A Traitor's Loyalty: A Novel (12 page)

One could drive for hundreds of kilometers along the East’s marginal autobahn network without seeing another human being or, indeed, any sign of recent human habitation. Occasionally the barbed wire, stone walls and guard towers of a work camp, or—very rarely—a colonist’s homestead would break the monotony. The Propaganda Ministry was constantly trying to attract colonists with its tales of the paradise awaiting them in the East, but few had taken them up on their offer. Those who did had generally been forced to abandon their homesteads after a very short time and now clustered together, dreaming of being able to afford to move back west, in walled settlements surrounding Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe bases in defense against the small bands of Slavic terrorists, supported by the Siberian government to the east, who roamed the countryside. The whole region was kept in a constant state of martial law as the personal kingdom of Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich Commissar-General of the East, Heinrich Himmler’s former protégé and the wartime leader of the SS.

Quinn thought about those vast, endless wastes, about the derelict ruins of farms and towns that millions of Polish, Russian, and Ruthenian Slavs had inhabited thirty years ago. In his mind’s eye he saw again the images of the inmates at the Purification Museum, the millions of Jews and others who had died in the death camps in those trackless wastes: emaciated, broken creatures with their heads shaven, their eyes sunken into their heads, and the skin sagging from their bones.

“Have you ever been to the East?” he asked abruptly.

Ellie started; she had been staring out the window at the passing farmland. “I was born there,” she said. “Volgaburg. My father was stationed there for the last of the fighting.”

“How long did you live there?”

“Not long. My mother sent me to a BDM school in Heidelberg when I was four. I haven’t been back since.” After a moment she added, “I have no memory of it. Is that why you’re asking?”

He shrugged, deliberately nonchalant. “Yes. It was just something that was on my mind.”

“Why?”

He did not answer. “Your father was in the Wehrmacht?”

Ellie did not press him, though he could tell she was wondering. She nodded. “He still is. He was a lieutenant when we invaded Poland in 1939. He fought in Poland, France, Russia, and Greece. By the time I was born he was colonel of his own Panzer regiment. He was transferred to Volgaburg after we made peace with England and America.”

Quinn understood why her father had had to return to Russia. When the Germans had made their breakthrough at Moscow in early 1943, then at Leningrad and Stalingrad a few months after that, the Red Army had simply collapsed and the German Panzer divisions had rolled forward unopposed onto the Russian steppe, eventually coming to a halt at the Ural ridge, more because of overextended supply lines and a general lack of interest than because they had finally met some resistance.

The startling rapidity of the German advance had meant that a number of Soviet divisions had been left, scattered and beaten, in their wake. While the bulk of the German forces in Russia had shifted to Italy and Greece, to combat the Allied invasion coming up from North Africa, the few remaining Soviet senior officers had tried to organize the remnants of their army into a fighting force.

These last Red Army divisions, who had to pillage outlying Wehrmacht camps for munitions and supplies, had never been more than a nuisance to the occupying German forces, but it was not until after Germany had
signed the Corunna Armistice and was at peace with the Western Powers that the Reich had finally had the forces necessary to divert to the East to stamp out that resistance once and for all. The Germans referred to this period as “the last of the fighting.”

The last of the Soviet units had retreated beyond the Urals in the late 1940s, taking refuge with the nascent, strife-ridden Siberian People’s Republic that had emerged out of the chaos of the Soviet collapse. Neither the People’s Republic nor the Reich had ever taken the trouble to attempt diplomatic relations with the other, and sporadic border clashes continued to this day.

Britain and the United States sent supplies to the Siberians and, in the 1950s, had even sent troops. Quinn had been one of them, when he first enlisted; he had spent three long, cold winters with a British tank battalion in the Siberian wilderness. But they had withdrawn the troops after a few years, when it became clear that neither side really had any interest in achieving any sort of goal that would end the conflict and bring about a settlement: the Germans liked having a theater where they could keep their young troops blooded, and the Siberians kept fighting merely out of hatred for Germany.

Thinking about that made him think of his brother again, in his olive private’s uniform.

“My brother fought in Greece as well,” he said. “During the last war.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “He was killed in the invasion of Istria in 1944.”

“Was he your only brother?”

“Yes.”

“He was older than you?” He nodded. “You joined the army because of him?”

“I suppose.”

Something in his voice made her look at him. “I’m sorry,” she said softly, and they lapsed into silence once more.

They passed through Dresden and into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which the Reich had created from the half of Czechoslovakia it had annexed to itself; the Führer had turned the other half into the puppet state of Slovakia. North of Prague they stopped for lunch then left the great north-south autobahn, heading west toward Nuremberg and Munich. By half past two they were passing through the outlying Munich suburbs, and an hour later they had reached the city proper. Just as in Berlin, the ominous, low-hanging overcast sky cast a dispiriting pall over the day.

Munich’s major industry was tourism, built around its ancient role as capital of the Kingdom of Bavaria and its hallowed place in the history of the National Socialist Party. Here, in 1923, a young Adolf Hitler, alongside the war hero Erich Ludendorff, had staged his so-called Beer Hall Putsch, when he had led six hundred armed Nazis as they stormed the Bürgerbräu Keller beer-hall while the State Commissioner for Bavaria was giving a speech there. Over the course of the night the insurrectionists had grown in number to three thousand, but when they had attempted to march on the city center a hundred armed policemen had met them at the Odeonplatz near Feldherrn Halle and blocked their path in a brief encounter that had claimed nineteen lives. The future Führer had served nine months for leading the Putsch, but had been catapulted overnight from the farcical leader of an obscure fringe group to national celebrity.

The site of such a seminal event in the Führer’s life was evidently a significant destination for those mourners unable to make it all the way north to Berlin or south to Linz, and heavy traffic clogged the city streets. The Hotel Udet was on the city’s far side, and Quinn and Ellie had plenty of time to admire the sights from their car as they inched their way across the city.

They crossed the Glory Way, as the route of the march from the Bürgerbräu Keller to Feldherrn Halle had been named. The Führer’s expansive building program had expanded it into a broad, majestic avenue, scattered with monuments to the nineteen who had died that day and statues re-creating the events of the march, culminating in the Odeonplatz with the famous statues of the Führer, General Ludendorff, Göring, and Himmler facing down the Bavarian state police.

Ellie stared down the avenue at a statue they passed, depicting a man in a military cap, soldier’s smock,
and spectacles standing before a barricade with some comrades and holding aloft a military ensign emblazoned with a swastika.

“Every summer my mother would choose where we would go for our holidays,” she said. “Invariably somewhere of great historical significance to the Reich and the Aryan nation. We visited Munich when I was eleven—I think. Maybe twelve.”

Quinn was also looking out the window, but not focusing on anything in particular. “I was born here,” he murmured.

She looked at him sharply, a frown creasing her delicate features. “You were born in Munich?”

He glanced at her, nodded. “By the time of my second birthday we had moved to London. But I was born here. The thirtieth of January, 1933.”

A date every German schoolchild knew. “That’s the Day of the Seizure of Power. The day the Führer took office as Chancellor.”

He nodded again.

“Your parents were English, though?”

He half-smiled. “My mother’s family is from Krakau. My father’s family had lived in Munich since the seventeenth century. My father fought in the Bavarian Army during the first war. Served in the same regiment as the Führer, as it happens, though so far as I know they never met.”

“Why did you leave?”

Only now did he finally make direct eye contact with her. “National Socialism,” he said simply.

THE HOTEL Udet stood a few blocks beyond Glory Way; it looked affordable without being run down. The sign by the entrance to the small car park bore a painted image of the hotel’s namesake, Ernst Udet, the native son of Munich who had flown alongside Hermann Göring and the famous Red Baron Manfred von Richthofen in the first war, then gone on to serve as a Luftwaffe general during the first decade of the Third Reich.

A light rain had started falling as Quinn and Ellie sat in the hotel’s car park, studying the building. “Wait here for me,” Quinn said finally.

“Now, this is getting—” The protest died on Ellie’s lips as Quinn pulled his Luger from its shoulder holster and checked that it was loaded and cocked, the safety on. He replaced the gun and looked at Ellie.

“You’re staying here,” he said. “We’ve no idea what I’m going to find in there.” She nodded. “Come round to the driver’s side. Keep the car running, keep the doors locked and keep an eye on what’s going on around you. If someone approaches the car, leave. If an hour goes by and I haven’t come out, leave.” She nodded again.

He opened his door and climbed out, then waited while she got out too and came round to him. She climbed into the driver’s seat and he bent over to speak to her. “I’ll try to be as quick as possible,” he said by way of reassurance. He straightened, closed the door and headed inside.

The ground floor of the hotel was a small reception area and bar. Just inside the doorway was the reception counter, two dozen room keys hanging from pegs on the wall behind it. Beyond the reception area, half a dozen round wooden tables were scattered around the room, each with four chairs, and the bar stood along the opposite wall. A narrow staircase led upstairs, presumably to the rooms. The electric ceiling light was turned off and the room was gloomy, as the only illumination was provided by the dismal, rainy daylight coming in through the windows.

A solid middle-aged woman who looked like she could probably hold her own in a brawl with several Waffen-SS boxing champions sat behind the counter reading a newspaper. All the pictures in the paper were of the Führer, from various points in his life. The woman glanced up disinterestedly at Quinn as he came through the open doorway, said, “No rooms left,” then went back to her paper. He walked up to the counter and waited, fishing his ID from his pocket as he did so.

After a few moments the woman found his silent presence sufficiently irritating to look up at him. “Can I help you?” she said resentfully.

“I’m looking for Reinhardt Grubbs,” he said.

“And I’m looking for my Nordic prince who’ll—”

Her voice trailed off as he flipped his ID open and held it in front of her. She straightened and looked up at him more respectfully. “Room seven,” she said. She nodded to the staircase on the other side of the room. “Upstairs.”

“Is he in there now?”

“I—I don’t know. I don’t think he’s left his room since he checked in, except for maybe an hour every morning when he goes to buy food.”

“And how long ago did he check in?”

“Um, about a week, I think. I’m not sure.” When Quinn continued to stare silently at her, she said, “Here, mein Herr, let me check.” The ledger was spread out on the table before her, facing toward Quinn and away from her, so that it could easily be lifted up onto the counter for new guests to sign in. She turned it round and flipped back through several pages. “Here he is. Since Saturday, mein Herr.”

That was the day Garner disappeared. “And how is he paying?”

“He paid in advance, mein Herr,” the woman said. “In cash. For ten days.”

“Have you spoken to him at all? Has he talked to anyone about himself?”

The woman shook her head vigorously. The last thing she wanted was for her or any of her employees to be connected with a man evidently under SS surveillance. “I haven’t, mein Herr, beyond the strictest pleasantries, and neither to my knowledge has any of the staff.”

Quinn returned his ID to his pocket and pulled out the photograph of Richard Garner. He held it in front of the woman. “Is this Reinhardt Grubbs?”

She peered at it, then nodded her head. “Yes, yes, mein Herr, that is definitely him.”

He was not entirely sure that he could not have shown her a picture of the Führer, or even of Ellie, and got her to swear that it was a photo of the man he was looking for, but the identification was enough to satisfy him. He replaced the picture in his pocket.

“The key,” he said.

She looked puzzled. “Mein Herr?”

“Herr Grubbs’s room key. Room seven.”

“Ah, yes, of course, mein Herr. How foolish. Please excuse me.” She turned and fumbled one of the keys on the wall behind her off its hook and handed it to him.

“My thanks for your assistance, Frau
Kamerad,”
he said.

“I am but a loyal servant of the Reich,” she said, but he had already turned away and started for the stairs.
“Heil Hitler!”
she called dutifully at his retreating back.

The upstairs hallway was even gloomier than downstairs; the only illumination came from an ancient wall lamp above the landing. Room seven was at the far end of the hall. Quinn knocked loudly on the door.

There was no answer, but he had expected none. He knocked again and said, “Reinhardt Grubbs, I’m here on state authority.”