke at dawn. He lay still for a moment, the weight of the cat still on his chest, then rolled over until his feet found the bare boards beside the bed. From the living room next door a single window offered a view across the neighbouring rooftops to the cloud of seagulls wheeling and swooping over the harbour. The houses were painted in shades of Scandinavian pastel – light greens and yellows and soft blues – and lifted his spirits after two winters in the grey wastelands of the Moscow suburbs. This was a city, he thought, that didn’t deserve a war. More importantly, it had so far managed to turn its back to the slaughter further east and mind its own business.
He found a saucepan and matches for the stove. Also, a painted wooden box containing a thin carpet of tea leaves. Watching the water beginning to stir, feeling that strange tug of freedom a city like this seemed to offer, he thought again of the Ukrainians, of their bucket and mop, of their clinical malevolence, and of the weeks and months that had followed. In some ways the story of that terrible year was all too simple: pre-Plank, and post-Plank. Physical recovery, all too slow, had taken him to an office on the second floor of the Lubyanka. Like every survivor of the torture suites, he had to walk on the tips of his toes to spare his ruined heels, and every morning he’d join this surreal carnival of prisoners negotiating the corridors and stairwells that led to the second floor.
There, he’d spend hours with an official he knew simply as Diski. He was middle-aged, tall, a man of infinite patience who bent over his desk like a librarian, scribbling notes as Schultz talked. He was jug-eared, with thinning grey hair. He always wore the same rumpled grey suit, no tie. His German was perfect, with hints of a Berlin accent, and he spoke with a slight lisp. Over the weeks that followed, he combed the story of Schultz’s last two decades, pausing on the smallest details, wanting his view on this personality or that, exploring individual episodes with an economy of effort and a sureness of touch that Schultz – himself an interrogator of immense experience – could only admire.
There was no physical hazard in these visits to Diski’s bare little office, but as the weeks went by Schultz felt the essence of his past life, all those memories, all those experiences, being squeezed out and carefully bottled, leaving him a mere husk of a man: brittle, desiccated, empty. It also occurred to him that interrogation was beginning to turn into a kind of job interview, though the precise terms of what might lie in store remained vague.
Then came the moment, late one afternoon, when Diski sat back from the desk, capped his fountain pen and announced that it was over. As a gesture of gratitude for his co-operation, and as a down payment on the services he would render, the state was prepared to make an apartment available to Schultz. It wouldn’t be grand, and there’d undoubtedly come times when Schultz would miss the life he’d so meticulously described, but it offered freedom of a sort, and Diski hoped that would be some small recompense for some of the unpleasantness he’d been obliged to undergo.
Diski had never made a speech like this and Schultz sensed that the moment required some kind of response on his part, but all he could managed was a single question: why?
*
Now, Schultz made himself a glass of tea and limped once again to the window. Dawn had truly broken now and there was even a spill of golden light in the east. When the cat appeared, he scooped it up and showed it the view before finding more biscuits for the bowl. On the phone from the café last night, Dahlerus’s wife had asked him to come for breakfast around nine. It was already half past eight.
He soaped his face in the tiny bathroom and wondered about a shave but decided against it. Moscow attached much importance to his disguise, to the look he needed to adopt. He was to have come from Berlin. His people there wanted him to be a worker on the move, displaced by the war, a little rough around the edges. A three-day growth of beard would therefore be perfect.
He returned the cat to the bedroom, retrieved the battered German-made suitcase that contained his few belongings and made his way down to the street. He shut the door, made sure it was double-locked, and dropped the keys through the letterbox. Valentina might be disappointed, but she belonged to a life that he could barely remember and he realised that he didn’t care.
A passer-by directed him to a taxi rank down by the harbour. A woman in a beaten-up old Volvo read the address Valentina had written on a scrap of paper, took a second look at Schultz, and raised an eyebrow.
‘Östermalm?’ she said in German. ‘Posh.’
She was right. Birger Dahlerus and his wife occupied an enormous corner apartment on the fifth floor of a waterside building barely fifteen minutes away. The concierge on the ground floor watched Schultz limping in from the street, and asked his business, but it turned out that Dahlerus’s wife had already left his name and Schultz found himself riding the lift to the fifth floor.
He’d never met Michaela Dahlerus, not in the flesh. He knew that Diski had made careful preparations for this moment, pretending to be phoning from Berlin with news of Schultz’s keenness to meet with Birger Dahlerus again, but the moment his wife opened the door he realised that something was wrong. She was nearly as tall as her husband and had kept her looks. She was wearing a soft woollen dress, the lightest shade of grey, cut to showcase her legs. Her complexion was flawless, no trace of make-up, and there was warmth in her smile.
‘Herr Schultz?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m afraid my husband’s already left. He may be back in an hour or so. You’re very welcome to come in.’
She stepped aside and let Schultz in. The hall and then the huge living room reminded Schultz of a similar apartment he’d briefly commandeered in occupied Paris: high ceilings, tall windows, polished wood floors with a scatter of interesting rugs. Michaela gestured at an armchair beside the low coffee table. She wanted to know about Berlin, about Germany in general. She was hearing the most terrible things.
‘All true, I’m afraid. Certainly in Berlin. And Hamburg. And Cologne. You have somewhere specific in mind?’
‘I come from a little place called Neuburg. It’s down in Bavaria. On the Donau.’
‘And you still have family there?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then they may be luckier.’
‘You really think that?’
‘I do, yes. The RAF don’t bother with the smaller targets, and neither do the Americans. Here’s hoping,’ he looked up and mustered a smile. ‘Ja?’
Michaela disappeared to make coffee and a little something for breakfast. In the absence of her husband, she said, it was the least she could do. Schultz sat back, gazing around, enjoying the splashes of sunshine through the big picture windows. It was Diski, back in Moscow, who had briefed him only a week ago on the current state of the Reich. This information, he said, had come from a number of covert sources in Berlin, chiefly embedded Soviet agents, and was rich with the kind of details he needed for conversations like these. Schultz hadn’t seen Diski for more than a year, and was surprised how much the man had aged. The Soviets, it was clear, were going to win this war. So how come Diski looked so glum?
Schultz dismissed the thought. His eye had been taken by the pictures hanging on the wall. They were watercolours, landscapes mostly. They were very accomplished, enormously subtle, the wash of greys and greens capturing the melancholy of the pale northern light and looking at them he couldn’t help remembering his early attempts to brighten the apartment assigned to him.
It lay in the outskirts of Moscow, in a suburb near the biggest of the city’s airports, three bare rooms on the fifth floor of a hideous modern block. One of the rooms, where the previous occupier must have slept, stank of the insecticide used to kill bedbugs, and when Schultz had tried to force open the window, he’d broken the catch, letting in the freezing air day and night. There was a market nearby, and two or three times a week he’d shuffle along the road to buy stunted vegetables and tins of borscht from ageing babushkas squatting on dirty blankets on the roadside. One day, he’d noticed a line of tubes of oil paint, only half squeezed. He’d bought half a dozen different colours and managed to lay his hands on a brush and some wood panels from broken boxes and that night he’d made his first stab at a painting of his own.
The result was a mess, a child’s muddle of garish blues and reds with no theme or pattern, and he’d lived with it for a day or two before dumping it in the bin. Later, he thought that maybe he should have dreamed up a title, called it ‘Migraine’ and sold it in the market as his own contribution to socialist realism, but now, looking at the largest of the watercolours hanging on the wall, he realised he’d have been kidding himself. Decent art, like anything else worthwhile in life, demanded a great deal of application.
Michaela returned with a tray of coffee and a plate of warm brioche. Schultz couldn’t take his eyes off the brioche. Paris again, he thought. Another life.
‘My husband telephoned just now. Meetings, it seems, are like rabbits. They just keep multiplying. He says he won’t be back until this evening. Is there any way I might be able to help you?’ She settled into a corner of the sofa and crossed her legs.
Schultz helped himself to a brioche. He hadn’t heard a phone ringing and suspected she was making this call up. The truth was that Birger Dahlerus had no intention of meeting him, and he wondered why. Back in 1939, on the eve of Hitler’s push into Poland, the businessman had done his best to nurture peace talks, and even after war was declared he’d been tireless in his efforts to bring hostilities to an early end, chiefly through his rapport with Hermann Goering. War, Dahlerus had pointed out, could only hurt businesses across the continent, including his own, yet there’d been no possibility of rapprochement.
‘He’s still close to Goering?’ Schultz asked.
‘We both are. Is that why you’ve come?’
‘In a way, yes. But the Reichsmarschall’s a spent force these days. The Führer blames him for the bombing. Being fat and idle is one thing. Watching Germany burn is quite another.’
This quote came direct from Diski and seemed to touch a nerve in Michaela.
‘Are you telling me there’s no point in dealing with Hermann?’
‘Yes. He counts for nothing any more. Mention his name in front of Hitler and watch what happens. The castles? The banquets? The endless hunts? The trophy kills to be stuffed and mounted? All those limousines? The Führer considers him a glutton and a scoundrel. There’s nothing left in that relationship. In fact, Hitler has nothing but contempt for the man.’
‘So where would our hopes lie?’
‘For what?’
‘For peace.’
‘With Himmler.’ Schultz reached for another brioche. ‘As I’m sure you know.’
Diski, again. Himmler, he’d assured Schultz only days ago, knows that the war is lost. Since last year’s attempt on Hitler’s life, he’s found himself more powerful than ever. Hitler doesn’t trust his Generals any more, and Himmler has taken their place. Better the head of the SS in charge than a bunch of stiff-necked Prussians with treason in their hearts.
‘I know very little about Himmler,’ Michaela said carefully. ‘But I know Folke Bernadotte.’
‘The two of them have been talking, Himmler and Count Bernadotte. Did you know that, too?’
‘I do, yes. About the Jews, I think. Herr Himmler is arranging for a lot of them to be released.’ She looked suddenly amused. ‘My husband tells me you’re a spy catcher. Have you come to arrest our friend Folke?’
Schultz laughed, shook his head. Count Bernadotte had royal connections here in Sweden. More importantly, as Head of the Swedish Red Cross, he could also count on a number of important contacts in London and Washington. If you wanted to broker a separate peace with the Western Allies, then Count Bernadotte would be a very good place to start. Especially if you were Himmler and had millions of Jewish prisoners at your disposal.
‘Do you think any talks might go well?’ Schultz asked.
‘You want the truth?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Then I get the impression the answer is no. Folke has taken soundings in London. The Allies are still demanding unconditional surrender, and nothing will change that. There’s also a problem with Herr Himmler. Folke tells me Hitler gave him important responsibilities on the Eastern Front recently, tried to turn him into a soldier, into a General. I get the feeling it didn’t work.’
Schultz nodded. This was true. Himmler had always been an administrator and schemer of genius. Way back before Stalingrad, he’d built the SS into a sprawling empire unchallenged inside the Reich, and Schultz himself had watched his precious Abwehr steamrollered by the zealots in black. But more recently, according to Diski, Hitler had handed him control of Army Group Vistula, expecting Himmler to give the Russians a good hiding, and the Reichsführer-SS had fallen flat on his face. He had no gift for playing the General, for understanding the ebb and flow of armed conflict, for laying traps and taking risks on the battlefield, and as a result – according to Diski’s sources in Berlin – Hitler was fast losing his patience.
