A Traitor's Loyalty: A Novel (11 page)

He looked at her expectantly.

“He’s been in touch with her,” she said. There was a slightly breathless quality to her tone, but it wasn’t because she was winded—she was beginning to get caught up in the excitement of the chase. “Just once. Gave her a number to call in case she has any trouble.”

“Do you have it?” he asked.

She nodded, pulled a folded slip of paper from her handbag and handed it to him. “Here. She’s supposed to ask for Reinhardt Grubbs.”

Quinn studied the number.

“What are you going to do?” she asked. “Are you going to call it?”

He shook his head and glanced up at her. “No.” He saw her bristle at the dismissal and explained, “Calling would just give whoever’s at the other end a chance to run away. No, I need to find out where the number connects to and pay them a visit.”

“Do you recognize the prefix? I don’t.”

Quinn nodded. “Bavaria. It’s a Bavarian number.” He folded the paper and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “Looks like I’m going to have to get back into uniform,” he said, turning the ignition key. The car coughed into life.

“No, I should do it,” she said. He opened his mouth to object but she pressed on before he could. “I’m a clerical worker at Prinz Albrechtstrasse. If, for some reason, they decide to check up on
me
, they’ll find I’m authentic. Besides, it won’t even get that far. It’ll just be a routine call to the Munich SS office. They’ll have every phone number on file for all of Bavaria. It won’t even take me five minutes.”

Quinn didn’t say anything for several moments, trying to find an excuse to reject her offer. Then, reluctantly, he nodded his head. “All right. Where do we need to go? “

“Albrechtstrasse. I can get the Munich office’s number there.”

He put the car into gear and pulled out into the street.

GERTRUD WATCHED from her window as Ellie hurried across the street and got into the passenger side of the Focke-Wulf parked there. The car’s windows were tinted, so Gertrud couldn’t see the features of whoever was waiting for her, but she could make out the motion of the two of them talking. She thought about Ellie and how young she was—so young that Jews were really just fairy stories to her. Gertrud remembered when she had been a young girl in the years before the war, when Jewry had still been a fact of life in Germany.

She remembered the friendly, plump woman who had owned the sweets shop at the end of the road, and how one day the woman had simply not been there anymore. Three of the teachers at school had similarly vanished a few months later—two Jews, it was whispered, and a homosexual. Two of them had been very friendly, the sort of teachers that children liked, and Gertrud and the other students had never suspected they were in fact indoctrinating them against the truths of the Master Race, and polluting Germany’s racial heritage by their very presence in society.

By the end of the war almost all the Jews and other undesirables in Germany and occupied Europe had been deported East, to the labor camps. Over time they had been replaced by the East’s dwindling population of Slavs as the Reich’s source of slave labor. The Führer had built the Purification Museum as a monument to what had happened to them then, and a good German, even one who opposed the policies of National Socialism and longed for democracy for the German race, did not question the
rightness
of their fate. Such questions were probably the most dangerous that a German could ask.

After a few minutes, the car pulled into the street and drove off. Gertrud picked up her telephone receiver and dialed the number she had written down for Ellie. After several rings there was an answering click.

“Hotel Udet,”
said a disinterested feminine voice.

“Reinhardt Grubbs,” she said.

Another click, then a ring. This time the phone was answered almost immediately.

“Hello?”
The voice was male, tense.

“It’s me.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, yes,” Gertrud said. “Don’t worry, I’m fine.” A pause. “Someone came. Just as you said.”

“Who?”

“Ellie Voss. I don’t know if you know her. She comes to the group meetings. Young, short blonde hair. Very pretty.”

“The one who works for the Gestapo? She was asking about me?”

“She was. But she insisted she wasn’t here for the Gestapo.”

“Then for whom?”

“She said she was working for the English. She was with someone, but I didn’t see him. He waited across the street in a car.”

There was a long pause at the other end of the line. Finally the voice said,
“Something’s wrong. If she was a British agent, I’d know about her.”

“I gave her the number like you said. Should I not have?”

“No, no. You did the right thing. Thank you. God only knows how much danger you’ve put yourself in for me.”

“I care about you. And I care about what we both believe in.”

“I should go now. It’s not safe to talk for too long.”

“I understand.” The words caught in her throat as she said them.

“It seems that things are in motion. I hope we get to speak again. If we don’t—if we don’t, I care about you too. A great deal.”

“Ric—Reinhardt?”

“Yes?”

“Be careful.”

“I’ll try. “

The line went dead with a click.

PRINZ ALBRECHTSTRASSE was eerily empty; the only person Quinn and Ellie saw was the desk clerk, who flicked a disinterested glance at each of their IDs before nodding them inside, though the echoing
ratta tat tat
of someone punching at a typewriter reached them through the deserted, labyrinthine halls. Apparently even those charged with maintaining the political and racial integrity of the German people could afford to take a day off in light of such a momentous tragedy.

The Department A office, where Ellie worked, was locked and deserted, but she had a key. It was indeed a matter of only a few minutes on the phone before she was scribbling down an address onto a pad of paper on her desk. She thanked the person to whom she had spoken and hung up.

“Munich,” she confirmed. “Somewhere called the hotel Udet.”

Quinn held out his hand for the pad. “Thank you,” he said. “Your help has been priceless.”

She frowned, looking down at his hand then back up to meet his eyes again. “What do you mean?”

He had of course guessed she would be resistant but he pressed on nonetheless. “I’ll take you back to your flat if you like.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You know I’m not going to let you do that. I’ve come this far. I’m going further.”

“No,” he said. “There’s no telling what can happen from here on out. This isn’t your fight. I should do this alone.” He still had his hand held out.

She slipped the pad into her purse. “We go to Munich,” she said. “Once we’ve reached the Bavarian border, I’ll let you see the address.”

He should just take it from her, he knew that. He was positive now that, even if he did so and left her, she wouldn’t report him to the Gestapo.

He let his hand drop to his side. “Very well. But if you’re to come with me, you must do exactly as I say.
When
I say it.
I’m
the spy, remember?”

She nodded solemnly. “Of that I remain very much aware.”

THE AUTOBAHN heading south out of Berlin was almost empty, and they made good time through Brandenburg and northern Saxony. In the opposite direction, though, the traffic going north into the capital was extremely heavy and slow. During breaks in the interminable Wagner and other favored composers, now being interspersed with recordings of the Führer’s speeches from the past forty years, the radio announcer explained why: the Führer’s body was lying in state today in the Grand Plaza in Berlin, at the foot of the steps of Speer’s Great Hall. The cars entering the city were mourners wishing to pay their last respects before the Führer left his capital for the last time.

Tomorrow morning an honor guard would transport the body to Linz, leaving at dawn and arriving late in the evening, in preparation for the state funeral on Friday. The funeral procession would take the same autobahn Quinn and Ellie were driving now, directly south out of Berlin. It was the massive highway that bisected the Reich from north to south, one of two great axes linking the four corners of the Germanic empire. Its northern terminus was in Scandinavia, at Nordstern, a German colony the Führer had built with the intention of overshadowing the nearby city of Trondheim, though he had managed only to turn it into a Kriegsmarine submarine base on the Norwegian Sea. From Nordstern it traveled south to Oslo, then was forced to pass out of the Reich so it could run along the Swedish coast through Gothenburg and Helsingborg. At Helsingborg it crossed the Sound, re-entering the Reich, and linked Copenhagen and Odense before turning south again to pass through Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, and Linz, terminating at Klagenfurt near the
Italian and Croatian borders. Another massive autobahn linked the Reich from east to west, from Volgaburg, once called Stalingrad, on the banks of the Volga to Amsterdam on the North Sea coast.

Quinn and Ellie drove in silence for a long time. The Führer’s death was the only news the radio reported: even Greece was mentioned only to note the spontaneous outpourings of grief not only from the soldiers of Germany, but also of Italy and the Independent State of Croatia.

After they left the Berlin suburbs, the parkland that ringed the city rolled by on either side of them, broad expanses of woodland and meadow preserved by the State. Here Aryan parents could bring their Aryan children to teach them of their natural heritage; the Hitler
Jugend
could bring its young members for the nature walks and camping trips it used to instill fellowship, fraternity, and complete devotion to the Reich; and the Party and government leadership could build their villas and estates in quiet seclusion, away from the dreariness and stress of government life in the capital and, indeed, from the oppressiveness of the giant, imposing architecture with which Speer, with the Führer’s enthusiastic approval, had rebuilt Berlin into a monument to the National Socialist Triumph in the years after the war.

From the time it got underway in earnest in 1942, the Allied bombing campaign had continued without interruption—the bombers of the U.S. Army Air Forces flying during the day and the Royal Air Force at night—until the representatives of America, Britain, Germany, and Italy signed the hasty Corunna Armistice in Spain in the aftermath of the atomic bombings in Japan and England. For almost four years the Allied bombs had rained inexorably down on Germany. They eradicated German industry and, in the process, gutted the Reich’s major cities: the urban centers of Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Munich, and Frankfurt, among many others, were all flattened. Germany had to rebuild her industrial capacity from the ground up after the war.

This had fit the Führer’s grand design perfectly, for he had always envisioned removing the Reich’s manufacturing base to the territories of the East annexed during the war—Poland, the Ukraine, European Russia. These regions, mostly empty after the native population was culled, he planned to open up for colonization by the Reich’s rapidly growing Aryan population, which had heretofore been confined within Germany’s traditional borders, while their conquered Slavic native populations would serve as a pool of slave labor, provided with only the minimum means needed to keep them barely alive and sufficiently able to service the assembly lines and massive plantations that would support the Aryan population.

That left the question, of course, of what to do with the shells of Germany’s great cities destroyed by the Allies. But the grand design had an answer for this as well. After the fire of A.D. 64, Nero had been able to rebuild Rome as a monument to himself; Charles II had rebuilt London following the Great Fire of 1666. But now the Führer had the opportunity to rebuild an entire nation in his own image, and he embraced the task passionately. Rising from the ashes of the war, each of Germany’s great cities would now become a tribute to National Socialism, and to the Führer. There was Nuremberg, the Party’s spiritual home, with its incredible arena where the Party held its annual rallies; Munich, birthplace of National Socialism and site of the famous Beer Hall Putsch; Linz, near the Führer’s birthplace of Braunau, where he had spent the twenty-five years since the war constructing a palace intended to serve as his mausoleum in the tradition of the Egyptian Pharaohs; and of course Berlin, where Speer’s Grand Avenue linked the Führer’s Palace at one end with the Grand Plaza at the other, overlooked by the Great Hall and the new Reichstag.

To their left Quinn and Ellie passed the grounds of the Baldur von Schirach Youth Academy, whose medieval spires rose above the treetops about a kilometer away. It was one of half a dozen youth academies throughout the Reich, where promising young boys of suitable racial heritage, their aptitude established through national testing, were admitted between the ages of eleven and thirteen to be prepared for careers as officers in the SS, Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, or Kriegsmarine. The student body hailed both from Germany and from the suitably Nordic satellites whence the Reich was also willing to draw its elite class: Sweden, Belgium, France, or Switzerland—if the prospective student could prove his satisfactory ancestry. Not far after the youth academy, the parkland gave way to grazing and farmland, punctuated by the occasional town or village visible from the autobahn.

This is Germany
, the Propaganda Ministry wished to say. The great stone and concrete modern monuments
of the cities and the verdant, picturesque countryside with its idyllic, medieval hamlets existed side by side as twin testaments.
This is the Triumph of the Master Race
.

The reality, of course, was that this was only the western end of Germany, where the life the Master Race enjoyed was made possible by the sweat and blood of the Slavs in the East. Quinn had lived in the East; he had spent three years based in the Crimea maintaining intelligence on the Kriegsmarine’s Black Sea Fleet. He remembered the vast expanses of forest and uncultivated steppe stretching to the horizon without interruption, and the ruined, abandoned husks of farmhouses and villages from the days when what were now the five Reich Commissariats of the East—St. Petersburg, Moskau, Kiev, the Crimea, and the Volga—had been the European territories of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union.