A Traitor's Loyalty: A Novel (37 page)

“You killed my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins. And my brother. My brother died trying to stop you, trying to avenge them, mein Führer. You killed the Jews.” He stopped, standing toe to toe with Heydrich.

The Commissar-General frowned at him in confusion. “I don’t understand. The Jews? What do you care of the Jews?”

“You said a little while ago, through there—” his eyes flicked toward the door leading back to the office, “—that I’m not German. That’s true, though not because I was born in England. I was born in Germany, mein Führer. But I’m not German, because you—because the National Socialists—took away my German citizenship before I was three years old.”

Heydrich’s eyes had widened as he began to realize what Quinn was saying. “No,” he said. “No, you can’t be.”

“I lied, mein Führer. My name isn’t Simon Quinn. My name is Mordechai Rosenhoch.”

“Ros-Rosenhoch,” Heydrich repeated numbly. But then he seemed to straighten. “And what of it? What do you think to accomplish here?” The slightest hint of a sneer touched his lip. “Do you think to give your family justice?”

Quinn shook his head sadly, even wearily, and seemed to falter for an instant. “Justice? No. They can never have that.” But then his eyes glinted. “I come here for a simple act of vengeance.”

The movement was quick—just a mere flick of his wrist—and powerful, and he had buried the knife in Heydrich’s stomach. He twisted hard, turning the blade ninety degrees, and then removed it.

The Commissar-General did not make a sound, just clasped his hands over the wound, blood welling through his fingers. He looked down, then back up at Quinn, and crumpled silently to the floor.

Quinn tossed the bloodstained knife down on the bed, strode quickly back across the room, and slipped out through the open window into the night.

THE AMERICAN consulate turned out to be only a few blocks from the Strength through Joy hotel. It faced onto a small square with an equestrian statue of Frederick Barbarossa in the center. Quinn, his arm throbbing intensely from the climb down the face of the hotel, settled himself in a darkened alleyway on the opposite side of the square, whence he had a good view of the consulate entrance, and waited.

It was possible she was already inside, of course, but he doubted it. Gunning would have had the good sense simply to get out of sight during the day’s fighting, and only now that things had quieted down would he have started making his way here.

He had less than an hour to wait. He spotted Gunning first, appearing out of the shadows at the square’s far corner and surveying the square to make sure it was safe to cross. Then he turned and beckoned, and there she was. Ellie came out of the shadows after him, and the two of them hurried across the square toward the consulate’s front entrance.

She paused at the base of the statue and looked about, searching for him, hoping he would be there waiting for her. Gunning saw she had stopped and turned back impatiently, waiting.

Quinn had been sitting with his back against the alley wall; now he rose, preparing to run to her.

“She would be much safer if you left her alone.”

He whirled, and there was the familiar figure, face in shadow, standing just a few meters behind him, watching him.

The old man stepped forward, bringing his face into the pale light. “The Gestapo knows who she is,” he said, “but alone, she’s no threat to them. If you were to rejoin her, however . . .” His voice trailed off, and his eyebrows rose significantly.

“You expect me to just let her walk away?”

“I expect you to put her safety ahead of your own gratification, Simon.”

Talleyrand came forward to stand next to him, and he turned back to see Ellie reluctantly following Gunning towards the consulate. They stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the two of them talk to the American marine at the consulate’s entrance. In reality it probably took only about a minute, but to Quinn it seemed an eternity—an eternity during which he did not run to her, did not call out to her. At last someone in plainclothes came out to meet them, and the marine let them pass. The two of them disappeared inside.

Quinn and Talleyrand continued to stare at the consulate entrance. At last the old man said, “I’m proud of you, Simon. That was a very noble thing.”

No bitter retort about hypocrisy leapt to his lips; instead, he asked, “How did you know where to find me?”

“Oh, it wasn’t a very difficult deduction. You couldn’t very well send her to the British consulate, nor could you leave her with the Germans until you knew who’d won. This was really the only place left to you.”

“So what happens now?”

“To her? She can go with the Americans, if she wants, as can Sergeant Gunning and Captain Barnes—I’ve already spoken with my opposite number at the CIA to ensure that. I imagine she’d be readmitted to Germany as well if she wanted. Or she could even come to England—I’d see to that, though I doubt it would require extensive intervention. The day’s events have brought to light some . . . activities of the Government of the day that are causing quite the stir in Britain. I daresay we shall have a new Government by the end of the coming week, if not sooner. One that will welcome your Fraulein Voss, once I put a word in.”

“And Barnes and Gunning?”

“The new Government will welcome them home as heroes. A good sort, Captain Barnes. He’s impressed me. I shall have to keep my eye on him—I think he would fit in well with our organization.”

“That was your intent the whole time, wasn’t it? To bring down the Government?”

“Not necessarily bring down,” the old man said. He turned to Quinn. “That is far beyond our remit, Simon. You know better than that—we don’t interfere with domestic politics, nor should we have any desire to. But that insidious treaty? I could not permit it to come to pass.”

“And we’ve been dancing to your tune the whole time, yes? This has all been your plan all along?”

“Well. . . .” Talleyrand looked back over his shoulder at the dark silhouette of the Strength through Joy Hotel rising into the night sky, and beyond it at the smoke still visibly rising in the city center. “Perhaps not planned down to the minutest detail. But you certainly managed to catch my general gist. You did extraordinarily well, in fact.”

“A good man died.”

Talleyrand cast his eyes down a moment. “Richard Garner. Yes.” He looked back up at Quinn. “I did not know he was going to run, and I would have saved him if I could. But you must understand, Simon, that even I have masters to whom I must answer, the Government, our supposed friends at the Gestapo. I did not want Garner to die, but if they had realized what aim I was truly working for, then all the sacrifices we
all
made would have been for naught.” He paused, then added quietly, “And while I’m sure you look suspiciously on everything I say to you, I doubt you will have trouble believing that Richard Garner’s death is far from the blackest mark on my conscience that I will someday have to explain to my Maker.”

Quinn sighed. “No. I believe you.” There was silence for a moment, then he asked, “What about my crew? And my boat?”

“Both have been released. We have the boat’s title—the Greek customs police found it when they searched the craft. Would you like it back?”

He shook his head. “Give it to one of the crew. Giglio. He’s one of the Sicilians.”

“Very well.” Talleyrand cocked his head inquisitively. “And you? Where will you go now?”

Quinn’s eyebrows arched. “You know, I’m famished. I think I’ll go find something to eat.”

This elicited a faint smile. “And then?”

He gazed contemplatively up at the stars. “Oh, to the East for a time, I think,” he said at last. “See if I can’t find some old ghosts. Put them to rest.”

The old man nodded sagely. “I see. Then I suppose this is good bye, Simon. Or would you prefer Mordechai?”

Quinn shrugged. “Either. Neither. It doesn’t really matter now.” He turned and walked away down the alley. After a dozen or so paces, though, he paused and turned back. “Why?” he asked. Talleyrand raised his eyebrows inquisitively. “Why did you do it? That peace treaty, whatever else it may have done, solved a lot of Britain’s problems. Why was it worth all our lives to end it?”

The old man tutted. “Come now, Simon. What is the very first lesson we taught you? We seek neither victory, nor even peace. We seek only
stability
, for only stability can guarantee our safety from apocalypse. We need the Americans in order for us to continue fighting this Cold War, but the Americans have never been enthusiastic about it. Europe is much too far away for them to see Germany as an immediate threat, and the last time they came here, the Germans sent them home with their collective tail between their legs. They’d much rather forget the whole thing; it’s only the British will that keeps them in it. If Britain were to suddenly forsake them and go over to the other side—why, then they would find themselves twice bitten. And with neither the Americans nor Britain here to oppose Germany—well then, who would be left?”

Quinn was staring off at an indeterminate point in the distance, nodding in understanding. “Stability. The preservation of order. Fair enough.” He focused back on Talleyrand. “But in that case, I’m afraid everything might not have turned out quite as you were hoping for.”

Talleyrand stared at him a moment, frowning, not understanding. Then, suddenly, his eyes widened, and he turned and looked toward the Strength through Joy Hotel, where Heydrich remained. Then he turned back
to the shadowy alley, but Simon Quinn was gone.

HITLER DID indeed intend to demolish and reconstruct the great cities of the German Reich. Like many of his fantasies, these plans started out on a moderately manageable scale—only five cities—and then ballooned to more than two dozen cities as the war dragged on and German reverses began to mount. When the Führer finally retreated to his Berlin bunker in the early months of 1945, still convinced of an imminent, glorious victory as the Russians, Americans, and British closed in from two directions, he took with him his massive scale model of his plans for his most cherished reconstruction, that of the city of Linz, and would spend hours studying it as Berlin was reduced to rubble above him. Kaltenbrunner—like Hitler and Adolf Eichmann (with whom Kaltenbrunner had attended school), a Linz native—arrived at the bunker intending to try to persuade the Führer to surrender, but was admitted to the room housing the model of Linz, a mark of special favor. Hitler declaimed for hours on his plans for the city, and Kaltenbrunner walked away a fervent convert to the approaching German victory.

Of the three reconstructed cities I have dealt with in detail, two—Berlin and Linz—are as much as possible based on Hitler’s actual plans for them; as regards Munich, Glory Way is entirely my own invention. Plans for the new Berlin are taken from their architect Albert Speer’s memoir
Inside the Third Reich
, the most influential primary source we have about the inner workings of National Socialism’s upper echelons. For the reconstruction of Linz—and other discussion of the Nazi rebuilding of Germany, such as the great north-south autobahn linking Klagenfurt, Austria, to the projected German colony of Nordstern (“Polar Star”) near Trondheim, Norway—I have drawn on Frederic Spotts’s excellent study of
Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics
. I should note that Hermann Giesler, Hitler’s principle architect and also the director of the reconstruction of Linz, vehemently disputed Speer’s assertion that Hitler intended to be interred in Linz with his parents.

Several characters appearing in the novel were historical personages, chief amongst them Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich was assassinated outside Prague by Czechoslovakian nationalists operating under British auspices in 1942. As head of the Gestapo’s parent organization, the RSHA, Heydrich was responsible for the beginning of the Holocaust. He chaired the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in 1942, attended by Adolf Eichmann, at which the blueprint for the Final Solution was established—including the mass deportation of Jews to the East for the purposes of slave labor in the early stages of building the infrastructure of the Reich occupation.

Adolf Galland, who once famously told Hermann Göring that the best way to improve the Luftwaffe’s performance would be to equip it with British Spitfires, was released as a prisoner of war in 1947 with the proviso that he was not permitted to pilot an aircraft. He worked as a forest ranger and served as a general in the Argentine air force before returning to Germany where, after the West German government passed him over for command of their new Luftwaffe, he worked as an independent aerospace consultant. He died in 1996.

Otto-Ernst Remer became a hero of National Socialism when, as commander of the Wehrmacht garrison in Berlin, he was instrumental in suppressing the coup attempt of July 1944 by arresting its leaders before they could gain control of the German capital after their attempted assassination of Hitler. After the war he became active in the Socialist Reich Party, one of West Germany’s first neo-Nazi parties, and fled to Egypt in 1952 when he was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for denouncing the members of the German resistance as traitors. In 1992 a German court sentenced him to twenty-two months in prison for publishing neo-Nazi propaganda and denying the Holocaust. He died in 1997 in exile in Spain.

Heinrich Himmler shaved off his beloved mustache and covered one eye with an eye patch as part of his
disguise as Heinrich Hitzinger, a sergeant major of the Secret Military Police, when he left Flensburg shortly after the Germans had surrendered. Captured outside Bremen, he committed suicide at Lüneburg on 23 May 1945 by biting down when a British doctor discovered the vial of potassium cyanide he had wedged between two of his teeth.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who did indeed succeed Heydrich as commander of the RSHA, was found guilty of count 3 (war crimes) and count 4 (crimes against humanity) by the Nuremberg tribunal and hanged on 16 October 1946.

Hermann Fegelein, brother-in-law to Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun, was stripped of his rank and imprisoned in the guardhouse of Hitler’s bunker beneath Berlin on 26 April 1945. With the city’s fall to the Red Army imminent, he had slipped away to his apartment in Charlottenburg and changed into civilian clothes, preparing to flee to Sweden with his mistress, when the SS caught up with him. The circumstances around his death by firing squad remain murky: some sources say he was examined by a military tribunal, others that Hitler ordered his summary execution. Some say that his sister-in-law Eva Braun pleaded for clemency, others that she said nothing in his defense.