A Traitor's Loyalty: A Novel (35 page)

He stared at the infantryman, only just processing the question. After a long moment, he nodded. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

The infantryman’s smile widened, and he and one of his fellows helped Quinn to his feet. Quinn’s upper arm exploded in pain, and he gasped, clasping it with his other hand.

The infantryman looked concerned; he gently pried Quinn’s hand away so that he could look at the wound through the tear in Quinn’s sleeve.

“That looks nasty, sir,” he said. “We’d best get you back to our checkpoint. We have a medic there.”

They were on a narrow street overlooking the river. A jeep stood with its engine running a few meters away, and they ushered him toward it. As they were climbing in, he heard the distant
crump
of artillery fire, very faint.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “What’s that firing?”

“We’ve cleared the city center, but there are still a few pockets of resistance on the outskirts, sir,” the infantryman said. “Nothing to worry about. We’ll have the traitors all pushed up into the mountains in a few hours.”

The darkened streets were deserted and, except for the occasional distant gunfire, eerily silent as they made their way through the city center. Every once in a while they would pass physical evidence of the day’s
fighting: an artillery crater, an overturned vehicle, soldiers’ bodies lying in the street.

On one street corner dozens of bodies, both Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, surrounded the burnt-out hulk of a tank bearing the SS’s twin lightning bolts, the building beside it reduced to rubble. A small work crew had arrived. A pair of Wehrmacht guards stood over two Waffen-SS prisoners carrying away the bodies while four more searched through the rubble, trying to find anyone who might have been crushed underneath.

“We’re coming up on the checkpoint now, Herr Quinn,” the infantryman said.

They turned a corner as Quinn opened his eyes, but immediately he had to shield them from the harsh light. Floodlights blanketed the street leading up to the checkpoint to prevent anyone from sneaking up on it. Quinn tried blinking rapidly to adjust his eyes to the light. Out the corner of his eye he could see them passing sandbag barricades topped with barbed wire.

The sentry waved them through and they entered the checkpoint, where the light was much more bearable. They were in a small city square with a fountain at its center. The square looked to be used as a vehicle park, while the Wehrmacht had commandeered the ground floors of the buildings enclosing it—mostly small shop fronts.

The jeep pulled into a parking space, and the lead infantryman hopped out and helped Quinn climb out. “The medic’s station is this way, sir.” He led him over to one of the buildings; the glass of its front door had been smashed, and someone had propped the door open with a beam of wood.

They went inside. This was obviously some sort of souvenir shop ordinarily. Its shelves had all been pushed up against one wall. Shattered plastic figurines of the Führer and small pewter models of the city’s bell tower littered the floor. The Wehrmacht had set up several rows of foldout cots. Wounded soldiers sat or lay on many of them, with their arms in slings or with crutches propped against their beds.

The infantryman led him over to a vacant cot and had him sit down, then hurried off to find the medic. Quinn waited patiently.

“Hey,” someone called from a far corner of the room, “the radio’s back on.”

“What do you mean, the radio’s back on?” came an answering cry.

“The
civilian
radio.
Deutschlandsender
has started broadcasting again.”

“Well turn it up then!”

There was a pause, and then a staticky voice filled the room.

“ . . .
and have now restored order in the city of Linz after acting to prevent an attempted coup by the leadership of the SS. A spokesman for Reich forces in the city said that at the current time details of the conspiracy are unclear, but it appears that the ReichsführerSS and a few key aides had entered into an agreement with the English government whereby England would back the overthrow of the Führer’s will and the rule of National Socialist law, in exchange for which the Reichsführer- SS, once vested with the Supreme Power, would make Germany a virtual English vassal, capitulating on all substantive sources of tension between the two states. The English foreign minister Lord Home was in Linz for the Führer’s funeral but has not made himself available for comment. Once again, for those of you across the Reich just joining us after the interruption of service early this afternoon
. . .”

The infantryman returned with the medic, a lieutenant, who ordered Quinn to remove his shirt and sent the infantryman off for some dry clothes.

The medic pressed his fingers gently against Quinn’s wound, causing Quinn to jerk his arm back in pain and eliciting a trickle of runny yellow pus. The medic tutted. “The bullet went clean through,” he said, “but it is unfortunate that you spent so much time in the river before we could clean it. This might be a painful one.”

Quinn glanced down at the inflamed purple and yellow skin surrounding the bullet wound. “I’ve had worse.”

The medic glanced at the scar on his upper right chest and nodded. He set about cleaning and disinfecting the wound, an extremely painful process, and was just finishing bandaging it when the infantryman returned with a clean change of clothes and a sergeant, both for Quinn.

“I have orders to take you to headquarters immediately, sir,” the sergeant said.

“It will be just one minute, Feldwebel,” the medic said, not taking his eyes from what he was doing. “I have
to give this man a sling.”

The sergeant was clearly unhappy with any delay, but he wasn’t in much of a position to gainsay the medical assessment of a doctor who also outranked him. Thus it was that a little less than ten minutes later, Quinn exited the makeshift field hospital with his arm in a sling and clad in a civilian change of clothes the infantryman had found somewhere, with—blessedly—shoes instead of jackboots.

Quinn and the sergeant got in a jeep and headed out from the checkpoint. They wove their way through the darkened, silent streets, occasionally passing a patrol in another jeep or an armored car. As they trundled across the piazza overlooked by the art museum and the opera house, a combat helicopter glided overhead, its searchlight methodically criss-crossing the terrain below it.

“
We remind you that the city is under curfew until further notice
,” the helicopter’s loudspeaker blared at the city in general. “
Remain indoors for your own safety. Not all fighting in the city has stopped. Anyone discovered out of doors not in Wehrmacht uniform is subject to summary military judgment
.”

They turned off the piazza and headed up In den Lauben. Soon they came to the great square before the communal hall that earlier in the day Quinn had seen from the window of the Strength through Joy Hotel, packed with tens of thousands of ordinary Germans awaiting their Führer’s funeral. Now a barricade of sandbags and barbed wire enclosed it, with only a single gap to allow the entry and exit of vehicles.

The sergeant pulled up to the gap, where the sentry checked their pass carefully, then stared intently at Quinn while the sergeant explained that he had orders to deliver him immediately to headquarters. After the sentry spoke with someone on his field telephone, he waved them through.

They headed across the square to the communal hall on its far side. The bell tower over the mausoleum of the Führer’s parents rose just beyond it. The sergeant weaved deftly through the vehicles scattered haphazardly around the square. There had obviously been a significant skirmish here: bullet marks scored and pockmarked the paving in places, there were several burnt out and overturned military vehicles, and bodies—both Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS—lay piled in a far corner.

The sergeant pulled up at the foot of the broad flight of steps leading up to the communal hall. The square fronted onto the riverbank, and Quinn stared out across the water at the silhouette of the Nibelungen Bridge a few hundred meters away, black against the inky blue of the night’s sky.

“Mr. Quinn!”

Quinn turned to see a Wehrmacht officer—it took him a moment to recognize him as Captain Meier, silhouetted against the light spilling out from the communal hall—approaching down the steps, his arm raised in greeting. Quinn climbed out the jeep, feeling a slight twinge of pain in his arm, and ascended the last few steps to meet him. They shook hands.

“It is good to see you well, Mr. Quinn,” the captain said. The English title sounded oddly accented from his lips. “I must say, I was positive you had died at the bridge.”

“I’m as surprised as anyone, Herr Hauptmann,” Quinn said.

Meier chuckled, then gestured toward the hall above them. “Come. Let’s go inside. The Commissar-General will be eager to see you.”

They ascended the steps and walked past the half dozen Wehrmacht sentries into the building’s antechamber. Meier led him across the chamber and through a tall, arched doorway.

This was obviously the hall’s main chamber. Rows and rows of seats, many of them now knocked over, had been arrayed to face the dais at the far end of the room, where the Führer’s coffin, draped with a swastika flag, still stood, ringed by at least two dozen Wehrmacht guards. Eight or ten Waffen-SS bodies lay scattered about the room, but one in particular caught Quinn’s attention. He was tall and thin, in his late sixties, lying on his back and staring emptily at the ceiling, a bullet hole in his forehead and blood puddled around him. But where the other Waffen-SS soldiers all wore common troopers’ coalscuttle helmets, this man had on the uniform of a senior officer, and a pistol rather than an automatic rifle lay a few feet from his outstretched hand. Quinn recognized him immediately.

Meier, realizing that Quinn had stopped, turned to learn the cause. He followed Quinn’s gaze, nodding
sagely when he saw. “Ah, yes. SS-Oberstgruppenführer Kaltenbrunner. The Führer’s body had a Waffen-SS honor guard here in the chamber. When our forces secured the building, Oberstgruppenführer Kaltenbrunner attempted to lead them in an attack from the inside.” He paused, considering. “We would have preferred to take him alive, of course. For interrogation.” A shrug—
But it couldn’t be helped
.

The matter now closed as far as he was concerned, Meier turned and continued on his way. But, before following, Quinn stared a few moments longer at the corpse of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, commander of the RSHA and second in the SS hierarchy only to Heinrich Himmler.

Meier led him through a doorway into a side corridor, then down a cramped flight of stairs into a narrow hallway whose cinderblock walls, unadorned concrete floor, and flickering fluorescent lights contrasted starkly with the expansive marble floors and walls draped in swastika banners upstairs. Closed iron doors were set into the walls every few meters, and four of them had armed Wehrmacht sentries; one had two sentries and a lieutenant.

“The Commissar-General is currently questioning one of the senior SS officers we detained today,” Meier explained. He nodded to the lieutenant, who opened the door he was guarding a crack and slipped inside, closing it after him.

Meier and Quinn waited. Intermittently, the sound of blows, whimpers, screams or stern questioning escaped from the doors that had sentries posted at them.

“Where’s Captain Barnes?” Quinn asked, partly to cover the noise.

Meier seemed to come out of some sort of reverie. “He’s at the municipal hospital,” he said. “Wounded in the leg when we stormed the communal hall. He should be quite fine. I imagine you’ll want to see him tomorrow.”

The door opened again, swinging wide this time, and Heydrich and the lieutenant emerged. Before it swung shut, Quinn caught a glimpse of the figure inside, a man in his sixties who had probably looked rather distinguished before they had stripped him to the waist and suspended him by his wrists from the ceiling, blood running freely from his nose and mouth: Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s personal deputy and Maurice Beauchamp’s controller in the SS.

“Herr Quinn,” Heydrich said warmly, extending his hand. “So good to see you survived.”

Quinn shook the hand. “Herr Generalkommissar.”

“I have the press assembled in two rooms upstairs, sir,” Meier said. “Foreign and domestic.”

“Then lead the way, Hauptmann,” Heydrich said. “I’ll see the domestic press first, then foreign. Then we’ll return to the hotel for the night.”

Meier saluted, turned and headed back down the corridor. Heydrich, Quinn, the lieutenant, and one of the soldiers who had been standing sentry outside Fegelein’s door followed.

They ascended the steps to the hallway upstairs, and Meier led them to a closed door and stopped. Heydrich paused, taking a deep breath, then opened the door and went inside.

He did not close the door behind himself, and Quinn heard the scrape of chairs and the rustle of a large group of people getting to their feet, then Heydrich began to speak.

“You must excuse me, Mr. Quinn,” Meier said. “I need to have the Commissar-General’s car brought round.”

“Of course, Herr Hauptmann.”

“I am as surprised and shocked as all Germans must be—in fact, more so,” Heydrich was saying as Meier walked away. “I worked closely with the former Reichsführer-SS during the years of our great struggle to secure the future of the Reich, and in the decades since I have always held great respect—admiration—for the devotion and tenacity with which he has served the German people and, most of all, our late Führer. Now, to discover that foreigners seduced him into conspiring to subvert our beloved Führer’s last, and most essential, commandment to us all—I would expect it of a Jew; I would not expect it of a man who marched at Munich in 1923.”

Quinn stepped away from the doorway; he did not wish to hear anymore.

HE FOUND himself a bench to sit on and waited while Heydrich spoke with the press. After about ten minutes the Commissar- General moved from one room to the next, speaking now to the foreign press.

“
In the East we must continue to grind them into the dust, every day, because if we give them even a moment’s latitude, a moment’s hope, then they might believe that they can be again anything more than what they are now, what they are meant to be—which is
nothing.
It has kept us blooded, and it has kept us vigilant
.”