Katastrophe, page 13
Schultz nodded. He’d opened the envelope. Inside he’d found a single train ticket for Malmö, plus a sizeable wad of Reichsmarks and a fully stamped ID card. The photo showed a face that Schultz could barely remember: well fed, confident, with just a hint of a smile.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘We made it. We had your old ID from Stalingrad and did the rest ourselves. Everything’s up to date, except the photo. We’ve kept you in the Abwehr, same rank. You answer to Himmler now but he allows the Abwehr crest.’ He nodded at the ID card. ‘It’ll get you through any check, I guarantee it.’
‘And this?’ A smaller envelope had Himmler’s name on it. The name was typed in German characters, not Cyrillic, and the envelope – unlike the paperwork Schultz had come across in Moscow – was excellent quality, with a weight that suggested something important inside.
‘You want me to give him this? Himmler?’
‘I do, yes. He knows you’re coming.’
‘So what’s inside?’
‘That’s of no importance, not to you. Simply give him the envelope. You may think it wise to explain your own circumstances. That’s up to you. Either way, it’s imperative it gets into the hands of Himmler. You have to know that. That’s your task.’
‘And afterwards?’
‘Afterwards you go to Berlin, as planned. How you get there is your decision, your choice. Hohenlychen, as I’m sure you know, is only a couple of hours away. In Berlin, you first make contact with this man,’ Diski produced a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket of his greatcoat.
Schultz gazed at it. Careful capital letters. Nothing Cyrillic. Plus two eight-digit numbers.
‘Rainer Gehlhausen?’ he looked up.
‘Dr Gehlhausen. He’s a surgeon. The first number is the Charité hospital where he works. The other one is his apartment.’
‘And he’s German?’
‘Yes. Normally I’d give you a codename but these aren’t normal times. Gehlhausen has been with us since the thirties.’
‘And you have contact with him?’
‘Of course. And we trust him implicitly. When you meet, extend my greetings and tell him to be patient, though patience is something I doubt he’ll need. Doing what this man does, you’d have no doubts that the war is nearly over.’
Schultz glanced at the name again and then looked up.
‘And Nehmann?’ he enquired. ‘Werner?’
‘Still in Kolyma, where we can keep an eye on him.’ He nodded at the smaller envelope. ‘Just make sure that gets to Himmler.’
*
The Malmö train left on time. Schultz’s last experience of travelling by rail had taken him from Stalingrad to Moscow two whole years ago, half crushed to death in a third-class carriage. They’d stopped at station after station en route for no good purpose, every door guarded by armed soldiers, nobody on, nobody off, and he remembered gazing out at the peasant faces on the platforms, the chaos of war writ small in their knotted bundles, their dirty children, their outstretched hands, their lowered heads, their muttered prayers.
Now, to his delight and surprise, the Revolution had paid for a first-class ticket and he had an entire compartment, all six seats, to himself. This was a world of plump upholstery, of a carefully swept floor, of armrests, of a curtain that would give him a little privacy from the corridor outside, and even of a menu, slipped into an embossed leather folder. He’d been allocated a seat in the compartment at the very front of the train, and as the big engine cleared its throat and the train juddered and began to move, he sat beside the window, his case stored on the overhead rack, the envelope from Diski on his lap, staring out as the locomotive rumbled over the blackness of water, heading south.
This, according to Diski, was his return to a life he’d thought he’d never see again. As long as he did their bidding and delivered the letter, and made his way to Berlin, he’d be a free man, a German in the land of his birth. Was this why he’d been so carefully processed back in Moscow? First tamed by the Ukrainians? Then preserved and shelved like a jar of pickles in a draughty, falling-apart suburban apartment with a bunch of elderly alcoholics for neighbours? Was his real fate always at the mercy of events in Berlin? With Diski and his masters awaiting the moment when they needed someone like Schultz, someone with the right pedigree, the right connections, to deliver a message, one tiny fragment of the jigsaw, and thus – in some mysterious way – hasten the war to its end? Was his role, in short, to make a brief appearance at the drama’s final act? Before the curtain came down and the audience rose to its feet?
Schultz, in his heart, knew the answer was no. The last couple of days in Stockholm had restored a little of his old confidence, his old bravado. In his shed of an apartment in Moscow, he’d been living, as they’d always intended, like a non-person, neither Russian nor properly German, neither dead nor properly alive. Readied beneath his bed was an ancient pair of boots. With the aid of a thin chisel and a borrowed hammer, he’d spent days fashioning a slot where the heel met the sole of the right boot, and when he’d finished he’d slipped a razor blade inside. The slot, virtually invisible, would pass most inspections, while the razor blade meant that never again would he have to face the Ukrainians. Arrested, he’d simply save the NKVD the chore of killing him.
This single act, he now recognised, had kept him at least half-sane. It meant that they hadn’t quite eliminated all of him. It meant that he could still take the initiative, still decide the course of events. The fact that he’d be taking his own life was irrelevant. Because it would be his choice, not theirs.
Now, as the last of the Stockholm suburbs slipped away, he knew he had to build on the sweetness of that one little victory. His years in the Abwehr, first on the front line, latterly in a senior position, had taught him many things, but the most important by far was the cardinal rule that applied to everything in the intelligence world. Trust no one. Ever.
Diski’s employers had built an entire empire on that single principle, hundreds of thousands of agents across the vastness of the Soviet Union, and however beguiling was this offer of freedom, back there on the station concourse, Schultz knew that it couldn’t possibly be so simple. The NKVD gave nothing away. What seemed plausible wasn’t, and in the ceaseless struggle to protect the Revolution, everything – including Oberst Wilhelm Schultz – was expendable. He could do his best to make sure that this letter got to Himmler. But what would happen afterwards?
Staring into the blackness of the Swedish night, he became aware of another noise over the rumble of the train. Then, in the window, he watched the reflection of a waiter with a trolly pausing outside the compartment. The door slid open. Schultz knew no Swedish. The waiter spoke passable German and asked whether Schultz had made a choice from the menu. When Schultz shook his head, he gestured towards the trolly outside.
‘Cold meat or cold fish. Cold potatoes. A little salad.’
Schultz chose meat. A minute or so later, he was looking at a plate of grey-looking beef, thinly sliced, overcooked. The waiter returned with the vegetables, and a basket of rolls.
‘You want wine?’
‘Red.’
‘A half-bottle comes with the ticket. You pay if you want more.’
‘A half-bottle is fine.’ Schultz gestured down at the tray. ‘I need a glass of water, and another knife. The smaller the better.’
‘You have two knives already, sir. The second is for the rolls.’
‘I need a third.’
The waiter shot him a look and then shrugged. The extra knife was exactly the same size as the second. He gave it a wipe, handed Schultz the water and another glass for the wine, and then left the compartment. Schultz waited for the clatter of the trolly to recede down the corridor before getting to his feet and drawing the curtain across the sliding door. Privacy, he thought. At all costs.
Back in his seat by the window, the tray stored on the seat opposite, Schultz lowered the blind, examining the letter for Himmler, lifting it to the individual light above his shoulder. Turning it over, he knew he was in luck. Whoever had sealed the flap had expended the minimum of effort. The triangle of flap was secured only by its tip. Schultz studied it, and then dipped his forefinger into the glass of water, wiped it nearly dry, and then applied the residue to the tip of the flap. There were heating vents beneath the seats and Schultz bent to expose the back of the envelope to the trickle of hot air. Moments later, he knew he wouldn’t need the extra knife.
There was a single sheet of heavy-gauge paper inside, double-folded. Putting the envelope to one side, he wiped his hands on his trousers and then flattened the letter on his lap. The embossed heading was in Cyrillic but he’d been in Russia long enough to recognise key elements. This letter had come from the Kremlin.
The text itself, mercifully, was in German and as he absorbed the three brief paragraphs, he sensed the hand of Diski behind the cautious shuffle of the prose. The sender of the letter presented his compliments to the Reichsführer-SS. He regretted the abandonment of the Non-Aggression Pact that had launched this war, and everything that had followed. In the pursuit of what he termed ‘a just and sensible outcome’, he suggested that the time had come for a pooling of mutual interests. Should the Reichsführer-SS be minded to explore this possibility further, then the Soviet Union would happily entertain the notion of bilateral talks at the highest level. These would naturally have, in the first place, to be conducted in the deepest secrecy, and preceded with a public gesture that established – beyond reasonable doubt – the Reichsführer-SS’s continuing authority in running the business of the state.
This last condition brought the letter to an end, no expression of good wishes, or even the best of health, but that was hardly the point because what took Schultz’s gaze was the signature scrawled across the bottom of the page. The signature itself was terse, forceful, difficult to decipher. Beneath, carefully typed, was a helping hand. ‘MK Stalin.’
Schultz looked up a moment. His Abwehr days had brought him a number of windfalls but never anything on this scale. His first instinct was to lock the door, which he did, but the moment he tested it to make sure, it slid back on its runners. He locked it again. Same result. This compartment had been pre-allocated, his seat and carriage numbers on the ticket. Did this account for the absence of other passengers? Would the thunder of the adjoining locomotive drown his protests as he fought off any attack? Had he, even this early in the journey, been lured into a trap? Methodically, he discounted the possibilities one by one. He read the letter a second time, and then a third, before returning it to the envelope and sealing the flap properly. Even a minute examination, he thought, would show no signs of interference.
With the letter tucked inside the pocket of his jacket, he raised the blind on the window and poured himself a glass of wine. I’m Stalin, he told himself. I’m the mighty Vozhd. Assuming the latter is authentic, accepting the authorship at face value, why would I ever launch a bid like this? Schultz had been studying foreign newspapers in Stockholm. Some of them were English, others American, and he’d even found copies of Pravda on the city’s newsstands. They were all at least three days old, and he could read neither English nor Russian, but that hardly mattered because the photos and maps, with their helpful little arrows, all told the same story: that millions of Soviet troops were poised on the banks of the River Oder, ready to consign the Thousand Year Reich to an early grave.
In these funeral rites, the city that really mattered was Berlin. Already half destroyed by British and American bombers, she was still the beating heart of the Hitler regime, and whichever army seized her first would have the loudest voice in post-war negotiations. Millions of Red Army troops waiting just two hours’ drive from the capital told Stalin that victory was his. The war to date had taken numberless Soviet lives. Schultz himself had seen the evidence in the cripples and widows who peopled the streets around his apartment block. So why waste yet more Russian blood when an early German surrender might be on offer?
This, he knew, was more than a possibility. No one in Russia doubted for a moment that Stalin was sworn to defend the Motherland and to spare her needless suffering. There’d been a big get-together down in the Crimea, Roosevelt and Churchill and the Vozhd posing for the cameras at Yalta, but since then the Kremlin had reassured the people that Stalin had successfully put millions of Poles between themselves and any future invader who cared to chance his luck, and the nation seemed to breathe more easily as a result. The Vozhd is promising victory, went word on the street. He won’t make widows of us all.
And yet. And yet…
Schultz studied his own image in the window. His face was in deep shadow but he fancied he could just detect the tiny bulge in his jacket where he’d stored the letter. His hand tracked upwards, confirming it was still there, then he realised that any further speculation – at least for now – was pointless. All that mattered, as Diski and his masters obviously knew, was getting this letter to its addressee.
He smiled to himself, cupping the wine glass, then he raised his big hand to the image in the window.
‘Prosit,’ he murmured. ‘Weidmannsheil!’
*
‘Good hunting?’ Schultz woke up seven hours later to find the door of his carriage open and the face of the guard peering in around the curtain. The remains of the meal and the empty wine bottle lay on the tray on the seat opposite.
‘Ten minutes to Malmö, sir,’ the guard grunted.
The face disappeared. Schultz had been sleeping full-length across three seats, his head pillowed on his carefully folded jacket. He checked that the letter was still there, and then bent to put his boots back on. Already the darkness outside the window was pricked by the lights of the city’s suburbs, and when they got a little closer he watched the smoke from the locomotive coiling away in the throw of light from the trackside streets.
The moment he stepped off the train, he realised how cold it was. The sole figure waiting beyond the ticket barrier half lifted an arm in acknowledgement. He was small, even smaller than Werner Nehmann. He was wearing a heavy fur-trimmed coat, not cheap, and he spoke German with a heavy Russian accent.
‘Is that all you’ve got?’ He nodded at Schultz’s jacket.
Schultz nodded, said nothing. He was watching the handful of other passengers who had got off. Faces. The way they walked. Those little tell-tale clues that all wasn’t quite the way it should have been. Satisfied, he turned back.
‘What now?’
‘I take you to a hotel. It’s two in the morning. At seven I collect you again. And then we drive out to the airfield.’
‘I don’t need a hotel,’ Schultz grunted. ‘I’ve slept already.’
‘Wrong, my friend. Moscow is paying. How was the journey? The meal? Everything else?’ He nodded towards the train. ‘Enjoy, tovarish. This doesn’t happen to many of us.’
Schultz shrugged and followed him out of the station. The hotel was a hundred metres away. Schultz came to a halt at the foot of the steps. He had a favour to ask.
‘Anything, tovarish.’
‘I need a gun. An automatic. German if possible. Also four clips of ammunition.’
The Russian looked at him. If the request took him by surprise, it didn’t show. Schultz half expected a nod, a smile of compliance, something faintly deferential, but given the manners of the Revolution he knew it wouldn’t happen.
‘Seven o’clock,’ the Russian said. ‘Meet me here.’
*
To his surprise, having double-locked the door and left a crack between the curtains in the window, Schultz was asleep the moment his head hit the pillow. He’d asked the woman at the reception desk for a call at half past six, but he was already awake when the phone rang. He’d slept fully dressed but now he decided to take a shower. With the room still in darkness, he peered through the crack in the curtains. With the exception of a uniformed worker with an enormous broom, the plaza outside was empty.
Schultz dumped his clothes on the bed, checked the door, and then stepped into the shower. The water was hotter than he’d expected and he spent a moment fiddling with the two taps on the wall but then he got the balance just right. A choice of soaps was a luxury he’d ceased to believe in, and he spent long minutes lathering himself from head to toe with a little tablet of something indescribably wonderful before turning off the hot tap and bracing himself for the shock of the icy water. This was a habit he’d long ago adopted in pre-war days, a guaranteed cure for any hangover, and towelling himself dry in front of the full-length mirror he realised what a difference leaving Russia had made. The two-year hangover was gone. He felt whole again. Bits of himself he’d left with the fucking Ukrainians were, after all, slipping back into place. He felt alert, and ready, and somehow wanted. His exact role in this puzzling new script remained a mystery but even that he accepted as a kind of blessing. The very best bits of life, he’d always maintained, often showed up as a complete surprise.
*
The Russian was waiting, as promised, at the foot of the steps. He had a sizeable overcoat folded over one skinny arm.
‘Here.’ He handed it over. ‘Before you freeze to fucking death.’
‘What about the gun?’ The overcoat felt heavy as Schultz put it on.
‘It’s in the right-hand pocket. A Beretta is the best I can do. It’s Italian but I know comrades who swear by it. Be careful once the clip’s empty because it no longer holds the slide back. 9mm Parabellum. Four clips, seven in each. Kommen Sie mit.’
Schultz was impressed. He’d already found the little automatic in the coat’s right-hand pocket and it felt snug in his hand. Another tiny act of restitution, he thought. Oberst Schultz. Reporting for duty.
The Russian had a cab waiting on the other side of the plaza. He gestured Schultz into the rear seat and sat beside him.
‘The airfield’s ten minutes’ away,’ he said. ‘The pilot’s name is Jürgen. We use him a lot. He’s been through a bit, this boy. You should ask him about the shitshow in the Ardennes. Without us fucking Russians, half the world would be speaking German by now.’
