Katastrophe, page 35
‘But why would Schultz give it away?’
‘Very good question, sir. Nothing in Willi’s life has ever been simple.’
Liddell nodded. His gaze had returned to the figures by the lake, SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff locked in conversation with two of the Allies’ senior Generals.
‘This situation has begun to exercise our leaders,’ he said quietly. ‘Roosevelt and Stalin are exchanging letters by the day, and Winston’s doing his best to table our own interests. The Soviets believe we’ve gone behind their backs to end the war on our terms and this would appear to make their case.’ He looked up, tapping the photo. ‘I can see no Russians in that little huddle, can you?’
Moncrieff shook his head. He’d been there. He’d watched very carefully. No Russians.
‘The Prime Minister’s anxious?’ This from Moncrieff.
‘Exasperated. He’s had sight of Moscow’s latest. Stalin is very unhappy. He points out that the Germans are fighting like hell for some tiny railway junction in Czecho while we get Osnabrück, and Mannheim, and Kassel, all of them barely defended. Those cities fall into our laps, says Uncle Joe, and we spill no blood. He’s definitely smelling conspiracy, which shouldn’t surprise any of us, but I must say that a photograph like this doesn’t help.’
‘You’re suggesting we should never have acquired it in the first place?’ Barton’s tone was icy.
‘On the contrary, I’m suggesting it was careless to lose it.’
‘That wasn’t our fault. Tam walked into a trap. Someone knew he was coming. From the moment he stepped into Switzerland, they were onto him.’
‘They?’
‘Crusader.’ She nodded at the figure in the lavatory. ‘Latterly with a little help from his friend. Of course the Russians are keen to find out about Wolff, about secret meetings, about what’s really going on. That’s what took them to Crusader. That’s what put him on the train to keep an eye on Tam. But the real question is who drew him to Tam in the first place.’
‘And?’
‘And what, sir?’
‘You have any suggestions? Anything helpful that might move this discussion on? This morning, Downing Street appeared to believe that it’s in German interests to make mischief. They want to set us at each other’s throats. They want the alliance to fall apart, East and West, and on the evidence of the current correspondence, I must say it appears to be working. A separate peace with us would suit Hitler very well. He may even suggest we link hands to fight the Soviets, which would be a glorious irony, would it not? We’d all be back in the thirties, fighting the Red Menace.’
Moncrieff was watching Liddell very carefully, the way the fingers of his right hand were drumming some secret rhythm on the scuffed green leather desktop. So soft, he thought. So intimate. So private. Did every musician take cover like this? Had years of playing in his string quartet removed him from the real world? From the challenge of an alliance under extreme pressure? Would the head of ‘B’ Section prefer to bring this troubling discussion to an end?
‘Crusader knew, sir.’ Barton wasn’t giving up. ‘My question is how?’
‘And you have some thoughts? You think word leaked ahead of Tam’s departure?’
‘I do, sir. Yes.’
‘To someone close to home?’
‘Yes.’
‘You have a name, by any chance?’
‘Philby.’
‘Evidence?’
‘He paid the embassy a visit last week. In Bern. He was there for three days.’
‘For what reason?’
‘I’ve no idea. But neither did the handful of people I talked to at the embassy, which is rather the point. There was some talk of meetings in town. I gather he paid Zurich a visit. But Broadway’s always the ghost at the feast as far as our diplomatic friends are concerned.’
‘Too tribal? Poor table manners?’ Liddell smiled. ‘Too secret?’
‘That, with respect, sir, is silly.’
‘Silly, how? Surely the bloody man might have a multitude of perfectly good reasons for taking himself off to Bern. As I understand it, we despatched Tam to mend fences with Dulles, to apologise for not being able to produce Wuensche, to offer him another petit cadeau. What on earth does any of that have to do with Broadway?’
‘Not Broadway, sir. Philby.’
‘You’re telling me there’s a difference?’
‘I’m suggesting there might be.’
‘In what sense, pray?’ Liddell was frowning now, an expression of mild reproof. ‘We’re very close to the end of the war, my dear. The umpire may draw stumps at any moment. The peace, I admit, will be a challenge and I fear that our little corner of the tent may become seriously untidy. There will be lots and lots to do. We have a small army of internees, as we all know. They’ll have to be sorted and re-sorted. Some will be duds. They can be sent home. Others may be more promising, may deserve a conversation or two, may be prepared to put themselves at our disposal. That little dance will take months, possibly longer, and our only blessing is that by then this wretched war will be over.’ He held Barton’s gaze for a moment, and then he nodded once again at the figures on the terrace by the lake. ‘This little contretemps will blow over. I guarantee it. Your anxieties about Mr Philby, dare I say it, are theological. This is not the time for family quarrels. I say again, the peace may be more challenging than the war. I suggest…’ He broke off, staring at Barton as she got to her feet, smoothed the wrinkles from her skirt and turned on her heel. Moments later she’d gone, leaving nothing but the squeal of a distant tram.
Liddell was still gazing at the door. Then he shook his head.
‘Verruckt,’ he murmured. Crazy.
*
The holding cells at Gestapo headquarters on the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse were in the basement. Each cell measured 1.5 x 2.5 metres. A bed folded down from the wall, and beside a small table was a stool. Morning and evening, prisoners were given a mug of lukewarm ersatz coffee and two slices of bread with marmalade, while lunch appeared at noon. It was always soup. And the thin broth always featured small chunks of soggy potato.
Today, Nehmann counted three of them. Counting, he realised, had become central to his sanity, the barest thread that secured him to what remained of his life. Every morning, when he awoke, he used his spoon to make another tiny mark on the wall beside his bed, a tally of early mornings, any one of which could have been his last. So far, he’d been here for four days. Four days of expecting the footsteps down the corridor, the scrape of a key turning in his cell door, the rough hands pushing him into one of the neighbouring interrogation suites, the brief pantomime of question and faltering answer, followed by the inevitable end. According to Goebbels, the Gestapo were mean when it came to precious ammunition. These days, a single bullet through the back of the head was all you could expect.
And yet, for reasons Nehmann couldn’t fathom, it hadn’t happened. In one sense this was a blessing. His ankles had been shackled on arrival but at least he was still alive, and so far there’d been no attempts to interrogate him. Yet the very fact that nothing had happened – no visits to the torture suites, no list of charges, not the least indication that anyone, except the elderly warder who delivered his food, even knew he was here – had left him in limbo. Kolyma, in a thousand ways, had been infinitely worse but never in his life had Nehmann had to cope with this strange absence of more or less everything. No official contacts of any kind. No threats. No explanations. No Gulag battle for rations or warmth. And worst of all, no books, no paper, no pen. Nothing to read. And no way of starting a modest conversation, even on paper, even with himself.
Once a day, after the evening bread and marmalade, the warder accompanied him to the washroom at the end of the corridor. Here – still shackled – he could use the lavatory and the cold shower. There was no soap and the scrap of towelling was a tease, absolutely useless, but what was worse was the absence of anyone else. When he asked the warder whether the Reich had run out of prisoners, the old man rolled his sad eyes and muttered something about one of God’s jokes, but when Nehmann tried to push him further he simply shrugged and turned his head away.
The neighbouring cells, of course, were still occupied. Nehmann could hear stirrings of movement on both sides, and late in the evening there came animal screams from the interrogation suites, yet these noises off began to resemble the soundtrack for some surreal film, yet another clever ploy on Goebbels’ part to drive his once-favourite journalist out of his mind.
Goebbels? Was it really his doing? Nehmann would have loved to believe that the Reich Commissar for the Defence of Berlin, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, still had time to settle this private debt, but the truth – he suspected – was much simpler. In the shape of his drafted speech, Mikhail Magalashvili had insulted both the Führer and his precious Reich. Neither of them could cope with this brief glimpse of the truth, and so Nehmann, after days or maybe weeks adrift, would have to pay the price.
That bothered him. He didn’t want to die and thinking about it was no help at all. He feared the sudden appearance of armed guards at the door, the stumble up the staircase to the courtyard, and then – bare seconds later – having to kneel in the cold dawn, listening to the slide of the single bullet into the executioner’s Luger. But what was much worse, at least for now, was the penance that went before it. All his life, in ways so subtle he’d sometimes never noticed, he’d been in charge. Now that had gone. Leaving, quite literally, nothing.
Then, on the evening of the fifth day, relief. It came in the shape of tap-tapping on the pipes that ran between the cells, faint at first, then stronger. Nehmann swung himself off the bed and knelt beside the pipe, listening intently. The tapping stopped, and then resumed, faster this time, and letter by letter Nehmann began to coax meaning from the torrent of dots and dashes. The old man in the Kolyma gold mines, the bunkmate who’d taught him Morse code, had done his work well. News, announced the tapper, had come from the concentration camp at Flossenbürg. Admiral Canaris had been put to death. May he rest in peace.
Nehmann waited for silence, and then composed a reply.
‘How do you know?’
Silence again. Then, fully a minute later, another message. The old guy who brings the food told me.
‘Do you think it’s true?’
‘True?’ The repetition was abrupt. His evening classes in Kolyma had never taught Nehmann the Morse for laughter, but he fancied that’s what the repetition implied. True? False? Who fucking cares any more?
Good point, Nehmann thought.
‘RIP,’ he tapped back. ‘Us next?’
*
Five days later, Franklin D. Roosevelt died. Moncrieff was at his desk in St James’s Street, checking the schedules for the first internees to be released after the war’s end. A soft knock on his door revealed Guy Liddell. His shapeless cardigan and worn corduroy trousers, thought Moncrieff, must have been a relic of peacetime.
He handed Moncrieff a telegram. It had arrived only minutes earlier from the British Embassy in Washington. President Roosevelt had died in Warm Springs, Georgia, and arrangements were already in hand to swear in the vice-president at a brief ceremony in the White House.
‘This is good news, Tam, believe it or not.’ Liddell settled briefly on a corner of Moncrieff’s desk. ‘Truman will have no truck with Sunrise. He’s just not made that way.’
Operation Sunrise was the bid to lead Wolff to surrender talks in northern Italy. As far as Moncrieff was aware, relations between Moscow and Washington were more acrimonious than ever.
‘Winston wants nothing more to do with Wolff,’ Liddell said. ‘He thought it was a dangerous idea to begin with and nothing’s changed his mind.’
‘He’s seen the photo we brought back?’
‘He has, Tam, and he’s asked me to pass on his thanks. After Yalta, Stalin’s pique has shaken him. Thin-skinned doesn’t begin to cover it. Neither does obduracy. The word he’s using is paranoic. He believes Stalin is made of the driest tinder and, more importantly, he thinks that photo of yours set him on fire. He thinks the man’s become impossible.’
‘He’s assuming Stalin has seen the photo, too?’
‘He is, yes. And here’s something else he apparently said. Best not to sup with the Devil at all, and you know why? Because no spoon in the world is long enough.’
Moncrieff smiled. It was a nice expression.
‘And Ursula? Any word?’
‘We sent the quacks in yesterday.’
‘Quacks? Plural?’
‘One’s a physician. He can find nothing physically wrong with her. The other man’s a psychiatrist.’
‘And?’
‘Severe depression.’ He shook his head, a gesture of regret. ‘Much as we suspected.’
*
Goebbels learned the news about the death of the president after midnight. He’d just returned home after celebrating the Berlin Philharmoniker’s final concert. To his intense satisfaction, the hall had been full, every seat taken, and afterwards guests had paused beside the Hitlerjugend at the exit doors, inspecting the tiny phials of cyanide.
Some helped themselves, taking enough supplies for their entire family. Others declined, shaking their heads, buttoning their coats and heading for the twilit streets outside. One elderly male guest, in a whispered aside that Goebbels had caught, suggested that listening to Wagner in certain moods was quite enough make you suicidal. This apostasy put a brief smile on Goebbels’ face and afterwards, at the reception, he made a fierce speech about waiting for God and fate to show their hands.
Back home at Bogensee, the news of Roosevelt’s death was awaiting him. Goebbels read the message from the German News Agency twice, just to make sure. Then he sank behind his desk in the room he used as an office, realising just how momentous this development could be. The new president had to be Truman, and Truman – he was certain – would have none of Roosevelt’s patience with Stalin. The days of to-and-fro correspondence over the Wolff affair, no matter how barbed, were over. Stalin was a thief, helping himself to country after country in Eastern Europe, and Truman knew exactly how to handle people like that. Personally, Goebbels had some respect for Stalin but his attempts to recruit Hitler to the Soviet cause had failed. Now, therefore, was the moment to hold Berlin, await the collapse of the Allied coalition, and then plot the Reich’s survival.
By now, it was the early hours of Friday 13th April.
*
Three days later, in the middle of the night, Maria awoke in her house in Eichwalde. For a moment she couldn’t understand what could have woken Dominika. The child had been teething all day, miserable with her aching gums, and Maria had moved the cot into her own bedroom, trying to offer a little comfort. Now, the child was tossing and turning, inconsolable, and Maria bent over the cot, watching her, until she, too, heard the ominous rumble of what she first took to be thunder. She went to the window and pulled back the curtain. It was a cloudy night, but there was no sign of lightning. Then she opened the window a little, and the noise got much louder. It’s coming from the east, she thought, beginning to shiver in the cold night air.
Nehmann heard it, too, hours later, not through the walls of his windowless cell, but thanks to his neighbour’s command of Morse code. The Russians are on the move, went the message. Nehmann reached for his spoon.
‘How do you know?’ he tapped back.
‘It’s the talk of the showers. The Reds are storming the Seelow Heights. Everyone knows.’
The Seelow Heights. Nehmann had a faint recollection of a pre-war visit he’d paid with a young dancer from the Polish Ballet on tour in Berlin. They’d borrowed a car and driven east towards the River Oder. The Heights overlooked the river valley, and it was said there were nice walks over the sandy hills. The rumours had turned out to be true but this morning that was hardly the point. The Seelow Heights were barely a two-hour drive from Berlin.
Nehmann, with nothing but a spoon in place of pen and paper, had already decided to start a news agency. The price of his sanity in whatever time was left to him would be a series of despatches. He was calling it Paprika Rundfunk, and in response to an acid enquiry from his neighbour, relayed on the pipes, he pledged to add a little spice to the passage of events.
Already, he’d invented a flotilla of new U-boats, emerging from shipyards along the Elbe, able to surface off the English coast and bombard major cities with death rays. Now, in the wake of the news from the Oder, he announced the successful despatch of a new breed of super-bombers, packed with high explosive and deadly nerve gas, all of them headed for the Russians storming the Seelow Heights.
‘Thank God for the Mistel project.’ He tap-tapped with his spoon. ‘Der Führertraum come true.’
Der Führertraum was the Führer dream and provoked the wrath of Nehmann’s new correspondent.
‘Führertraum, bollocks,’ he tapped back. ‘You’re the fucking dreamer.’
‘I am.’ Nehmann was delighted. ‘And you’ve no idea where that can take you. My next despatch? Why the Führer is disguising his age in order to join the Volkssturm. And how post-war Germany, once again victorious, will be living on fried eggs and mashed potato and those horrible pastries they serve at the fucking Berghof. The Red Army, sensibly, is already planning their retreat. They want nothing to do with us. Who can blame them? More follows.’
That night, Nehmann awaited the summons that would take him to the interrogation suite. He’d insulted the Führer once to Goebbels, and now again on Paprika Rundfunk. That, surely, would trigger at least a conversation but – once again – absolutely nothing happened.
*
Four days later, with the Russians already in the suburbs of Berlin, Moncrieff decided to pay Ursula Barton a visit. St James’s Street, like the rest of the capital, was gripped by what Guy Liddell was calling Friedensfieber, or peace-fever. One of the Watchers had opened a book for when the Germans would chuck in the towel and call it a day. The bulk of the betting settled on the middle of the first week in May but the cannier punters, the ones with a knowledge of Bolshevik history, laid their bets on 1st May. Stalin would never resist the temptation, they insisted. May Day is sacred in the Ivans’ calendar, and what Stalin wants, Stalin gets.
