A Traitor's Loyalty: A Novel (22 page)

The first boarding call for his flight sounded over the intercom. Quinn had already finished most of his bratwurst, and he was starting to worry that the opportunity he needed was not going to present itself. But then, there it was: a Luftwaffe sergeant—he did not see if it was the same man as either of the two he had already encountered—strolled into the lavatory.

Quinn calmly popped the last bite of his bratwurst into his mouth, then tucked the newspaper under his arm, rose, and nonchalantly walked over to the lavatory entrance, tossing his cup into the bin as he passed it. Out the corner of his eye he saw his watchers stir, then settle back again as they realized he was only heading for the toilet.

He was in luck; the Luftwaffe sergeant had chosen a quiet moment to relieve his bladder, and the lavatory was empty but for the two of them. The sergeant stood over a urinal with his back to the entrance; Quinn stopped a couple of meters away and stared at him.

After a moment the sergeant became aware of the scrutiny, and Quinn heard the liquid trickle falter. The sergeant looked over his shoulder and scowled. “What are you looking at?” he demanded.

Quinn held up his ID. “Obersturmbannführer Kaufholz, RSHA Amt III,” he identified himself coldly.

The sergeant’s eyes widened. He hastily shook off, buttoned his trousers, and turned round. “Err—yes, Herr Obersturmbannführer. What can I do for you?”

Quinn looked around conspiratorially, as if worried he might be overheard, then beckoned the sergeant over to the lavatory’s far corner. “Over here,
Feldwebel.”
He took a step in the indicated direction, turning his back to the sergeant as he did so. He heard the sergeant behind him, following.

Without warning he halted and threw his right elbow back and up as hard as he could. It smashed into the sergeant’s face, and he heard the satisfying crunch of cartilage. The sergeant’s rifle clattered to the linoleum floor.

Quinn spun round. The sergeant had staggered back, stunned, and had both hands over his face; blood streamed from between his fingers. Quinn stepped forward, placed his hands on the sergeant’s shoulders, and rammed his knee into the man’s crotch. The sergeant doubled over, groaning. Expertly, Quinn found the sergeant’s helmet strap with his fingers, unfastened it and pulled the helmet off. He grabbed a fistful of the sergeant’s red hair and slammed his head against the tile wall with all his strength, then let go. The man crumpled to the ground. For a moment he struggled to get up, moaning, then he went limp, unconscious.

“Sorry, Feldwebel,” Quinn murmured. “Just the wrong place at the wrong time.”

He looped his arms under the sergeant’s armpits and dragged him into a toilet stall, closing and locking the door behind them. Blood was flowing prodigiously from the sergeant’s broken nose, and he also had a gash on his forehead from the impact with the wall. So far, though, all the blood was spilling onto his tunic; his greatcoat had escaped with no more than a few flecks on the lapel. Quinn quickly stripped the greatcoat from the limp form in order to keep it clean.

Next he pulled the sergeant’s jackboots off, then unbuttoned his trousers and pulled them off. Then he removed his own jacket, shoes, and jeans. The sergeant’s trousers fit Quinn comfortably, though the boots were a little loose and felt slightly awkward. He buttoned the greatcoat all the way up to hide the fact that he was not wearing a military tunic.

He emptied the pockets of his old coat and trousers and transferred everything in them—his passport and
Gestapo ID, some money, and the Columbia-Haus treaty—to the inside pocket of the greatcoat. A quick search through the sergeant’s tunic pockets produced fifty Reichsmarks and the sergeant’s military ID and citizenship papers: Wilhelm Hamer, aged thirty-five, born in Metz, category 2 Nordic racial classification.

He hauled the sergeant up into a sitting position on the toilet seat, eliciting a groan of protest from the unconscious German. He pulled his old trousers on around Sergeant Hamer’s ankles, then forced his old shoes, which were too small for the sergeant, onto his feet. Anyone looking under the door would see only the sergeant’s feet with his trousers around his ankles.

Quinn left the stall by worming his way under the partition separating it from the next toilet, so that he could leave the stall door locked from the inside. The sergeant’s helmet and rifle lay on the floor where he had fallen. He retrieved them, putting the helmet on and slinging the rifle over his shoulder, and headed for the exit.

He deliberately did not so much as glance in the direction of Barnes and the other man as he left the lavatory; he needed to ensure he did absolutely nothing to attract even their cursory attention. His plan depended on them not looking at him, on them simply seeing a uniform exit the lavatory, dismissing it, and returning their attention to the lavatory exit and waiting for Quinn to emerge.

He paused a few meters from the lavatory and scanned the overhead signs, then turned and headed in the direction indicated for the U-Bahn entrance. He affected a disinterested, unhurried stroll, but his heart pounded against the inside of his chest. The helmet and the too-large jackboots felt awkward, and the unconscious berth of a meter or two that people now gave him disquieted him.
They
saw only the uniform, too.

As he passed the checkpoint at the entrance to the terminal one of the Luftwaffe privates’ German shepherds growled at him, and he saw the SS lieutenant who had talked with him about Istanbul glance casually over in his direction, then return his attention to what he was doing. Quinn kept walking. He had spotted the U-Bahn entrance now, just another ten meters ahead.

“Feldwebel!”

The voice came from behind him. He pretended not to hear it and kept walking.

“Feldwebel.”

Closer now; he was reasonably sure it was the lieutenant’s voice.

“
Feldwebel
!” A hand clasped his shoulder and pulled him around. He turned, desperately calm, ready to turn back around and run for it.

“Feldwebel,” the lieutenant said, “you are out of uniform.”

Quinn just blinked at him.

After a moment the lieutenant prompted, “Your helmet strap, Feldwebel.”

Quinn managed, “Sir?” Then it dawned on him. “Oh. Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Hastily he reached up and fumbled with his helmet’s chinstrap, finally getting it fastened on the second try.

The lieutenant nodded, evidently mollified. He looked down at Quinn’s buttoned up greatcoat. “Are you cold, Feldwebel?”

“Sir? Oh, that, sir. I—spilt a drop of tomato sauce on my tunic, sir.”

The lieutenant pressed his lips together in an expression of disapproval. “You should take more care with your appearance, Feldwebel.”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir. I’m not usually so careless.”

“I should hope not.” The lieutenant frowned, trying to place Quinn’s face, but he could not. More than likely he had simply seen the sergeant patrolling the airport, though he could not recall any specific instance when he had seen him before.

At last the lieutenant snapped his heels together and saluted.
“Heil Hitler!”

Quinn returned the salute.
“Heil Hitler!”

The lieutenant wheeled about and headed back to the checkpoint. Quinn also turned back around and started walking. In just a few meters, he was descending the steps to the airport’s U-Bahn station and safety. Safety being, of course, an entirely relative term.

HE GOT a few odd looks on the U-Bahn, but nobody felt like confronting the Luftwaffe sergeant with an automatic rifle over one shoulder and demanding to know his business. He sat on the hard plastic bench and brooded.

He had no idea where his destination should be. The British were probably already looking for him, and he imagined so would the Gestapo be shortly. He needed an ally, but there were no allies to be had.

Please God, let me get caught by the British. If I have to get caught, don’t let it be the Gestapo
.

He got off the U-Bahn at one of the downtown stations, on the banks of the River Spree, a few blocks from the Grand Avenue. For a while he leaned against the iron railing along the side of the pavement and stared down at the river’s murky brown water.

He should find a place to get out of sight. Armed soldiers on the streets of the Reich were not an entirely unusual sight, but they typically moved in pairs and belonged either to the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS, not the Luftwaffe. Besides, once they found Sergeant Hamer in the airport lavatory, they would know to search for a man in a Luftwaffe sergeant’s uniform. He thought about buying himself some trousers and shoes but decided against it; if he had to get himself to Linz, he would most likely need the money for something more essential.

Eventually he got up from the railing and strolled along the quiet street for a while until he came to a row of four or five decaying tenement buildings overlooking the river. He wandered across the street and entered the alley separating two of the buildings. Each had a rusty wrought iron fire escape running down its side.

Picking one of the buildings, he stood under its fire escape grille, reached up with the butt of his rifle and tugged at the bottom rung of the ladder till it came loose. The ladder came rattling down to the ground, clanging loudly as it struck the alley pavement.

He climbed up to the fire escape’s lowest level and pulled the ladder up behind him, then started his climb upward. The tenement was five stories tall. He wondered if anyone saw the Luftwaffe rifleman climbing past their living room window, but doubted they would call the authorities if they did.

The tenement’s roof was deserted. The surface was covered in gravel, except for where someone had a small vegetable garden in one corner. The rooftops of Berlin spread out around him, the huge dome of the Great Hall rising prominently from amongst them on the far side of the river. Quinn settled himself in the lee of the two- foot brick wall running round the roof’s perimeter and closed his eyes. He could feel the warm sun on his eyelids and was glad it was no longer raining, though the gravel underneath his back still felt damp. His greatcoat kept out the chill breeze running over the city’s rooftops.

He had been awake continuously since waking up on Ellie’s couch yesterday morning before going to visit Gertrud, which seemed like years ago. Now, after less than half of a minute, he slept.

When he woke he knew that time had passed, but he was unsure of how much. Through his closed eyelids he could tell that nightfall was approaching, and the temperature had started to fall sharply. Quinn rubbed his eyes open and sat up, leaning his back against the roof’s low brick wall. He stifled a yawn, then clambered slowly to his feet and gazed out across the river at the city spread out on the opposite bank.

The setting sun eerily silhouetted the dome of the Great Hall into stark, metallic, green relief and picked out the clouds and industrial smog that hung over the city as streaks of bloody red and orange against the pinks and purples of the evening sky. He was facing into the teeth of the brisk rooftop breeze, which the setting of the sun and the onset of the night-time chill had turned malicious and biting.

He checked his watch. A quarter to nine. He had slept for almost seven hours. He picked up his rifle and
slung it over his shoulder, climbed out onto the fire escape’s top landing, and began to clamber earthward.

He felt a bit dismayed that he had slept so long; he had expected to wake earlier and have a bit more time to prepare emotionally for the plan on which he had decided. But, he told himself, perhaps it was a good thing. Now he had time only for action; he did not have to sit and wait, and let the doubts start gnawing at the back of his mind.

He dropped the last eight feet from the fire escape’s bottom landing, then walked slowly back along the alley’s length, emerging cautiously onto the street running along the riverbank. A few blocks up the road was the U-Bahn station from which he had come earlier this afternoon, but that line would not take him to Ellie’s flat. Her building, though, was less than two or three kilometers away, in the opposite direction and on the other side of the river. He turned and started walking.

After a few blocks he came to a thick, low stone bridge, old enough that it had not been built to accommodate two-way car traffic, and started to make his way across it. He stared down at the brown, brackish waters as he walked, remembering in a quiet, detached way tipping over a railing and plunging into the river four years ago. The sensation of being shot came back to him: the momentary disbelief, followed by intense, agonizing pain, like nothing he had ever felt before. And then waking up in the alley on the riverbank hours later, the blinding pain now orders of magnitude greater than it had been when he had first been shot.

By the time he had crossed the bridge and started making his way through the Berlin streets towards Ellie’s building, the memories of that last night in Berlin, the night Karl had died, had turned into disquieting doubts, which he was grateful had not had a chance to come to him earlier because he had been asleep. He would probably be shot and killed—indeed, his plan was sufficiently foolish that he
should
get killed.

A new, quietly fatalistic acceptance had settled over him; this was the only way he would be able to get to Heydrich, so this was the risk he must take. Even if he survived the next few hours, fate would probably catch up with him later tonight, or tomorrow, or within a few days. He would keep fighting them until they stopped him from fighting back. All he really hoped for now was that his newfound fatalism did not end up bringing Ellie down with him.

He stood on the corner opposite Ellie’s building for a long time, staring up at its plain cement face, wondering if he would make it alive to her front door across the street. From here he could see both the front entrance on one side and Ellie’s window on the other. Her light was on, and he thought the blinds were open, but from this angle he could not tell if there was any activity in her flat.

He took a deep breath and started across the street. His heart pounded in his chest, but he forced himself to move slowly and nonchalantly. He had no doubt that Ellie’s building would be under surveillance: certainly by the British, since they had been there this morning, but probably by the Gestapo as well. Either one could decide to pick him off as he crossed the street.