Authors: Jack Ludlow
‘Will we have another war?’
‘It can be avoided.’
‘How?’
‘Give Germany back what she lost at Versailles. We have no objections to you ruling the waves, in fact the Führer admires the British Empire, but we are the land power to match your sea power. Let us look to our backyard and we will leave you to your oceans.’
‘I think there are one or two nations that might object.’
‘Nations? Is Poland a nation? No, like the rest it is the construct of a fool of an American president and men who were too supine to tell him to mind his own business.’ That thought obviously angered him. ‘The Americans do not understand Europe, and nothing proved that more than Woodrow Wilson’s stupidity at Versailles.’
His voice dropped. ‘We want peace, Herr Jardine; we
need
peace to restore Germany.’
‘And once restored?’
‘Then we can destroy the Bolsheviks and I hope and expect that is a crusade in which, instead of being enemies, the British Empire and the Greater German Reich will be allies.’
When Cal thought about what those same Bolsheviks were doing in Spain it was a tempting prospect, but he doubted it would ever
come to pass. Göring barked an order and the dining room was cleared.
‘You are a calm man, Herr Jardine, and I admire that. When I invited you here, I was not sure what to do with you.’
‘Are you now?’
Göring stood up. ‘I am going to retire. Sleep well.’
There was no sign of Göring in the morning, but he did hear the sound of distant gunfire, so he assumed he was hunting. There was plenty of other noise, made by workmen building, sawing and hammering, and a pre-breakfast walk showed that Carinhall was a construction site – if Göring needed money, this was where it was going.
On his walk he tried to sum up the man – he had a feeling if he got away from here, still questionable, he might be asked. Göring was a bit of an opportunist, which did not mean he did not believe in the German destiny of which he had spoken the previous night; in that he was passionate and perhaps that was why he was a Nazi, they being, to him, the only people who could restore the country to what it had been in his youth.
Yet for all his more open perspective and lack of humbug, he was as deluded as any of his comrades; he sincerely believed in an absolute impossibility, that Great Britain would let Germany have a free hand on the Continent. It was a chilling thought, and one he had harboured for many years, that there was going to be another war and maybe one that would be even more terrible than the last. Old Sir Basil saw it too, so did Peter Lanchester and his mysterious cabal of backers – why could not the politicians and the people who voted for them?
‘It’s not impossible,’ he said out loud. ‘It can be stopped and it must be stopped.’
‘Herr Jardine.’ It was Brauschitz. ‘When you have breakfasted I will fly you back to Unterlüss.’
Well that answers one question,
he thought.
He’s not going to shoot me
.
J
ardine had a lot of things he thought wrong with the Germans, and that came from growing up as a young schoolboy in Hamburg, having spent his formative years in a French
lycée
, which, it had to be said, made him exotic enough to avoid the bullying that might have come his way and very popular with the girls.
As a nation, never mind individuals, they were damned serious and too ready to take offence. Try being five minutes late for a meeting in a coffee bar and it was like the fall of the Roman Empire; what you say is what you mean – the exact opposite of the way the British behaved. A friendship declared was like a blood ceremony without a cut, and God help you if you failed to meet the obligations.
Yet you could not fault their efficiency: when they said his goods would be delivered on a set day, that was the day they would arrive in Hamburg, and he was there before them, in what was for him an old stamping ground. Gessler had assembled the agreed batch of
weaponry, he had inspected everything and it was all proper; he had even tested random weapons and they worked.
There was a residual guilt from his last departure from the city, so hurriedly made, in which he had to go without saying goodbye to someone important: the lady who had not only occasionally shared a bed with him for several months, but also probably saved his life with a phone call. The walk he took around St Pauli, with a hat low on his eyes, took him past many of the places he had frequented and it was good to know the people who had been there before were still around.
They were doing what they had always done, selling the dream of a good time as long as you could pay, very likely purveying stuff you could buy for one mark for ten – twenty if you were a real idiot; the club hostesses were still pretending to drink what was supposed to be champagne and the heavies were still there to ensure the clients pay the excessive bills when they complained.
The sad bit missing was the bar of Fat Olaf, where Peter Lanchester had found him on that fateful day. That was closed and shuttered, and where was he? Had he paid a price for Cal Jardine getting away before the Brownshirt SA thugs arrived to beat his brains out? He hoped not, and the chances were good; Fat Olaf was a survivor, maybe he had opened up somewhere else.
He had walked the Reeperbahn, slipping into the Herbertstraße as darkness fell to make sure Gretl the great dominatrix was still plying her trade and her whips, glad to see her in a new costume of sparkling gold, glaring out with practised ferocity to the street, waiting for those players and payers who wanted to go home and tell a great story about their Hamburg adventure; it had never occurred to Cal that anyone really enjoyed the first part of Gretl’s thing, it was
the way she took the pain away that made her an institution.
He was sad that he dare not say hello, because he did not have a clue what had happened when he left; Lette might know and, if she still worked in the local party HQ, would be finished by now. She had an apartment in Trommelstraße, not a place with a telephone and not a good address, but one with neighbours who looked after her kids when she was working.
It was not easy to call without everyone knowing – it certainly had not been in the past, and many was the time he had been ribbed when he came of a night, doubly so if he was spotted by the old lady scrubbing the stone steps as he left in the morning, and in a sense he was breaking an agreed rule: she had always known if he went it would be sudden, he had an unspoken order that the break should be final.
It’s damned difficult to be on the wrong side of a door when you worry about what might happen when you knock. Lette was a beautiful widow, good company, and there might be a new man in her life, which made Cal wish he could pretend to be some kind of door-to-door salesperson. That there was someone home, he knew – the radio was playing dance music.
He raised his hand to knock, then hesitated, thinking to walk away. This was all wrong, it went against the grain of everything he advised others to do, everything he thought right about how to behave – you cut the cord when it was life and death. Just then a neighbour came out to use the communal toilet and he had to hit the door to avoid suspicion.
It was heart-stopping the way the music diminished, the sound being turned down, and his heart was in his mouth as he waited, listening to the farting coming from the toilet. When the door was
opened it was by Lette’s daughter, Inge, no longer the gauche
twelve-year
-old he remembered, but a promising fourteen and looking like the beginnings of a real woman.
‘Uncle Cal,’ she cried, her eyes wide open with glad surprise; then she flung herself at him and her shout brought the two boys running. Christian and Günter, both younger than their sister. They were around his legs within seconds, shouting his name. Having ruffled their hair and said their names he looked up and there was Lette, in an apron and looking tired, in what passed for a hall; was she drying her hands, or was that hand-wringing fear?
‘Hey,’ was his feeble greeting.
She came forward, maternal in the way she shuffled the children inside so she could shut the door, this while he was subjected to a stream of questions asking where he had been, and as children do, the boys were telling him about what had happened to them in between now and the last time he had seen them, gabbling away in near incoherence.
She was clever, Lette, the way she shooed the children away so she herself could give him a kissed greeting, in truth the chance to whisper in his ear that he should say nothing incriminating, that the boys, particularly, could not be trusted.
‘Say you have been at sea.’ Then she turned and began to take off her apron. ‘You take care of Uncle Cal, while I go and see if Old Ma Pieffer can look after you.’
Moans and groans ensued, the selfish cries of the boys contrasted with the self-possession of Inge as he was dragged to the table, covered in an oilskin cloth that had seen better times, to tell stories of South America, Spain, of creatures too fabulous to be real and to indulge in that visitor pastime, giving the children money.
‘Are you coming back to stay, Uncle Cal?’
When he looked at Inge then, it nearly broke his heart; he knew she saw him like a parent and had done so from the very first day they had met. They had bonded as if it were predestined, she trusting him, he good with her, and if leaving Lette had been hard, leaving Inge, whom he thought of as a daughter, was worse.
‘Boys, you have your bank still?’ The yeses were larded with anticipation – he had always been generous, and Cal obliged by emptying his pockets of pfennigs and the odd mark, passing them over. Then they dashed into the only bedroom where, no doubt, they would boast one was richer than the other.
‘Are you here to stay?’
He could not answer, but then he did not have to; his silence was sufficient. Looking at her, bonny but not yet fully formed, he wanted to take her in his arms and hold her as he had once done, maybe tell her the stories he had loved inventing. Somehow she was beyond that. It was a relief that Lette returned with the news that Old Ma Pieffer was on her way down.
‘I can’t, little one.’
Inge nodded and he knew that when he was gone she would cry. Lette had her coat on and was keen to get out of the door and there was just a flash of jealousy in Inge’s eyes that her mother spotted and smothered with a kiss; if Cal was close to Inge, her mother was closer still. Then they were out on the landing, his nose twitching at the odour of the neighbour’s noisy evacuation, down the stone stairs and into the street.
‘What do you mean “We can’t talk”?’
The laugh was hollow. ‘What do you think will happen when Christian and Günter go to school tomorrow? Once they have sung
a hymn to the damned Führer they will be asked if anything strange has happened and they will say Uncle Cal came back. Their good National Socialist teacher will ask who Uncle Cal is.’
‘For the sake of Christ.’
‘You do not know what they will say, what they will be asked, or the consequences, and that, my lost love, is life in the Third Reich; I cannot even talk in front of my own children, because if I do they will be encouraged to denounce me. So, do you think we could have talked in there about why you had to leave and the phone call I made to give you a chance to flee?’
‘Is there somewhere we can go?’
‘Cal, this is St Pauli, there are a hundred places we can go.’
‘Am I allowed to say, Lette,’ Cal said, leaning over her and looking down into her eyes, ‘you look tired?’
‘Two years nearly I don’t see you and that is what you want to tell me? I have three children, a job I hate, surrounded by foul-mouthed bigots who should be taken out to sea and thrown overboard, and no one to tell.’
‘Inge?’
‘I cannot burden her.’
‘I miss telling her stories.’
‘She misses you more than she misses the stories.’
‘What happened to the money I left for you?’
‘It is still in the account you opened, I haven’t touched it, and do I have to tell you why?’
‘Questions would be asked if you were suddenly flush. But the idea was you could get a better apartment, one where Inge can have some privacy. She’s of an age when she needs it.’
‘I think we might have to use that money one day for something more serious than another bedroom.’
‘I thought you might have found another man.’
‘If I can find one I can trust, and who knows how to treat me right, then maybe I will, but all I meet are beery shits.’
The one thing never discussed, the reason she was trusted to work in the local Nazi party office, was her late husband, a rabid National Socialist who had been killed in street fighting prior to the 1932 elections. To the men she mixed with every day, Brownshirt thugs, he was a hero; to her a bully and wife beater she was glad was dead.
He had met Lette when out running – she was an ex-
hundred-metre
sprinter, and with no knowledge of her background they had begun to stop and chat while catching breath. She found release in talking to him, a man who hated the Nazis as much as she did, and said so, as well as being active in getting Jews out of Germany. Lette had become his lover; only later did he discover where she worked and how many times she had used her position to save those under threat herself.
It was no wonder she was tired, never mind the children and the job; she was living a double life, cursing Jews as diseased rats one minute, trying to warn them of the danger they were in without getting caught the next. He had suggested she get out before; Lette had refused while there was good to be done. When it came to being brave, Cal thought her ten times the person he was.
‘Anyway, you have not told me why you came back.’
‘It might have been for you.’
She punched him in the balls then, which given he was naked, had him out of the bed and hopping. ‘Why did you do that?’
‘You are a liar.’
Still rubbing hard, he acknowledged the truth. ‘I know, and not a good one with you.’
It had been a strange relationship: he was fond of her without being in love, she, determined never to have another man rule her life. If there was sex between them, and there had just been that, and very enjoyable too, then it was based on deep friendship rather than passion, and if she knew that she was being used, it was a situation that troubled her not at all.
‘Two years without a man in my life,’ she said, her voice deep as she tugged him back into the bed. ‘I hope you have not been too wounded – by that punch.’
She was asleep when he left, and when she awoke she found a thick wad of high-denomination Reichsmarks on the table and a
one-line
note, which read, ‘
For Inge’s new clothes. Invent a rich relative XXX.
’
He was down at the docks before the line of railway trucks arrived, having used the papers he had to get through the main gate into the free port area and make sure the SS
Barhill
was at its berth, then getting back to the main gate to await the arrival. The way they took him was so professional that he did not see it coming at all: the van drew alongside, men in working gear appeared from nowhere, he was hit just hard enough to be stunned and then bundled into the back, thrown onto the metal floor with a knee digging into his back.
The command to stay still was backed up by a slap to the head and he knew his hands were being tied. He was thinking this did not make sense, unless Göring had had a change of mind; but why would he do that, because MCG in Athens would not get paid? Had there been a leak, with so many – far too many – people in on what was
planned? There was nothing he could do but lie still and speculate.
The hollow sound when the van stopped told him he was in some kind of garage; there was the squeak of the door opening and he was hauled out, one man on each elbow hurrying him along through a doorway, then a couple of corridors, so he had trouble keeping his feet. He was taken into a bare room with a single chair in the middle, the sinister single light bulb above, then sat and tied down, realising as he moved that the legs were fixed to the floor. Then he saw the battered table against the wall with the rubber truncheons on it.
And then he was alone, but not for long, and the smiling blond fellow who entered gave him a shock, which he was not able to hide; this was bad, very bad, worse than Göring reneging. The last time he had seen Gottlieb Resnick had been on a Black Sea dockside, and the German had wanted to just shoot him then; he would want more now.
‘Mr Jardine,’ Resnick said in his accented, horribly ungrammatical English, ‘you did not me believe when
auf Wiedersehen
I said, but here are we, once more with each other in company.’
‘Are you still an
Oberstürmbannführer
or did you get busted to
Gefreiter
for that cock-up in Constanta?’
‘It had on me no effect, but when you to hell get there is waiting a very damaged Romanian colonel to greet you.’