The Herrenhaus Forfeit: Chasing Mercury Book Two, page 8
Her eye was drawn by a small flame that flared and died amid the rubble. A small shape, perhaps some kind of animal, scampered over the faint skyline of the mound. Marjorie realised that although she had stopped walking, the echoing footsteps had not.
She spun around and peered through the mist of her anxious breath. A slight, solitary figure was silhouetted against the reflection of the yellow-green glow that emanated from beneath the dome of the Anzeiger-Hochhaus. The figure of a woman.
When it was thirty paces away the figure stopped. Another small flash of flame, smaller this time, less desperate. A cigarette.
That kind of woman.
I knew you were waiting in the street,
I heard your feet, but could not meet...
“You’re supposed to be underneath the lantern,” Marjorie called out to the shadow, as much to steady her nerves as anything else. “By the barrack gate.”
An exhalation of smoke, green as chlorine.
“Wie bitte?”
“Never mind. Keine Sorge.” Cursing her overactive imagination, she turned away to hurry on towards her own improper rendezvous at the Maschpark, only to be halted a few seconds later by a low whistle from behind her.
Six notes. A lilting, haunting refrain.
Marjorie took another step and then another, then stopped and turned again. The woman was following her, but slowly, matching her pace. One hand was thrust into the pocket of her long coat. The other cupped around the cigarette, briefly illuminating youthful features beneath the tilted brim of a felt slouch hat. Uncharacteristically slender legs took two steps closer in characteristically heavy socks and shoes.
That kind of woman. Possibly. But not looking for business. This one had something else on her mind. Recalling stories she had heard, Marjorie scanned the nearby rubble mounds for accomplices, possibly even for feral children like the Wolfskinder, or for one of the bands of former Ostarbeiter that still roamed the region. But the mimicking of the ‘Lili Marleen’ ballad suggested a degree of sophistication and that somewhat dismissive ‘beg your pardon’ had been pure Hausfrau. A German woman who had singled her out. That might mean a civilian of non-victim status who’d had all she could take of 1,500 calories a day and was looking to lash out at anyone associated with Mil.Gov. Or someone who had heard what the Education Branch was trying to do and wanted to help, even if only to qualify for a higher scale of ration card.
Or someone, like everyone else, who had something to sell.
The sound of a motor made her jump and then relax. The only possible traffic this late, tonight of all nights, would be military. Perhaps redcaps rounding up revellers. Or perhaps he had come to fetch her.
Sure enough, a jeep was making its way through the ruins from the direction of the Neues Rathaus. As it rounded the bend, the headlamps swung Marjorie’s shadow towards the woman and illuminated her face.
“You were at the carol service!” In her surprise, Marjorie forgot even to attempt to speak German.
The young woman raised her head. Beneath the brim of the hat and a fringe of spiky fair hair, the wide-set eyes and broad features stretched into an expression of amusement.
“So I was,” she said, also in English. “We’ve been waiting to speak to you, Mrs Jessop.”
We? Marjorie turned away from the enigmatic smile and saw that the jeep, with three soldiers in it, was hovering ominously. Her heart fluttered. Ordinary MPs on the drunk patrol would have been one thing. Special investigators were something else.
“I think if you don’t mind I’ll leave it to another time. I’m rather late...”
The woman stepped closer. The hand in the coat pocket was pointing something at her.
“Oh, I think Staff Sergeant Carter will wait for his ‘Lili of the lamplight’, don’t you?”
Clambering up between the men in the back, Marjorie hoped the woman was right. Without that lift back to Bückeburg she’d be scuppered. And that was all supposing they were going to let her go again. As the jeep cut through the narrow streets and heaps of the obliterated Altstadt, she waited for the rest of the blackmail demand to be declared. After the woman’s casual reference to Jacob she had no doubt that whoever these people were they were going to try to use her unorthodox domestic arrangements – and the threat of their exposure to her employers – to extort some service from her. What that might be she could not imagine.
She had known it was a bad idea, right from its clumsy inception on that rain-lashed evening at the unfinished RAF station. She wasn’t even terribly sure what she had seen in the uncouth staff sergeant that had led her to take him under her wing, and into her bed, nor exactly what it was that she saw in him now. To say that the last few weeks had been by turns strange, terrifying and overwhelming was an understatement and a half. But they had also been exciting. She had not felt so alive for years and years. More than that, she could not even begin to picture herself doing her day job at the Civic Development Section here in Hanover, or the Education Branch Headquarters in Bünde, without her nights at the little halfway house of Frau Lipke’s ersatz Gasthof in Bückeburg. Coping with the Germans – with denazification, with the reconstruction of more than just infrastructure and industry, with the forced viewing of the Belsen films – called for something quite different from her well-worn widowly reserve. It demanded passion, a Lebenshunger, a lust for life.
Do your worst, she wanted to say. So what if I’m shacking up with an unmarried younger man who’s probably a thief and a chancer? Take a good look around. Haven’t you seen where we are? Didn’t you hear those women boast about their white glass whips, before you put them to death? How can I be living in sin when we’re all living in Hell?
Perhaps she had more sense than to try such a line of reasoning on her employers or Jacob’s, but in this frame of mind she seriously considered calling the woman’s bluff when it came.
Yet come it did not. When the jeep pulled into a shed on the edge of the shantytown at the ruined Hauptbahnhof, to be greeted by another not-quite-British soldier toting a submachine gun, the woman laid her hand gently on Marjorie’s arm.
“I’m not sure we could stretch to Glühwein but can I offer you a drink? Whisky? Or a cup of tea?”
“I’ll take a whisky.” Marjorie followed the woman out of the shed and into a yard that appeared to be part of the unofficial refugee camp. Several blanket-swathed figures squatted around a campfire. Uprooted Germans who did not qualify as Displaced Persons, passing through to somewhere else, if somewhere else existed. A couple made way grudgingly, leaving unburned fruit boxes to sit on.
Across the camp, around other fires, people were singing. Some of the men had clearly been drinking. Most of the voices sounded close to tears.
“Let’s have a chat, woman to woman. I gather that’s your speciality.”
Marjorie laughed and took the bottle.
“I wish it was,” she said.
The young woman returned a sad, serious smile.
“The others still use my old nomme de guerre, Slečna Slavík – ‘Miss Nightingale’. My real name is Ludmila Suková, but you can call me Mila, Mrs Jessop.”
“Marjorie, please.”
“Thank you.” Now that she had said her name – if it was her name – the lilting precision of her English, the softness of the sibilants, made more sense. Not German. Given the sound of that pseudonym and its redolence of partisan bands, most likely Czech. “And please accept my apologies for the crude way we picked you up. I hate it that I had to pretend to threaten you. Or actually threaten you, I suppose.”
“It’s quite alright,” Marjorie said.
“You see, I’ve lost my little boy.” And there the woman paused, not for emphasis but, Marjorie understood, for strength. When the strength came it brought a certain earnestness and a certain carelessness she also recognised. It was the kind of carelessness that might make a man seize his rifle and raise his head above the parapet, she thought.
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, not recently. Six years ago. And as Stas back there would tell you, that presents me with a paradox. Now the war is over I’m prepared to do anything to find him. But if I do anything...”
“Untoward?”
Her eyes seemed to sparkle in the firelight, but not with mirth.
“Cruel. If I do anything cruel to find him, then how can I expect, how can I deserve to find him, amidst all this...?”
Her sweeping gesture might have meant the shantytown, the ruined city behind it, or the rest of the region behind that. It might have meant the whole of Germany, or all of Europe and much of the world beyond. Everyone was looking for someone in the darkness and in most cases, like the singers, or like this suddenly nervous young woman swigging whisky straight from the bottle as though it was going out of style, the only thing they were close to was tears. It had been a long time but Marjorie knew well enough how this night, of all nights, was not a good night for those who had lost the ones they loved.
“What is it I can do to help you, Mila?”
“I need an in with Mil.Gov and your Education Branch is perfect. Recently my enquiries led me to question two brothers, the Düttmanns. One of them, Georg, gave me the name of someone he had worked with, stealing children from the east.”
“My God.”
Mila shook her head as though to deny herself the same level of victimhood.
“My case is a little different but the officials involved are broadly the same. The man who took Pavel, the commander of the whole special action group, used to go by the name of Konrad Pfeffer. Georg gave up someone who might know where he is. A former clerk of his, called Helmut Ziegler. He was a schoolteacher in Münster before the war. And it so happened that the other Düttmann brother, Stefan, told us about two English who he’d just dropped off at a guesthouse in his taxi. One of whom was heard to mention that she worked for the Education Branch.”
“I see, I see...” Except she didn’t. Marjorie handed back the bottle with a querying look. At least that was what it was supposed to signify. Howard might have said it signified something else. “Sorry... do you think he works in our office or something?”
“No. But if he ever wants to work again as a schoolteacher, he’ll need to pass denazification. And to do that he’d have to submit his Fragebogen to your section. It’s possible that you have his questionnaire on file, including his current address.”
“That’s not my department...”
“No, but you could get us in there, perhaps, or get us the file...?”
Marjorie unwound the scarf from her neck and hair. She was feeling hot now. Dizzy. She saw the same warmth flush the young woman’s cheeks. It had to be hard to rekindle such enthusiasm after so many years of searching, and yet she looked so fresh. Almost a child herself.
“How is it that you still have a... a gang?” There was no other way to say it.
Mila gave her a sly smile that accentuated the curve of scar tissue on her cheek.
“We’re black marketeers. I need their help to find Pavel, so we help each other. When he’s not hitting this stuff, Stas is a great designer of false identities and other subterfuges. Marek is a pickpocket, among other things, and Miro, the artist, our forger. ‘Uncle’ Ludvík is my rock.”
“And you are theirs.”
Mila shrugged, as though the thought had not occurred to her.
“I give them a sense of purpose, I suppose, and hold the group together. That’s important, when a job requires an investment of time and money before it pays off. Or when we must win favour with people who can get things done.”
Marjorie nodded. Woman to woman indeed.
“You’re a mother to them,” she said and saw her words sink in.
“In a way.”
“And what are these jobs you do?”
“Why would I tell you that?”
“Because you need to trust me, Mila, and I you,” Marjorie surprised herself both with the confident tone of her voice and with the content of what she was about to say. “And because if you can help me court some people with whom I need to win favour, I might be able to help you with your business operations, as well as your quest.”
Mila wasn’t looking drunk now. She was looking up at her with a new emotion. Not respect, perhaps. But not just surprise or – God forbid – amusement either.
Call it curiosity.
“Well... we try not to do anything too harmful, as I said.”
“You said ‘cruel’.”
“I did. I suspect I have my own definition for that. I meant that we don’t hurt people if we can help it, and we don’t hurt anyone who hasn’t asked for it. We’re not above swindling Nazis on the run, but we’d never help them escape. We might let them lead us to some loot they’ve stashed away, but then we’ll just take it, or even leave them for the authorities. We might break into someone’s house or factory, if they were war profiteers, but we draw the line at robbing anyone who’s going hungry, whoever they are.”
“That’s very noble of you.”
“Not really. It means we’re unlikely ever to bring the police down on us.”
“So you acquire this merchandise. What happens then?”
“We try to turn it into the things we need. Equipment, food, bribes, mostly.”
“You trade it on the black market, exposing yourselves to risk – and poor exchange rates – every time.”
“What else can we do?”
Marjorie seized the bottle from her. Her hand was shaking.
“You need an ‘in’ with Mil.Gov. I need one with the local women. Leaders of women’s groups, labour organisers, the people I’ll never meet through our contacts in church groups and the bloody Women’s Institute. The people here.”
“And in return?”
“In return,” Marjorie said. “I’ll introduce you to someone who might take the merchandise off your hands, wholesale.”
* * *
Jack Penny didn’t believe in dybbuks or any other species of ghost. He didn’t believe in the Golem either. He knew that Jews had to put up their fists for themselves. So whatever he had seen watching him a moment ago from the crest of the rubble mound couldn’t have been some kind of disembodied spirit or animated matter.
It had just looked like that.
He took another nip from his hip flask and let out an appreciative grunt that clouded the air. Then he shivered anyway. Brandy was alright for warming your cockles and mussels but it wasn’t much cop for frozen arses.
He was sitting in his jeep in the grounds of the imposing New City Hall, most of which was still standing. The same could not be said for its outbuildings, nor for virtually every structure of the Old Town spread out in front of it, save the scorched steeple and saw-tooth walls of the Aegidienkirche. Everything else was rubble.
A miracle they still found anything of value left under it, but they did. Making sure no beggars or snatchers were in the vicinity, he pulled out the duffel bag from beneath the dash and took another gander at tonight’s haul. A blackened figure of a shepherd girl with her teats out: he’d get his Jerry pawnbroker to cast an expert eye over that because bronze had become pretty tasty, one way or another. A fancy china mantel clock, stopped but miraculously unbroken. An old book too, which wasn’t really his thing, though Jimmy had told him to look out for something called the Gutenberg Bible. This one, very leathery and poncy, was called ‘Goethe Faust’ and dated 1790. There were also several pieces of tomfoolery, including an emerald the size of an eyeball and a nice fat gold wedding ring.
And all he’d paid the local gang-leader was two dozen tins of bully beef and one of his spare tyres. Not that the bastard had done anything to earn it of course, but he had his yung-uns to reimburse.
He looked around again for redcaps or, worse, for the German Feldgendarmerie they’d re-armed to serve as their guard dogs, complete with metal collars. So much for denazification! And so much, worst luck, for any chance of sending those same kinchins shinning up the Neues Rathaus for the copper on the dome. Which was a crying shame, because six years of global demand for electric wire and ammunition cases had left it a seller’s market. That was why it was always a good idea to pick up any bronzes you could, regardless of artistic merit. Especially if your lads were running a smelting operation on the sly.
When the two women emerged from the stalagmites of the Old Town, Penny was busy berating himself for failing to cook up a raid on the roof lining to coincide with tonight, when all the redcaps and most of their square-head counterparts had their work cut out arresting pissed-up homesick squaddies. (There was always tomorrow, Christmas night proper, he supposed, although he wasn’t really up on how the goyim did things and the Jerries seemed to do it all a full day early.)
But hang on. Two women? His old lady (no pun intended) had someone else in tow.
As he shoved the bag of treasures safely away again, he caught another blur of movement from the nearest rubble mound. Or not movement, not exactly, but a pallid sort of presence, like a face still fixed on him and yet still somehow blurred.
That couldn’t be right.
He shivered again and shook his head to clear it.
“Evening, ladies!” For a crack he pulled out the big mantel clock and piled on a shirty look for Marjorie. “And what time d’you call this then?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Bradley needed air. Pushing through the side of the tent, he set his hat against the freezing rain and fumbled in his overcoat for his Luckies.
“Tell me that again,” he said.
Doctor Schlosser accepted a smoke and eyed the little gold lighter. His reply was more guarded, and not just because of his rusty English.
“The Sonderbeauftragter came to the B.A.F. works with a very particular request for assistance. He wanted a chemist’s opinion on the possibility of modifying a certain brand-name pesticide, to remove the additive. Stransky asked me to help. I looked into it, but it was impractical, so we advised the Sonderbeauftragter to contact the licensed manufacturer and order a formula without the additive.”
