Berlin Red (18 page)

At that precise moment, Inspector Hunyadi was sitting alone in a conference room in the Reichschancellery building, waiting to begin the first of several interviews of members of the German High Command about the leak of information from the bunker.

In choosing a location for these interviews, Hunyadi had been given little choice, since this was one of the few places left in the Chancellery with its roof remaining intact.

This had, until not too long ago, been the location of Hitler’s meetings with his High Command; one at midday and the other at midnight. It was a grand, high-ceilinged room, with white pillars in each corner and paintings of different German landscapes – the Drachenfels Castle overlooking the Rhine, a street scene in Munich, a farmer ploughing his field at sunrise on the flat, almost featureless plains along the Baltic coast. In between these paintings, windows taller than a man looked out on to the Chancellery garden. In the centre of the room stood a long, oak table, on which the maps of battlefields would be unfurled and gestured at by field marshals waving ceremonial batons. Along the back wall, comfortable chairs with padded red leather seats had welcomed those whose presence was not immediately required.

At least, that’s how it used to look.

One night in late October of 1944, a 250-pound bomb dropped by an American B-17 landed in the Chancellery garden, barely fifty feet from the outside entrance to the briefing room. The explosion blew out the windows, spraying the back walls with glass, shrapnel and mud. The upholstered chairs were hurled into the air, along with the briefing-room table, in spite of the fact that it normally took ten men to lift it. In a matter of seconds, every piece of furniture in the room was wrenched into pieces, some of which became embedded in the ceiling.

At first, Hitler had insisted that the briefings continue in their usual location. The windows’ holes were sealed up with plywood. The wreckage of the table was removed and those in attendance did their best not to stare at the gashes in the walls, from which shards of window glass still protruded like the teeth of sharks.

Maps were spread out upon the floor and men crouched down to trace their fingers along routes of advance and retreat.

Forty-eight hours after the explosion, just as the midnight meeting was about to commence, a twisted dagger of metal from the bomb’s tail fin fell from its resting place in the ceiling and stuck into the floor, right in the middle of a map of the Schnee Eifel mountains.

That was too much, even for Hitler, and before he left the city for another of his fortresses, he ordered a new location to be found. By the time he returned, in January of the following year, the only place left was the bunker.

Since the power was out and the windows were blocked up with plywood, Hunyadi had resorted to a paraffin lamp to light the room. The yellow flame, tipped with greasy black smoke, writhed behind the dirty glass shroud. Most of the furniture had been removed. But the conference table was still here, along with a couple of chairs. It was enough to serve Hunyadi’s purposes, but little more. In addition, the paintings had all been removed. Now Hunyadi surveyed the dreary expanses of yellowy-brown paint on the empty walls, studded with the hooks from which the portraits had once been suspended.

Hunyadi had considered summoning everyone on his list to the police station, where he could have questioned them in one of the holding cells, but he wanted to play down the appearance of a formal interrogation. In addition, German military law usually required that any interrogation of a military official be carried out by someone of equal rank. Not only did Hunyadi lack the pay scale of the officers who would soon be marching through that door, but he wasn’t even a soldier.

No matter what location he chose, the reception was likely to be chilly, especially since most, if not all of them, would already know why they were being summoned. Even to be questioned meant that their loyalty had fallen under suspicion.

As the minutes passed, Hunyadi felt the quiet of the room settling like dust upon his shoulders. Even though his rational mind assured him that he was not back in a cell, he still felt trapped in this windowless space and it was all he could do not to bolt into the street. He thought about all the people he had sent to prison over the years. Rarely had he ever felt pity for the people he’d helped to convict, but now he grasped the full measure of their suffering. It was strange that this had come to him only after his release from Flossenburg. In the weeks he had spent in that cell so much of his mind had shut down that every emotion, no matter how extreme, had been dulled to the point where he felt almost nothing at all. Maybe that was the true punishment of prison – not the loss of time but rather the inability to feel its passing.

A few minutes later, the door burst open and there stood Field Marshal Keitel, with cheeks almost as red as the crimson facing on his greatcoat. Without waited to be welcomed, he stamped into the room, removed his hat and tossed it on to the table. Then, resting his gloved knuckles on the polished surface, he leaned across until the two men’s faces almost touched. ‘You miserable little man!’ he spat. ‘Did you ever stop to think that I have a war to run?’

Keitel, in his early sixties, had greying hair, a high forehead and fleshy ears. When he closed his mouth, his teeth clacked together like a mousetrap, causing the flesh around his jowly chin to quiver momentarily.

‘I just have a few questions,’ said Hunyadi, removing a notebook from his chest pocket, along with the stub of a pencil. ‘Please sit,’ he told the field marshal, gesturing at a chair on the other side of the table.

‘I won’t be here long enough!’ roared Keitel. ‘Just hurry up and ask me whatever it is you need to ask, so you can report back to the Führer that I am not the source of any information leak.’

‘So you are aware of the leak?’

‘Of course! For months, there have been rumours.’

‘What kind of rumours?’

Keitel breathed in sharply through his nose. ‘Things finding their way on to the Allied radio network.’

‘What things?’

Keitel shrugged angrily. ‘Useless gossip, mostly. The sordid details of people’s lives.’

‘The Führer seems to think it is more serious than that.’

Slowly, Keitel leaned away from Hunyadi. He pulled himself up to his full height, fingers twitching inside grey-green leather gloves. ‘He has no proof of that, at least none that I have seen or heard about. If you ask me, he’s chasing a ghost, and we have other, more important things to occupy our minds. It is simply a distraction, which is exactly what the Allies had in mind.’

‘So you will admit the leak exists?’

The field marshal shrugged. ‘Possibly.’

‘And where, if you had to guess, would you say the leak is coming from?’

‘If you ask me, they are the kind of details one hears talked about among the secretaries, of which there are several working in the bunker.’

‘So you think it is one of them?’

‘I’m not accusing anyone,’ snapped Keitel. ‘It’s just a hunch, but one that carries weight if you can see this from the Allies’ point of view.’

‘And how is that?’

‘Whoever they are using for this, if there is anyone at all, is someone they consider expendable.’

‘How so?’ asked Hunyadi.

‘How long did the Allies think they could go on telling bunker secrets before Hitler sent a man like you to find the source? Now have you asked enough questions or are you going to keep me here all day?’

‘No, Field Marshal,’ said Hunyadi, closing his notebook. ‘You are free to go.’

The next man through the door was Hitler’s adjutant, SS Major Otto Guensche. He had come straight from his duties at the bunker and wore a brown, double-breasted knee-length leather coat over his dress uniform. He was very tall, with sad and patient eyes; a man who looked like he was used to keeping his mouth shut.

Hunyadi realised at once that he would get little out of Guensche. After a few, perfunctory questions about life in the bunker, all of which Guensche answered in a slow and quiet voice, as if he was certain that others were listening, Hunyadi sent him away.

There followed a line of secretaries – Johanna Wolf, Christa Schroeder, Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge. If anything, these women were tougher than the field marshal. They gave almost nothing away, but from the upward darting of their gazes and the twitching of the muscles in their jaws, it was clear to Hunyadi, from his years of questioning suspects in the dingy, glaringly lit interrogation cells of the Spandau prison, that these women had plenty they could tell. The question was whether they had, and Hunyadi did not think so. Their loyalty ran so deep that it was oblivious to the kinds of political manoeuvrings that other, more highly placed members of the Führer’s entourage might have found tempting.

After the secretaries, Hunyadi interviewed Hitler’s chauffeur Erich Kempka, a rough, sarcastic man, who was himself a victim of the rumour leak. The story of his infidelities had been described more than once by ‘Der Chef’.

Then came Heinz Linge, one of Hitler’s valets, so nervous that he might have uttered some inconsequential detail in his sleep and thereby brought about the downfall of the Reich; his right eye began to twitch uncontrollably and Hunyadi dismissed him earlier than he had planned to out of fear that the man might be about to suffer a heart attack.

After Linge’s departure, Hunyadi glanced at his watch and realised that the day was almost over.

His final visitor was Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s emissary to the Führer’s court and, judging from the reputation that preceded him, someone universally disliked.

Unlike all the others, Fegelein appeared completely at ease, and it was this which made Hunyadi suspicious.

‘Why am I here?’ demanded Fegelein.

‘The Führer believes that there is a leak of classified information from his Berlin Headquarters. Some of it is finding its way to the Allies, who are broadcasting it from their radio stations.’

‘You mean “Der Chef”?’

‘You have heard of him?’

‘Everybody has, but if that’s why you’ve brought me in I can tell you right now you are wasting your time.’

‘You may be right,’ answered Hunyadi, ‘but I must speak with everyone who has access to classified information in the bunker. And that would include you, Gruppenführer, since you attend the Führer’s briefings every day.’

‘That’s my job,’ he replied.

‘Nevertheless,’ said Hunyadi, ‘we must satisfy the Führer’s curiosity.’

Fegelein slumped down into the chair on the other side of the table. He breathed in deeply and then sighed. ‘So ask away.’

‘I only have one question,’ said Hunyadi.

Fegelein blinked in confusion. ‘That’s all?’

‘If there was a leak,’ asked Hunyadi, ‘then where, in your opinion, would it come from?’

Fegelein thought for a moment before he replied. ‘Somewhere down the line,’ he said.

‘Down the line?’

‘Someone who has learned to slip between the cracks,’ explained Fegelein. ‘A person you see all the time but never notice. But you are wasting your time looking at me, and others like me. My kind of people do not risk our lives on spreading gossip. We have far too much to lose for that.’

‘Thank you,’ said Hunyadi. ‘You may go.’

Fegelein stood up and turned to leave. But then he turned back. ‘Why only one question?’

Hunyadi smiled, almost sympathetically. ‘If you were indeed the source of the leak, would you have admitted that to me?’

Fegelein snorted. ‘Of course not!’

‘Precisely,’ said Fegelein.

‘So why bring us in here at all?’

‘Firstly, because that is what Hitler wants. And secondly, so that there can be no doubt, in the mind of whomever is divulging this information, that they are being hunted now.’

Fegelein nodded, impressed. ‘A tactic which might lose you some friends before this investigation is over.’

‘There are no friends,’ said Hunyadi, ‘only the enemies I have already and those who do not know enough to hate me yet. In my line of work, that is an occupational hazard.’

‘If only there were someone you could turn to for help.’

Hunyadi stared at him. ‘Meaning what?’

‘Such a person might be very valuable.’ Fegelein held out his arms and let them fall back to his sides. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘If you are implying that I can request assistance from the SS, I am already aware of that.’

‘The SS is a large organisation which does not take kindly to strangers snooping about in their business,’ Fegelein told him flatly. ‘What you need is someone who can get the job done while still maintaining absolute discretion.’

Hunyadi narrowed his eyes with suspicion. ‘And this person might be you? Is that what you’re suggesting?’

‘It might be.’

Now I know why they hate you so much, thought Hunyadi. ‘And why’, he asked, ‘would someone like you make me an offer like that?’

‘Because I know who you work for, and I have lately found myself on the wrong end of his sympathies. Any gesture I can make to remedy that situation is worth doing. So you see, if I help you, then I am also helping him. All I ask in return is that, when the time comes, you remember who your friends are.’

‘I’ll keep it in mind,’ Hunyadi answered cautiously.

Fegelein handed him a business card. On one side, in embossed letters, were his initials, HF, and on the other side was a Berlin telephone number. ‘This is how to reach me, day or night,’ said Fegelein.

After the man had departed, Hunyadi turned his thoughts to the things he had learned that day. The most useful information had come, not from what his visitors had said, but from what they did not say. Tomorrow, he would go to the bunker, and report his findings in person to Hitler. The news was unlikely to go down well, and Hunyadi wondered if the messenger would be the first to fall.

That evening, after a meal of quail braised in a mushroom and cognac sauce, delivered from the kitchens of Harting’s restaurant on Mühlenstrasse to the apartment of his mistress, Fegelein sat in a high-backed chair made of crushed yellow velvet, smoking a cigar. Lazily, he held the phone receiver to his ear while his master, Heinrich Himmler, grilled him about the meeting with Hunyadi.

‘What did he want?’ demanded Himmler. ‘What is he looking into?’

‘A leak,’ replied Fegelein. ‘A flow of information from the bunker which has been finding its way into the hands of the Allies. Apparently, you can hear it almost every day on that pirate radio station of theirs.’

‘Is there any truth to it?’

‘No idea,’ sighed Fegelein, ‘but even if there is, it’s nothing serious.’

‘Nothing serious!’ scoffed Himmler. ‘How the hell can you say that?’

‘Because the information is useless,’ explained Fegelein. ‘It’s just gossip. There’s nothing to indicate that military secrets are being passed on to the enemy, at least from the bunker.’

‘Then why did he have to bring in a detective?’

‘Not just any detective,’ said Fegelein. ‘It’s Leopold Hunyadi.’

‘Hunyadi!’ exclaimed Himmler. ‘The last I heard, he was going to be shot, or hanged or something.’

‘He appears to have dodged both the bullet and the noose,’ replied Fegelein. ‘I must say I am not at all surprised. I have looked at Hunyadi’s police record. It is very impressive. He has received all four grades of the Police Meritorious Service medal.’

‘Four?’ asked Himmler. ‘I thought that there were only three – gold, silver and bronze.’

‘They gave Hunyadi one with diamonds, created just for him. Hitler personally stuck the badge on him, back in 1939. Do you know he also speaks four languages, including Russian, Spanish and Hungarian?’

‘Yes, yes, Fegelein,’ Himmler replied angrily. ‘Anyone would think you were starting up a fan club for Hunyadi! And none of this explains why Hitler did not give the case to our own man, Rattenhuber. He’s in charge of security in the bunker and he’s the one who should be investigating this.’

‘And he would be,’ answered Fegelein, ‘if Hitler trusted anyone at all down there in that concrete labyrinth.’

‘Do you mean he suspects us? The SS?’

‘I mean he suspects everyone, Herr Reichsführer.’

There was a long pause, during which time Fegelein studied the whitening ash of his cigar as it slowly extinguished itself. Knowing Himmler’s distaste for tobacco, he did not dare to take a puff even when talking to the man on the phone, for fear that Himmler might hear the popping of his lips as he drew smoke.

‘We need to keep our eye on this,’ Himmler said at last. ‘If it does turn out that one of our own people is involved, it will destroy whatever faith Hitler has left in us.’

‘I have taken steps to see that does not happen.’

‘What steps, Fegelein? What have you been up to?’

‘Just extending the hand of friendship to a colleague,’ replied Fegelein. ‘I told Hunyadi to come to me if he ever needed help.’

‘And why would he go to you instead of anybody else?’

‘Because I let him know that I can be discreet, and I predict that he will soon accept my offer.’

‘As soon as he does that,’ said Himmler, laughing softly, ‘he will belong to us. But what makes you so sure he will call upon you?’

‘Everyone needs someone like me at one time or another,’ answered Fegelein, ‘and I sense that Hunyadi’s time is coming.’

‘Let us hope so,’ said Himmler. As usual, he hung up without saying goodbye.

For a moment, Fegelein listened to the rustles of static on the disconnected line. Then he put the phone down and set about puffing his cigar back to life.