Read Flight from Berlin Online
Authors: David John
‘Where were you?’ Eleanor’s voice was thick with sleep.
‘Just talking to a neighbour.’ He sat on the bed, facing the picture. She brushed the hair from her eyes and stretched lazily, reaching her arm towards him.
‘Did he help build that Zeppelin, your dad?’
‘Yes . . . he died on it, too.’
‘Oh gee, I’m sorry,’ she said, sitting up.
‘Took off for India in bad weather. Crashed over northern France and burned. On its maiden flight.’
D
enham sent Tom out for some pastries, and told him there was a shilling for him if he could get hold of any more of the weekend’s newspapers from Mr Blount’s shop or the neighbours. In the meantime Eleanor got the mains water running.
The boy excelled himself, returning in fifteen minutes, beaming, with the
Manchester Evening Guardian
, the
Times,
and the
Daily Express.
This last one carried a long feature on Hannah by Pat Murphy, using the news agency snap of her standing, tight-lipped, on the podium. There was plenty of backstory, but news of what happened was thin, posing the question ‘could she have been coerced?’ rather than taking the words of her dynamite broadcast at face value. It cited a German press report that she had suffered a breakdown and mixed in some conjecture that this may have stemmed from the strain she felt over German policy on ‘the Jewish question.’
Oh, Pat,
Denham thought, guessing that his friend had been leaned on by Lord Beaverbrook. Go and work for someone else.
Laughter came from the kitchen, where Tom was giving Eleanor his tips for winning at conkers.
The
Times
scored far higher, with an article on page two by Rex getting most of the truth across. Must have cost him a fight with his editor. The bare facts were so startling that the lead column felt obliged to comment, albeit in an exculpatory tone: ‘Hannah Liebermann, an Olympian not noted for outbursts of an emotional kind, has revealed the brutality and coercion surrounding her decision to participate; further evidence, if any were needed, that the German government is prepared to back policy with force, and that its grievances resulting from the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno must be taken seriously . . .’ He would cable Rex later to thank him.
He put the papers down and stared at the frayed pattern of the sitting room rug, his mind working. He hadn’t a day to lose. If somehow he was going to get the Liebermanns out of Germany, he must publish his interview with Hannah
now
while everyone was talking about her. It would be his biggest and best shot.
W
hen Tom had eaten his breakfast Denham took him on the bus up the hill to Hampstead and delivered him to the gate. Anna rushed from the front door in a sort of crouching run, her arms wide, crying at the sight of Tom’s face, hugging him on the garden path. She didn’t invite Denham in.
It started to rain as he hobbled back towards Rosslyn Hill, wishing he were recovered enough to make the walk down.
He’d almost reached the bus stop when a wave of dizziness hit him.
His left shoulder was seized with a bolt of pain that almost made him faint. By the time he was seated on the bus and heading towards Fleet Street, the pain was so intense, his head spinning so violently, that the lower deck rolled like a raft on the high seas.
H
arry Garobedian sat behind the desk in his dingy office suite above the Olde Cock Tavern on Fleet Street. His hard brown eyes were wide now with understandable astonishment.
‘My God, Ricky boy. This . . . this has got everything.’
‘You wanted a human interest story . . . and I want to give the Germans a bad press week. So this one works for both of us.’ The attack of dizziness had subsided, leaving him with a dull headache.
Harry picked the telephone receiver off its cradle and replaced it immediately, breathing deeply through his nose, as though smelling his mother’s lamb keshkeg simmering in the pan. ‘I got to hand it to you. “Hannah Liebermann—
My Story
” . . . When do I get the copy?’
‘Tomorrow.’
He opened a drawer and rolled a cigar across the desk to Denham.
Denham said, ‘I need this piece to go huge, Harry. To turn the heat up so high they
have
to release her. Her family, too.’
Harry lit his cigar from an enormous brass table lighter and leaned back in his chair, observing Denham through the fug. A rumble of barrels rose from the tavern cellar.
‘What’s happened to you?’ he asked.
Denham lit his cigar and drew on it, but did not speak.
Harry continued to watch him, then leaned forwards to tip his ash.
‘Okay, listen, I want a follow-up, too.’ He placed his fingers in the air, as if seeing Denham’s name in lights. ‘ “My Gestapo Nightmare,” by Richard Denham.’
Denham smiled. Harry had the eyebrows of a vaudeville villain. The agent lifted a cash box onto the desk, unclipped four white £5 notes, and handed Denham an advance.
‘Tomorrow then,’ Denham said.
E
leanor had found some engineer’s overalls and had tied a tea towel as a scarf around her head. She had cleaned out the iron boiler, reconnected the flue with a spanner, and got the thing burning with coal she’d found in the basement, finding the whole task oddly satisfying. All morning it had helped clear her mind and set her thoughts on her future. On Richard . . . on Herb. ‘No electricity, no gas,’ she said, kissing him, ‘but there’s hot water. I’ll just serve notice on the spiders and the place will be almost habitable . . .’
He slid his hands around her lower back and pulled her towards him.
That afternoon Denham cleaned the grime off his father’s Edwardian typewriter and got down to work. The strange pain in his left shoulder was now constant, and his ribs seemed to be rubbing against needles, but he ignored it, tapping away quickly at a little escritoire in the drawing room, listening to the children playing in the street. Children without brown shirts or daggers.
By seven o’clock the rain had passed over and a sunset beckoned, sending its crimson light into the house. Eleanor was writing letters at the kitchen table. He noticed that one, already sealed, was addressed to her husband. He had a fair idea of what it said.
‘Get your hat,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you the Hill.’
Clouds parted, filling the sky with drama. A flock of sheep scattered before them as they climbed Primrose Hill, deserted apart from a few boys flying kites in the gathering breeze. At the top of the path Denham turned her round towards the city below.
‘Oh my,’ she murmured, clutching his hand.
Beyond the trees of Regent’s Park, dark with rainwater, London shone from myriad chimney pots to the cross on the dome of Saint Paul’s, ablaze with a reddish gold.
Denham pointed out the Palace of Westminster, black with soot; the distant downs of Kent, where he’d grown up; the spires of the City churches.
They stood a long while without speaking. Eventually Denham said, ‘When I was locked in that place I thought I’d never see clouds or sky again.’
‘I love you,’ she said, turning to him. ‘I want to stay here with you and Tom.’
‘Marry me, then?’
T
hey had celebrated quietly that evening, and the next morning Denham delivered the Liebermann piece to Harry, who had been on the telephone for much of the night, syndicating it to newspaper groups across the United States. By the time Denham got back home, though, the dizziness and the pain in his shoulder had reached an intensity he could no longer ignore.
‘Well, isn’t that the damnedest thing?’ he said, after kissing his fiancée in the hall.
‘What?’
‘You’ve gone all blurred, old girl.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You know, like the way they film Greta Garbo in close-ups . . .’
H
e thought he heard the horn of a river barge. Now and then he would open his eyes and see faces. He knew when it was Eleanor’s face, and Tom’s face, but others he didn’t know at all. Often there came a face with an efficient smile; her breasts rested on him when she leaned over to adjust his sheets, and a man with a copper-wire beard who put his face very close and shone a light right into his eyes. He had no sense of time. He felt the tube in his arm being checked and a dressing being changed on his upper left side. His one constant sense was of Eleanor always nearby. Sometimes he could sense her crouched next to him, her head almost on his pillow, and this made him feel calm, safe. He slept most of the time.
A morning came when he could see clearly again, when his eyes remained open, and the sister fetched the man with the copper-wire beard. The blanket was folded down over his chest. He couldn’t touch his upper left side. The burning itch of a major incision. A brown rubber tube led from his bandaged arm to a saline drip. To his left, a window gave a view across the river, framing the length of Westminster, all its pinnacles and parapets like an eroding black cliff on the opposite bank. The sky wore a heavy haze.
‘You’re very fortunate to be alive, sir,’ the man with the beard said, observing him over a pair of half-moon glasses. He had a genteel Scottish brogue.
‘How long have I been here?’
‘Four days. Your spleen was damaged, but the main rupture was delayed. You had heavy internal bleeding when they rushed you in. I performed an emergency procedure to stanch the flow.’
Denham closed his eyes and nodded, fighting a feeling of nausea.
The pain in his shoulder, the dizziness, and the blurred vision were symptoms, the man explained, of the spleen being starved of oxygen.
‘That’s quite a beating you got. I take it you reported the incident to the police?’
Denham gave a faint smile. To think he was in a country now where the police were on your side and the criminals didn’t wear uniforms. If the rupture had begun in Berlin, he realised, he would have bled to death at Rausch’s feet. He started to thank the surgeon but was overwhelmed by a series of hacking, dry retches.
He dozed again and was roused only by an altercation near the door of his room. The sister’s voice was saying, ‘Certainly you may
not.’
A slight scuffling sound, and there was Rex, holding a bunch of carnations and a paper bag bulging with grapes, with some bare stems at the top.
Denham wanted to laugh. ‘Flowers? I’m not dead, man.’
‘Brought you a bottle of Bass, too, but that harridan just took it off me.’
He leaned over and offered Denham a skinny hand. ‘How are you feeling, old chap? You look all in.’
‘Don’t make any jokes, Rex. I may actually split my side.’
Rex’s face became earnest. ‘Dashed over like billy-o when I heard. Came yesterday as a matter of fact, but you were in no state. It was David Wyn Evans who informed me.’
‘You know him?’
Rex busied himself for a moment putting the carnations in a vase. ‘It’s, ah, confession time.’ He sat down slowly and lifted the creases of his trousers off his knees. ‘Evans reports to me. I’m his officer.’
T
he net curtain billowed in a white arc. Outside, the heavy haze was giving way before a wind that whipped the dark surface of the river, sending a draught of cool air into the room. The sun dimmed, filtered through an ominous sky of sulphur and charcoal. Rex got up and closed the window.
‘All those beers and you never once mentioned it,’ Denham said. ‘Although I admit I had an inkling.’
Rex gave an embarrassed smile. ‘Well, I’m relieved. Couldn’t say
anything
until I knew you were on board. That said, we would never have made an approach if we’d known they were already shadowing you . . .’
The first drops came down, followed quickly by a deluge, which pimpled the river in a great hiss, dissolving the Palace of Westminster in a wash of grey. For a few moments they stared out the window.
Denham said, ‘All this’—his hand gestured to his broken body—‘over some missing dossier?’
Rex grimaced.
‘Hitler must be stopped, old boy—and soon. Diplomacy will achieve nothing. And the few of us who
realise
that have been looking for other means . . .’ Rex pinched the inner corners of his eyes. ‘He’s a madman, nothing but, yet the diplomats come away saying his demands deserve consideration. The PM is wavering, and you know how many here are sympathetic. The Mayfair set—all bloody admirers—with voices in the cabinet. The Cliveden lot, who’ve been whispering against Phipps.’ He let out a long sigh. ‘This Anglo-German treaty Hitler is after—it must not happen. If it does, we’ll have paid with our souls for a shaky peace, weakened our allies, and made him unassailable into the bargain . . .’ He folded his thin arms and stared into the rain.
Denham couldn’t help but smile. ‘I’m not surprised the
Times
won’t print half your pieces.’
‘Think she’ll let me smoke?’ Rex said, pointing towards the door with his thumb.
‘I doubt it, but don’t mind me.’
Rex took out his tobacco pouch and poked a clump of brown shred into his pipe. ‘The Rhineland, six months ago. Our best chance to unite and stop him—
missed.
He took a gamble, but his instinct was dead right . . .’ He shook his head. ‘The man has an unholy sense for others’ weaknesses, their cowardice. He won’t stop now. Unless we make a bold move of our own, and I mean a
bloody
bold move, we’re looking at a German hegemony in Europe within a few short years . . .’
‘That bad?’
Rex slouched back in his chair, surrounded by curls of wood-smelling smoke. Water poured down the windows, filling the room with a veiled light.
Denham’s eyes began to droop.
‘Rex, that dossier . . .’
‘Yes, old boy . . .’
‘Why me . . . ?’
The sound of Tom laughing approached from outside in the corridor. Rex stood up.
‘Almost forgot,’ he said, speaking around the stem of his pipe. ‘Hannah Liebermann is being kept at a sanatorium in Frankfurt called Klinik Pfanmüller. She’s allowed no visitors, so we may make of that what we will. Her parents are at home under house arrest. I’m sorry, that’s all we could discover . . . That was a splendid piece you wrote, by the way. Powerful stuff. But I fear not powerful enough to dent the steely heart of that regime . . .’