Katastrophe, page 38
‘You’re very welcome, my friend.’ He nodded at the empty chair. ‘Let’s put this bloody war to bed.’
The little speech sparked a storm of applause, hands banging on the table, heads turning to take a proper look at Moncrieff, a couple of the older figures reaching for bottles to recharge their glasses. Philby, Moncrieff sensed at once, was in rude form. In the parlance of the bull ring, a novillo was a mere apprentice.
His assigned place, to Moncrieff’s relief, put him beside Ivor Maskelyne.
‘I’d recommend the Manzanilla for starters.’ Maskelyne was already pouring. ‘We should raise a glass to the Worshipful Skinners. The days of thin pickings, thank God, are over.’
Moncrieff swallowed a mouthful of the wine. It was cold and slightly tart, in perfect condition. He could taste sunshine with just a hint of the wild tarragon he remembered from the bony Andalusian hills. Bella and I could have spent the rest of our lives making friends of a wine like this, he thought.
‘Wolff?’ he asked Maskelyne.
‘He’s a happy man. For one thing he’s managed to keep his head on his shoulders. Given the company he’s been keeping, that’s some achievement. For another, it’s his birthday next week. Forty-five is a decent achievement for someone in his game.’
‘And the surrender?’
‘Done. Dusted. Date-stamped. Consigned to history. Alexander’s also despatched Freyburg’s Kiwis to Trieste to take on the Chetniks. They should be arriving as we speak. Good hunting, eh?’ He lifted his glass. ‘Here’s to Uncle Joe’s next sulk.’
‘He’s just taken Berlin,’ Moncrieff pointed out.
‘A day late, though. The calendar is the handle that winds the Bolshevik clock. May Day counts for everything with our Kremlin chums. It’s the feast of the saints in Moscow. Twenty-four hours late in raising the red flag? Marvellous pictures but heads, I fear, will still roll.’
‘A happy thought?’
‘Far from it.’ Maskelyne shot him a look. ‘But we’ve come for the dancing, mon brave, have we not?’
The evening was now properly underway. The commandeered wenches arrived with the bowls from next door. One of them was carrying Moncrieff’s envelope and she knelt quickly to leave it behind Philby’s chair. Philby, deep in conversation with a younger colleague, barely acknowledged her. Then some comment provoked a sudden bark of laughter, and he threw back his head, patting his colleague on the arm, but his eyes kept returning to the man from St James’s Street who’d kept them waiting. Perhaps I’m the luckless bull, Moncrieff thought. Awaiting the estocada.
Few hands were picking at the food and most at the table were drunk by the time Philby ordered the games to begin. He wanted stories, preferably funny or rude, that would mark the passing of the last few years. Field Marshal Montgomery was on his feet at once, hands on his hips, gazing sternly around. Everyone at the table knew that this prickly little man had driven Eisenhower to distraction but his rant about the crusade he demanded to lead was perfectly judged. Not just to Berlin, he demanded. Not just to Minsk. Not just to Moscow. But to the Holy Land. His finger stabbed the air as he rounded on Philby. ‘Every man deserves a legacy,’ he insisted. ‘The smaller people crucify me daily but their efforts will be in vain. I shall park my caravan on the Mount of Olives, and go to bed even earlier than usual because tomorrow, gentlemen, Jerusalem shall be mine.’
His pronunciation of ‘tomorrow’, with the ‘rr’s adrift, brought the house down. Even Philby was clapping. Once the applause had died, Philby asked for more volunteers. The man in the Leander blazer began a convoluted story about a trap he’d laid in Istanbul but lost his thread. His near neighbour, who was wearing the top half of an Admiral’s dress uniform, recalled the day that Section Five had taken their cricket team to an internment camp near Woking and lost to a bunch of Italian POWs. This sparked a guffaw from Philby, who reminisced briefly about the afternoon Tam Moncrieff had turned out for the same team at Glenalmond and botched a sitter in the outfield.
‘No matter, Tam.’ He quelled the gales of laughter. ‘I’m sure you can cap that.’
Moncrieff got to his feet. He hadn’t devoted much thought to what he might say but, looking at the wet eyes and shiny faces around the table, he felt nothing but a sudden gust of deep anger. He wanted to take these people back to 1938. He wanted them to imagine that last Party Rally at Nuremberg. He wanted them to be part of the huge crowd in the Zeppelinfeld, silenced for a moment by the sudden appearance of an Me-109 swooping in from the west.
At the controls, he said, was a young flier who’d become the toast of the Reich. Every housewife, every woman with German blood in her veins, wanted just a second of that young man’s undivided attention, and none of them doubted for a moment that he could have fathered an entire nation of his own. His friends called him der Kleine, Moncrieff murmured, the Little One, but he was big in every sense that really mattered.
‘But that, gentlemen, isn’t the point of my story…’ he waited for the laughter to die, ‘… because later that evening I got a summons to pay court to Goering. He had a caravan, too. It was parked beside the Zeppelinfeld in a compound on its own. He’d also laid hands on six bottles of Spanish brandy and unlike Monty he had no qualms about broaching them. That night, for whatever reason, the great man was in the mood to celebrate. He had a thirst on him. He was reckless by nature. In the last war, over the trenches, he’d taken a risk or two and had never seen any reason to stop. He wanted my company, any company, and he was glad to have me there. And so we drank. And drank. And drank. And you know what he told me? Get rid of Hitler, he said, and peace stands a fighting chance. Just that. Put a bullet in the Führer’s fat head, and the world may be safe again. Was he the only one to see what was coming? To fear what was coming? Of course he wasn’t. You’ll know their names. Oster. Canaris. Ludwig Beck. Diplomats. Spies. Generals. So what am I saying, gentlemen? What am I telling you? Simply this. That 1939, and everything that followed, need never have happened. Not if we’d been listening properly. And not if we’d drawn the appropriate conclusions. To peace, my friends. Despite the price.’
Moncrieff’s toast was greeted by silence. Only Ivor Maskelyne rose in response.
‘My thoughts entirely.’ He glanced down at Moncrieff. ‘Gut gesagt.’ Well said.
Heads now turned to Philby. Moncrieff, who recognised the playful little smile, knew he’d let the air out of the evening’s balloon but he didn’t care. He’d spent seven years waiting to share one or two home truths, and now – in this surreal setting – he’d done just that.
War had happened because people like these around the table, for whatever reason, hadn’t done their jobs properly. Appeasement had fed Hitler’s gigantic appetites, and millions had died as a direct result.
‘You have a photo for us, Tam? By any chance?’ Philby was toying with his glass.
‘I have, yes.’
‘And is it as glum as that pretty little speech?’
‘I’m afraid that’s for you to judge.’
‘So may we see it?’
‘Of course.’
Moncrieff directed Philby’s attention to the envelope behind his chair. Surprised for once, Philby bent to retrieve it.
Heads craned around the table. People were eager to see what was inside. Philby slipped the photo out and studied it a moment.
‘Well, sir?’ It was Montgomery. ‘Do we all get a peek?’
Philby nodded. The sleepy charm and the playful little smile had gone. He held the photo up as Section Five’s finest sought to make sense of the image. The broken nose. The trousers heaped around his ankles. His neck belted to the cistern’s downpipe. Rough justice administered by Willi Schultz.
‘Exhibit one, I assume?’ Philby was looking at Moncrieff. ‘So what’s it really like in that head of yours?’
*
It was Ivor Maskelyne who managed to revive the party. More bottles from the Worshipful Company of Skinners passed from hand to hand, and the entertainment, once it resumed, produced stories and images that made even Moncrieff smile. The last round of the games featured treasured objects, and when Moncrieff’s turn came, he rose to offer a flattened pebble.
‘This came from Lake Maggiore,’ he said. ‘And I offer it in the spirit of a challenge. As a kid I loved skimming pebbles. Just now, outside, it’s low tide. I checked earlier. 10.43. So why don’t we muster downstairs, on that little beach? We keep track of the number of skims I get. If it’s an odd number, I go in. If it’s evens, you lot get wet. Fair?’
With the roar of approval came the scrape of chairs on the wooden floor as the party got to its feet and made for the door. In the thunder of feet on the wooden stairs that led to the beach, Moncrieff sensed relief that the evening was ending the way it had began, with laughter and a kind of wild glee.
Last out of the room was Philby. He paused at the head of the staircase, gesturing for Moncrieff and Maskelyne to go ahead, as ever the perfect host.
‘Very neat,’ he murmured. ‘Guy would be proud of you.’
The foreshore at the foot of the tower was littered with debris from the falling tide. Beside it, the black mouth of Traitors’ Gate. Moncrieff paused a moment, aware of a barge ghosting downriver towards Tower Bridge and the docks beyond. Section Five had formed a ragged line beside the water. Some were already taking off their shoes and socks. Children, Moncrieff thought, released from the war and given their heads for the evening.
He watched a couple at the end of the line, struggling drunkenly to support each other. Was it a dance? Were they having a fight? He shrugged, clapping his hands to attract attention before recapping the rules. Odds, I lose. Evens, you go in. Then he turned to Philby.
‘On your call?’ he suggested.
Philby nodded, waiting for Moncrieff to make space for himself, then counted down from three. On zero, Moncrieff sent the little pebble flying into the darkness and the moment it left his hand, with that little flick of the wrist, he knew he’d judged it perfectly. The first splash was visible, the second less so, then nothing remained but a series of tiny plops as the pebble skittered across the water.
In some ways, Moncrieff thought later, this must have come as a disappointment, but nothing could silence Section Five at its most vocal.
‘Seventeen,’ yelled one voice.
‘Thirteen.’
‘Nine.’
‘Twenty-one.’
‘Seven.’
‘Twelve.’ This last from Philby. ‘And I hold the casting vote.’
White faces turned towards him in the darkness. No one could quite believe it. Section Five betrayed by its own leader? Could life get any more unfair?
Then came a wild yelp as the first volunteer, fully clothed, threw himself into the water. More followed, some in various states of undress, churning the brown sludge until only three figures remained on the tiny crescent of beach.
‘Christ, just look at them,’ Maskelyne had lit a fat cigar. ‘How on earth did we ever win that bloody war?’
‘Maybe we didn’t.’ It was Philby, a soft voice in the darkness. ‘Ever think about that?’
*
Memories of that first day of freedom in Berlin, for Nehmann, never left him. Leon, with commendable tact, shepherded them from destination to destination, acting as driver as they picked their way round the ruined capital, and translator when they were waved down at the many Soviet checkpoints that had appeared in the wake of the German garrison’s surrender. Already road signs in Russian were directing troops to commandeered Wehrmacht barracks and roadside feeding stations. The latter were manned by beefy Soviet women, all of them in uniform, and when they stopped for Leon to fetch mugs of tea from a huge samovar propped on a baulk of timber, Nehmann watched the line of waiting infantry melt away at Leon’s approach.
‘He has clout?’ asked Schultz. ‘This friend of yours?’
‘Lots. He got me in to see Stalin.’
‘You met him?’
‘I did.’
‘And?’
‘He’s a Georgian. That’s all you need to know.’
‘And that’s enough?’
‘For what?’
‘All this?’ Schultz gestured at the wasteland that had once been one of the city’s busiest intersections. ‘Germany on its fucking knees?’
‘More than enough. The man’s a rascal. I doubt he has an honest bone in his body, but he scares everyone shitless. It starts with the Russians and it spreads west. One look at his eyes tells you everything. Yellow, Willi. The colour of badness.’
Badness. Nehmann was grinning. Freedom was something he’d given up on and he couldn’t quite get used to the feeling. Wreckage everywhere. Untold opportunities if you kept your nerve.
Leon returned with the tea. When he asked where they wanted to go next, Schultz said the KWI.
‘The Institute?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I have to show you something.’
‘It’s important?’
‘Important enough to have put me in front of a Volkssturm patrol.’
Leon nodded, and watching him sip the tea, Nehmann had the feeling he knew exactly what had prompted this request.
*
The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was in Dahlem. At the first checkpoint, a senior NKVD officer ordered them all out of the car. Leon took him aside while uniformed guards searched both Nehmann and Schultz. By now, the officer had scrawled something on a scrap of paper, applied a rubber stamp and handed it to Leon. The next checkpoint was within sight of the Institute’s main complex, and the NKVD presence was even heavier, but one look at Leon’s laissez-passer and the Mercedes was waved through.
The site itself was crawling with armed troops. With them, in a variety of uniforms, were other personnel Leon referred to as ‘technicians’. They’d been shipped in specially, he said, moving half a day behind the Red Army’s front line in anticipation of sealing off this site.
‘Why?’ Nehmann was looking at Schultz.
Schultz got out of the car. Leon negotiated an escort to accompany them into the grounds. The squat, ugly building Schultz recognised as the Virus House lay ahead, ringed by an inner circle of heavily armed guards. Exhaust fumes were drifting in the wind from a couple of Red Army trucks, and the site stank of cheap gasoline.
Schultz led the way round the side of the building, and then gestured at the work party manhandling drums onto the back of one of the trucks. The men were wearing gas masks and heavy gloves, and it took four of them to lift each drum. They must have dropped one of them because the top had come off and the contents had spilled across the sodden turf. A lone soldier with a spade was doing his best to scrape the stuff up.
‘What is it?’ Nehmann was trying to make sense of the scene.
‘Uranium oxide,’ Schultz grunted. ‘The scientists call it yellowcake.’
‘So what do you do with it?’ He was frowning now. ‘Why all the security?’
‘We take it back home.’ This from Leon. ‘And try to turn it into a bomb before the Americans blow us all up.’
Nehmann blinked. The soldier with the spade had nearly finished.
‘He’s serious?’ Nehmann was looking at Schultz.
Schultz said nothing for a moment, then checked his watch.
‘Lunch?’
At Nehmann’s suggestion, they went to a bar favoured by journalists from the Promi. There was no glass in the windows, and the top half of the building seemed to have disappeared, but a word to the barman conjured Nehmann two foaming glasses of Kindl.
‘He probably remembers you.’ This from Schultz.
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘And?’
‘He doesn’t. It’s this stuff that worked.’ Nehmann had a roll of Russian currency from Leon, who’d elected to stay outside in the car.
‘I think he’s in love with you,’ Schultz growled. ‘Watch your arse.’
The thought had occurred to Nehmann, too. He’d sensed something close to affection developing on the journey out of the Gulag. He’d never doubted for a moment that Leon’s faith in the regime trumped everything else, that he’d put a bullet in Nehmann’s head if he had to, but there was another life beyond the Bolshevik brainwash, and Nehmann suspected that Leon had glimpsed it. Just now, a glance through the window revealed the Russian deep in a book. The man has soul, he thought. Books can make life tough where he comes from.
Schultz ordered more beers. When the woman behind the bar offered to cook for them – half an egg each and a spoonful or two of potato mashed with swede – Nehmann said yes. He wanted to know more about the KWI, and about the yellowcake. Schultz obliged with an account of his flight from Sweden, and the events that had finally delivered him to the lakeside house at Wannsee.
‘You met Himmler?’
‘I did.’
‘And?’
‘The man’s finished. He nearly did for me, too.’ Schultz described the Wiener schnitzel, the greediness of his escort, and the luck he’d ridden in making his escape. After the last two years, he grunted, God owed him a favour and, thanks to a flier called Jürgen Frenzell, he’d finally made it back to Berlin.
‘The letter from Stalin was a death sentence,’ he said. ‘I should have known that from the start.’
‘And the yellowcake?’
‘You’ll know the woman of the Wannsee house.’
‘How come?’
‘She said you paid a visit, way back. Messner’s egg slicer?’
Nehmann was thinking hard. Then he had it.
‘My last trip to Berlin,’ he said. ‘I was en route back to the airfield. I had a minute on the doorstep to hand it over.’ He paused. ‘Thin woman? Baby in her arms? Angry?’
