Read Flight from Berlin Online
Authors: David John
I know he is speaking of the war. Standing in the light he begins to tremble all over, as if from extreme cold, and his breath comes in short gasps; then he covers his face with his hands and lets out a low cry, as though he is being reborn into the world.
Too surprised to speak, I wait until he is more composed.
Go back to the ward, I say.
Without thanking me, or uttering another word, he pulls open the door and leaves.
In those few moments I was more frightened of him than of my own father.
I
t all began when I met Captain Kurt Rogel,’ Friedl said.
He was on the sofa in the sitting room, across from a fire Denham had made from the last of the winter’s wood. After getting over the shock of finding Friedl and Nat at his door, after a dinner over which the young men had recounted the tale of their escape—on a Danish herring trawler from Warnemünde on the Baltic coast—Denham stood at the mantelpiece listening, with Eleanor next to him in the armchair. Nat had gone to bed.
‘He picked me on the Ku’damm, must have been June ’32. Invited me to Horchers, the best restaurant in Berlin. Got to know me over a bottle of Pfälzer. Military bearing, Prussian blue eyes,
French manners
. Forty-five years old and with a permanently amused expression. From an old family in Pomerania. Soon I was more or less living at his house in Zehlendorf. Much later, he told me about the network . . .’
Friedl turned his glass of whisky, watching the fire’s light through the crystal.
‘Kurt was a career army officer. Had been since the war. He’d paid little regard to Hitler throughout the ’20s. I mean, there was something just
absurd
about him, so
odd
after all, and his support came and went. But by the winter of 1930 the Depression was biting deep, and Kurt and his colleagues, officer friends, became seriously alarmed by the little corporal. Every time this man spoke the crowd was tens of thousands larger.
‘Who was he? The question no one seemed able to answer. Which is why Kurt and the officers began looking into the man’s past. The records of his war service, the missing years in Vienna, all that. Of course, they suspected
something
, and I can’t say I was surprised. Ask a warm boy in Berlin back then and chances were he’d say the Bohemian Herr Hitler wasn’t as cold as you’d think. The investigations turned up what you’ve now seen, and that’s only what they could find. More went missing or was destroyed. They tracked down Engelhardt of the List Regiment, found some of the Munich boys who gave those police statements . . .’
‘And Hans Mend?’ Denham said.
‘Him, too, the
Arschloch
. The idea was to show the dossier to President Hindenburg and so keep Hitler firmly out of power. But then in January ’33 a deal was done behind closed doors, and this great deceiver was handed the chancellorship of Germany before Kurt and his friends could act. That dossier suddenly became a very dangerous thing to possess. Kurt needed someone with contacts abroad whose sympathy was beyond any doubt.’
‘Jakob,’ said Eleanor
Friedl nodded. ‘Jakob Liebermann was invited to join what was becoming a small, highly placed resistance group. He used his banking network to spirit the dossier to safety.’
Friedl took a cigarette from a silver case that sparked in the light. Denham had seen it before. Those engraved initials
KR
, which had made him so suspicious when they’d first met at the Hotel Kurgarten.
‘But by the end of ’33 the group was biding its time. The dossier was left in its hiding place because they were convinced Hitler would soon overreach himself, take a step too far, at which point the army’s support for him would crumble. Or that was the hope.
‘But instead the monster’s power increased tenfold. It was as if the country was under a spell, as if it still is . . . We decided to use the dossier. The question was how.
‘The idea of us blackmailing the Führer was crazy—we’d have been murdered in our beds before we knew what had hit us, along with anyone who’d ever met us. But a foreign government could do it, blackmail him. The British, for example . . .’
Friedl dropped his head back on the sofa.
‘For my safety I was not told everything. I was to meet a British reporter who would identify himself with an agreed password at the first meeting. The date for the meeting was the first of August, the day the Games opened in Berlin. With so many foreigners there it would seem less suspicious.
‘A week before the meeting, while I was in Friedrichshafen, something went badly wrong.’ Friedl sighed, looking tired, and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘One of the officers in the network was betrayed and arrested. Under interrogation he revealed the names of two or three others—and the dossier’s existence. On that day I believe Hitler himself learned of the dossier for the first time. Kurt got an urgent message to me . . .’
Friedl stopped. Fighting down the lump in his throat had the effect of making his eyes fill up.
‘ . . . warning me not to go to the house. Then they got him, too. What happened to him after that, I never found out.’
The cat leapt in a silent arc onto the sofa, looking for company. Friedl lifted it onto his lap, and ran his fingers through the tabby fur for a while. The purring seemed to calm him down.
‘Who knew the dossier was hidden in London?’ Richard said.
‘Only Kurt, Jakob, and me. No one else.’
‘Go on.’
‘You could imagine—how I felt. Not knowing how much the SD had discovered through interrogation. The timing was the worst thing. Because in a matter of days I was due to meet the British reporter beneath the bell tower at the Olympic stadium. That was on the day you and I flew to Berlin on the
Hindenburg
. My task was to tell him where he would collect the key and to give him instructions for accessing the London bank.
‘But by then I feared a trap. What if it wasn’t a British reporter meeting me . . . but an agent of the SD.
‘I didn’t know what to do. Then I saw you in the bar of the Kurgarten. A British reporter by himself? I couldn’t believe it. I hoped, oh I hoped that you were the one I was meant to be meeting in the stadium—because I had this sense that I could trust you. And after we spoke for so long on the airship that sense was even stronger. Of course, you weren’t him; you didn’t know the password, but I had to do something. So I acted on instinct . . .’
‘You gave me the Hannah story, knowing it would lead me to Jakob . . .’
‘Yes.’ Friedl seemed to shrink into his clothes. ‘And if Jakob trusted you, too . . .’
‘He would give me the key.’ Denham smiled thoughtfully at the fire.
‘If your damned group had given the key to the British embassy instead,’ Eleanor muttered, ‘you might have saved us all a lot of trouble.’
‘Kurt must have had his reasons,’ Friedl said, looking at the floor. After a long pause he said, ‘Richard, I am so sorry. For putting you in danger. Their investigation of Kurt led them to me. The moment I got back to Berlin I think they had shadows all over me, waiting to see where I led them. It was only a matter of time before they found out I had indeed met a British reporter—and it was you. I should have warned you at the Nollendorfplatz . . .’
Denham heard the soft, whirring chime of the grandfather clock in the drawing room. It now had for him the association of history turning, reconfiguring.
‘Well. It’s over now,’ Denham said. ‘Tonight I’ll finish that translation. And tomorrow we’ll hand the dossier to the SIS.’
‘Yes, thank God it’s over,’ Friedl said and knocked back his whisky. ‘Now please forgive me, but I’m exhausted.’ He got up, said good night, and went upstairs.
A log cracked and shifted in the grate. Eleanor was staring into the fire, the light dancing across her face.
‘Eleanor?’
Still looking into the flames, she said, ‘I’m thinking about Jakob—and Hannah and Ilse. What are we doing . . . just handing this thing to the Brits when we could use it to save our friends’ lives?’
The cat purred on the sofa.
She pulled her gaze away from the fire and faced Denham. ‘Who knows what the Brits will do with it? It could rot in another old safe for years while they decide—or worse, end up in the hands of one of those pro-German suckers. I say we go to the German embassy and make an offer they won’t refuse. The dossier in exchange for Jakob, Ilse, and Hannah.’
‘Eleanor,’ Denham said, ‘this is about more than three people.’
‘Do you really believe we can do this, Richard, that we can play power politics to control a head of state? Look, we’ve got our hands on something that could actually save the lives of three people we know. Are we going to throw that away on the off-chance of something greater?’
She plucked a cigarette from the packet on the coffee table and broke the match as she struck it.
‘Jakob Liebermann gave us that key, and it’s his family that’s suffering now.’
After the second attempt she lit her cigarette and blew a jet of smoke at the ceiling. The firelight made a golden crown of her hair, in which Denham’s gaze was lost.
‘Think it over,’ she said, getting up. ‘But if we can’t use this to rescue our friends, there must be something wrong with us.’
13 NOVEMBER ’18
What rest I have is disturbed by a nightmare as lurid as any of Singer’s. I am awake before dawn, and it is icy cold in my room; I warm my hands under the electric lamp and try to recall the dream.
I am surrounded by men’s faces in a muddy trench, wanting to assure them that their emotions are no cause for shame; that they can shed tears and still be men—the things I tell hardened troops on the wards, to their surprise. Then I realise they are all dead, and in different stages of decomposition. The trench walls are made of corpses, heaps of them. I look over the top and see a soldier coming. I can’t make him out at first because he is veiled in a green mist—mustard gas. He scrambles down over the bodies towards me, pointing his rifle with bayonet fixed. He speaks to me. His words are ‘Voca me cum benedictus.’ I pick up a bayonet from the hands of a corpse, lunge forwards, and plunge it into the soldier’s eye with all my strength. With that, I wake.
To analyse it: the first part is simple. Its source is the conflict in my own role: between my duty to heal the men and send them back to the Front, in most cases to their deaths. For that, duty does not absolve me.
The figure emerging from the mustard gas is more complex, but it was that which brought the feelings of dread and fear, not the corpses. Of course it was Patient H. Those Latin words, from the requiem mass for the dead—
‘
Call me among the blessed
.’
The animus driving H’s cure was his belief that he was chosen in some way, that Providence was calling him to a purpose. And I was the medium of his awakening. But it is more than that.
‘Call me among the blessed . . .’
Whom
have I called?
It occurs to me that of all my cases, Patient H is my only complete success. And I gave him more than sight. For surely, a man who believes that through his
own will
he has cured himself of blindness will believe he can achieve anything on the face of this earth.
And in the dream I had to kill him. Because he is one who should not have survived.
D
avid Wyn Evans watched the track as the next race was prepared, his brow set against some doubtful thought. The conversation was not going the way Denham had planned.
An electric buzz as the hare flashed by, and seven muzzled greyhounds shot after it to roars of encouragement from the crowd.
‘Slippy Boy’s in the lead,’ Tom shouted, turning to look up at them.
Evans leaned in to Denham’s ear. ‘If I’m understanding you right, you’re attaching conditions to handing it over—’
‘Of course I’m not.’ Denham gave an abashed smile. ‘King and country come first. But you can surely give me a guarantee—that you’ll use it to procure the release of the Liebermanns? Once you’ve got it you can start demanding whatever you want from Berlin—’
‘Dad, which dog did you bet on?’
‘Slippy Boy.’
He rested his hands on Tom’s shoulders. Evans was silent again, tall and sombre in black like a lay preacher, oblivious to the cheering tiers of flat-capped men around him.
Eventually he said, ‘It may not be that simple, Mr Denham.’
He continued to watch the track, but his eyes were distant, reflecting some complex tableau of thoughts, and Denham understood. The SIS had politics of its own, and those prepared to play so ruthless and un-British a game as blackmail were probably few. He would have to trust that Evans, Rex, and whoever else was on their side would not be stopped.
The shouting rose as the dogs sped into the second lap.
‘In that case photograph everything in the dossier,’ Denham said. ‘I will use the original to exchange for the Liebermanns.’
The tall man considered this new tack, tapping the tip of his black umbrella on the ground and slowly shook his head. ‘The power of that dossier is its uniqueness and authenticity—and in the fact that we will have the original proof and no one else. Sorry. I can ask, but they’ll say no copies.’
Denham felt his spirits sliding.
There goes plan B.
Evans glanced sideways at Denham. ‘Our colleague, Mr Palmer-Ward, is getting most eager to take possession of it.’
‘Soon,’ Denham said, distracted. He had to think.
There was a great commotion as the hounds tore past in a blur, leaving behind one dog trampled, yelping in the dust, its hind legs broken. A great ‘oh’ from the crowd. Denham put his hands over Tom’s eyes as two men ran onto the track to put Slippy Boy out of his suffering.
T
he meeting around the kitchen table at Chamberlain Street that evening felt like a war cabinet. Denham explained that they were on their own in the matter of the Liebermanns; there would be no help from the British government. Eleanor began to cuss, but Denham cut right to it: the only idea he had left.