Katastrophe, page 18
‘That bad?’
‘Worse. For two whole summers, no one had got in our way. Victories like those make you fat and happy. We never saw what was coming, never picked up the clues. The Ivans taught us many lessons. Most important of all, they showed us how stupid we’d been.’
‘Stupid?’
‘Arrogant. Blind. Deaf. Believers in our own propaganda. Until you’re on your knees in someone else’s country, you have no idea where all those lies will take you.’
Schultz paused for a moment, aware that – at last – he’d manage to catch Beata’s attention. There was something new in her eyes. Once or twice, she’d even nodded. Sympathy? Agreement? He’d no idea.
Merz wanted to know how he’d got away from Stalingrad.
‘I didn’t. Nehmann and I were like brothers by the end. We got caught up in all kinds of madness. You’re right. Nehmann was a journalist. Some of those lies were his but he was a good man, here, where it matters.’ Schultz’s big hand closed briefly over his heart. ‘The Russians found us in an empty church. Nehmann had come up with some music and the priest was banging away on the organ.’
‘So they took you?’
‘We surrendered.’
‘And then what?’
‘They put me on a train to Moscow. Nehmann I never saw again. Christ knows, he may be dead but somehow I doubt it. You want the details? About Moscow? About the Russians? About the many blessings of their Revolution? My pleasure.’
For much longer than he’d intended, Schultz gave them a candid account of the last two years of his life. He talked about the Lubyanka, and the many ways the NKVD had tried to prise open the bits of him where he kept his Abwehr secrets. He asked them to imagine a life led under the glare of lights that never went out, under the gaze of unseen eyes when your only way of measuring time was the daily tick-tock of beating after beating. He introduced them to the Ukrainians in their white smocks, to the world of the plank, and the axe, and the lump hammer, and the hours of supplementary interrogation that followed when he abandoned any trace of self-respect and opened his entire life for their inspection. No secrets left worth protecting. No question he wouldn’t answer. Just the knowledge that he’d become a husk of a man, emptied of everything except a growing sense of dread.
Throughout this account, Schultz was aware of the baby beside her mother, and the longer Schultz talked, the more beguiled the baby seemed by his presence at the table. She was far too young to understand what he was saying, but as he plunged deeper into the numbing void that had followed his months at the Lubyanka – the draughty apartment, the consolations of black-market vodka – she kicked her legs and gurgled and reached out to try and seize that thick finger again. Finally, Schultz realised he’d nothing left to say.
‘So that was me,’ he said, ‘my war. It took three years until I realised what they had in store for me. They wanted me to deliver a letter. The price of a postage stamp might have saved me a great deal of grief.’
‘A letter to whom?’
‘Himmler. Onkel Heine. They believed I knew him, which in a way was true.’
‘And who wrote this letter?’
‘Stalin. The great Vozhd.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I did their bidding. Himmler is under treatment in the SS sanatorium at Hohenlychen. I gave him the letter this afternoon and refused an invitation to stay. The rest of the story you can blame on Frenzell.’
‘He flew you down here?’
‘He flew me first from Stockholm, and then to a field down the road. He was also kind enough to give me your address. Your friend’s a modest man but I suspect I owe him my life. Himmler hates untidiness, especially when it comes to a postman like me.’
Merz nodded, then exchanged a glance with his wife before reaching for the bottle and recharging Schultz’s glass.
‘We have an old shed in the garden,’ he said. ‘Lottie uses it as a den in the summer. It gets cold at night but there’s a mattress in there and a pile of blankets, and if you get bored Lottie’s very good about sharing her toys.’ He paused, waiting for an answer, but Beata had something to add.
‘We call it das Puppenhaus, Herr Schultz,’ she murmured. ‘And you’re very welcome.’
Das Puppenhaus. The doll’s house. Schultz rubbed his big face, and then extended a hand to Beata.
‘I was christened Wilhelm,’ he said. ‘But Merz used to call me Willi.’
13
Tam Moncrieff was no fan of the little Lysander aircraft. They were, he thought, creatures of the night, perfectly equipped to drop into French fields under cover of darkness, deliver an agent and then disappear again before the nearest German caught wind of what might be happening. Back in the glory days of SOE, when the whole of France lay under occupation, Lysanders were invaluable but now the Germans had gone, pushed back towards the borders of their own country, and it wasn’t at all clear to Moncrieff why he couldn’t get a flight on one of the bigger twin-engined Dakotas that regularly ferried personnel and equipment across the Channel and into France. That way, at the very least, he might have an hour or two of relative comfort to grasp what the next week or so might have in store for him.
Ursula Barton, alas, wouldn’t hear of it. Thanks to contacts in SOE, she’d laid hands on a Lysander and had struck a deal that gave MI5 the flight for virtually nothing. With a budget that was shrinking by the day, she pointed out, she couldn’t possibly afford the outrageous sums charged by a War Ministry desperate to claw back the money to pay for all those timeservers behind all those Whitehall desks. No, she insisted that Moncrieff present himself at the airfield near Chichester where the Lysanders were hangared. She also gave him a thickish brief outlining known developments to date, plus a handful of books she wanted him to present to her good friend, ex-agent Clover.
In a rather touching aside, saying goodbye in her office, she’d revealed her worries about what kind of present she could possibly afford. Sending food or drink was out of the question because the Swiss were spoiled for both. No woman could possibly afford perfume these days, and to lay hands on nylon stockings you had to be on good terms with a Yank. So, in the end, it had to be books.
The books were bundled with binder twine, and before he left the office Moncrieff had taken a cursory look. Two of them were collections of poetry. Gerard Manley Hopkins he admired. Of Henry Vaughan, he knew nothing. One of the remaining volumes was an exploration of faith by a Scottish explorer who’d lived among Buddhist monks, while the other was a thickish history of the Protestant Reformation. Barton, looking up from the litter of paperwork on her desk, had caught his bewilderment at once.
‘Clover’s joined the Salvation Army,’ she said. ‘She’s in the process of becoming an Officer. I thought I’d mentioned it.’
‘But she’s still…’ Moncrieff shrugged, ‘… in the game?’
‘Christ, yes,’ She smiled absently up at him. ‘Forgive my French.’
Now, with the snowcapped peaks of the French Alps at last in sight, Moncrieff was reading Barton’s brief for the second time. The pilot, a taciturn Scot, was mercifully uninterested in conversation and to Moncrieff’s surprise the little plane had more room for his leggy frame than he’d expected. With the sun over his right shoulder, he was doing his best to master the known order of events to date.
The operation, whatever shape it finally took, appeared to have attracted not one but two codenames. The Americans, who were clearly in charge, were calling it Sunrise. Churchill, it seemed, preferred Crossword. To Moncrieff, long schooled to hunt for the tiniest hint of daylight through the usual thicket of complications, this was itself significant.
Those with the keenest antennae in London had begun to remark on a slippage of power to the Americans that appeared to be irreversible. President Roosevelt had bailed out a near-bankrupt Britain in the early days of the war, while General Dwight D. Eisenhower had masterminded the successful assault on D-Day. There were rumours of a falling out between Eisenhower and the bumptious Montgomery, but no one seemed to doubt for a moment that the Americans were well and truly in charge. It was, after all, their money, their matériel and their huge machine grinding slowly towards a crossing of the River Rhine, and when it came to a settlement at the war’s end, Moncrieff sensed that the Americans, under the inscrutable gaze of Stalin, would be calling the shots.
So where did this leave Operation Sunrise? Moncrieff, from his desk in St James’s Street, had started with the urgent request to ship SS Sturmbannführer Max Wuensche to Switzerland. A call to the officer in charge of Camp 165, way up in the wilds of Caithness, had confirmed his presence among the other high-value inmates, but when Moncrieff had steered the conversation round to other fingers in this pie, he’d hit a brick wall. Yes, Herr Wuensche had – to date – a blameless record as a prisoner of war. No, he’d never volunteered anything beyond his rank and service number. And, no, he very definitely would not be leaving under escort on the next train south. When Moncrieff had pressed for more details – expressions of interest, perhaps, from other intelligence agencies – the Lieutenant Colonel in charge, a Scotsman like Moncrieff, had regretfully brought the conversation to an end. Max Wuensche, he murmured, was an active and willing participant in many aspects of camp life. He was also a painter of some talent and doubtless, after the war, he could look forward to a life of opportunity in the neue Deutschland.
Moncrieff had loved this phrase, ‘the new Germany’, not least because it revealed yet another aspect of the jockeying currently taking place in every corner of the Alliance. He spoke regularly to American contacts in Washington. He bought drinks for some of the wary Free French expatriates who haunted certain pubs in Knightsbridge and Belgravia. He even had links to sources in the Russian Embassy. These conversations, some official, most not, told him that the players around the board were preparing their last throws of the dice, and all of them – without exception – acknowledged that Germany, and therefore Germans, would be a major force as post-war Europe tried to come to terms with what might turn out to be a messy peace.
So who was making sure that Wuensche, the much-decorated SS hero and Hitler’s favourite adjutant, would never form part of wherever Operation Sunrise was headed next? And was Ursula Barton right in thinking that a Yugoslav partisan advance across the plains of northern Italy, in the wake of a local German surrender, might serve Soviet interests very nicely?
The latter possibility had weighed heavily with Moncrieff. Three years ago, he’d got rather too close to a trail of coincidences and questionable contacts left by a fast-rising MI6 agent called Kim Philby. He and Ursula Barton had begun to have doubts about exactly where this plausible, effective, though endearingly shy operator’s loyalties really lay. Their enquiries had given rise to a number of key questions, none of them ever properly addressed, but Moncrieff’s involvement had come to a sorry end. He’d been beaten, injected and kidnapped in the middle of the night, and thanks to a drug called Scopolamine the next week or so of his life had become a mystery. This experience had shaken his faith in almost everything, and it had taken the years that followed to restore something of his former self. Tam Moncrieff had started his adult life as a Royal Marine but only recently had he felt the return of that sense of raw physical self-confidence.
Now, as the Lysander sideslipped into an airstrip the size of a pocket handkerchief in the French frontier town of Annemasse, he folded Barton’s notes and slid them back into his suitcase. Moments later, the little plane bumped to a halt. The pilot was already signalling to a uniformed attendant in charge of the refuelling bowser. He had to be in Paris before nightfall.
‘It’s gone four already,’ he tapped his watch. ‘Good luck wherever you’re off to next.’
Getting into Switzerland, Barton had warned, might offer a challenge or two. Travelling as a fully accredited member of the Security Service, complete with MI5 ID, would raise all kinds of difficulties. The Swiss were punctilious when it came to protecting their cherished neutrality, and although it was common knowledge that spies were thick on the ground, officials on the frontier did their best to turn away yet more trouble. And so, after some thought, Ursula Barton had decided to appoint Moncrieff to an administrative role in the Salvation Army.
In the Swiss branch of the organisation, Anneke De Vries – aka ex-agent Clover – had recently been appointed an Officer in the organisation, the Salvation Army’s equivalent of an ordained minister of religion. Moncrieff was bringing her literature that she would be translating into German and French. These were first-hand attestations to the power of prayer, the reach of gospel, and – above all – the blessings of dedicated work among the poor. This was authentic material, freely available to callers at the Army’s impressive headquarters in Queen Victoria Street, and although Barton hadn’t troubled the Army’s management with this small subterfuge, she could see no reason why it wouldn’t ease Moncrieff’s path into Switzerland. She’d also furnished him with a Salvation Army ID card, hastily mocked up by a gifted counterfeiter who nested in a tiny office on the top floor of MI5 headquarters.
‘When you try, you can look very stern,’ she told Moncrieff. ‘Self-denial and good works? Never fails. Trust in the Lord and all will be well.’
As easy as that? Moncrieff somehow doubted it, but he’d spent a great deal of time in Europe before the war and he knew how porous borders could be if you knew the language and had a story to tell. The queue on the French side of the frontier was long. It happened to be a Saturday, and he imagined that most of these people must be taking their hard-earned francs into shops in nearby Geneva, where goods unimaginable in France were still for sale. At last, he found himself looking at the uniformed official who appeared to be in charge. Only two flimsy looking wooden barriers stood between him and Switzerland. Moncrieff’s passport listed his occupation as ‘Army officer’. The official glanced up at him. His German had an inflection that was new to Moncrieff.
‘You’re here on official business?’
‘I am.’
‘With a fellow Officer?’
‘Indeed.’
‘In Bern, perhaps? The embassy? The military attaché?’
‘In Locarno.’
‘Locarno? You have papers? A name? An address?’
‘I have these.’
Moncrieff extracted a thickish envelope from his suitcase and handed it over. The official extracted the sheaf of printed witness Barton had acquired from Queen Victoria Street. The official peered at the first page but didn’t speak English. He wanted Moncrieff to translate.
Moncrieff, who’d anticipated this moment, selected an account from a woman in London’s East End who’d been bombed out early in the war and lost everything, including her house, her second husband, her ancient dad and a much-loved tom cat called Gary. The Salvation Army had come to her rescue and now she was a Soldier for the cause in neighbouring Plaistow.
‘That’s also in the East End,’ Moncrieff said helpfully. ‘And I gather the cat’s named after Gary Cooper.’ He smiled. ‘Meet John Doe? Playing opposite Barbara Stanwyck?’
The official was looking baffled.
‘What’s this got to do with the Army?’
Moncrief feigned bewilderment for a moment or two. Then his fingers found Barton’s precious ID in the pocket of his jacket, and he handed it across.
‘Wrong Army. My mistake. I should have mentioned it. This is the Salvation Army. Not the other sort.’
‘You work for these people?’ The official was studying the ID.
‘I work for God.’
He explained about William Booth, the Army’s founder, about branches of the movement worldwide, and about Anneke De Vries.
‘She helps run the Army in Locarno. I have her phone number, if it helps. We have all kinds of issues to address but she’ll be translating this material and distributing it throughout Switzerland.’
‘But why don’t you do that? Your German is excellent.’
‘Too busy, I’m afraid.’ Moncrieff risked a smile. ‘God’s work never ends.’
The official’s gaze returned to the envelope. Moncrieff sensed that his luck was about to run out but then the official looked up. He wanted to know how bad things were in England.
‘Very bad, alas. Peace is something you take for granted until it’s not there any more.’
‘But you think there’s a place for your Army here? In Switzerland?’
‘We know there is. Poverty and need start in the human heart.’ His hand briefly closed over his chest. ‘We’re called to rescue the lost, as well as the afflicted. Even here in your country.’
The official was frowning now. Then he glanced at the lengthening queue and reached for Moncrieff’s passport.
‘One month.’ The big stamp descended on the empty page, and he scribbled a date.
‘More than enough, I hope.’ Moncrieff was pocketing his passport. ‘God willing.’
*
Getting to Locarno from Geneva was never going to be easy, Barton had warned, but it was on the second of the two train changes that Moncrieff began to suspect that he was being followed. His new friend was tallish, with cropped hair, a lean, bony face, and deep-set eyes behind a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. His long black leather coat was unbuttoned in the warmth of the train and he’d selected a nearby window seat. It was dark outside after the first change of train and Moncrieff was aware of the man lifting his head from his newspaper to briefly study Moncrieff’s reflection in the window. He must have read his edition of the Journal de Genève twice by the time they got to Bellinzona.
From here, according to the porter on the station, it was a bare ten minutes to Locarno. The local train would be arriving in minutes. By now, the platform had emptied except for Moncrieff and, a discreet ten metres away, his shadow, the folded newspaper now tucked beneath his arm. Moncrieff was wondering whether to effect a formal introduction when an engine and a single carriage steamed fussily in to take them both to Locarno. Agent Clover, Barton had assured him, would be waiting at the station but Moncrieff, checking his watch, was beginning to have his doubts. Switzerland, he suspected, went to bed early. Who would venture out at four minutes to midnight?
