The City of Shadows (32 page)

It was Stefan's turn not to respond. He didn't need to.

‘I told her what I could,' said the priest quietly, looking out to sea.

Even in those uncertain, fearful words Stefan knew that whatever Francis Byrne had told Hannah Rosen, it was not the truth, certainly not all of it, but none of that mattered.

‘Do you know where Hannah is, Father?'

The priest was too preoccupied with himself to hear the question.

‘I wanted to tell her everything. I tried to. I can't lie any more!'

He stopped and turned to face Stefan. There was a plea for help in his eyes, and they were growing wet with tears. Getting someone to confess was usually the hard part for Stefan, yet it looked like getting Byrne to stop was going to be the problem now. It was what had happened yesterday and the day before that Stefan needed to know about, not the past; but Hannah had broken the lock on the cupboard where Francis Byrne kept his secrets and Stefan's arrival had just kicked the door open. However hard he tried to bring the priest back to Hannah and Danzig, it was the past that was pouring out now.

It was fast and confused. He told Stefan he hadn't gone to Merrion Square with Susan that day. It was only when something went wrong that Keller had phoned him and told him he had to come. It was serious. She was bleeding badly; she was barely conscious. She was asking for him. Someone had to take her to hospital. There was a car. The driver said he was a guard. They only had to drive across the square to Holles Street but the guard drove to the Convent of the Good Shepherd instead. The Mother Superior took one look at Susan and said she couldn't help. They needed to get her to a proper hospital. The Coombe was nearest, but on the way the guard stopped the car. Susan wasn't moving. It was too late. She was dead. The guard told him to go home. No one could help her. The only thing he could do was pray for her. And he had done what the guard said. He left her there. As Father Byrne closed his eyes, his lips moved silently. He was praying, for himself. Stefan didn't need divine guidance to know who the unknown guard was: Jimmy Lynch.

As Father Byrne spoke, staring out at the Baltic Sea, Stefan simply listened. He knew he wouldn't get any more out of him till this was over. The priest hadn't looked at Stefan as he told the story; only once, at the end, did he turn and hold the detective's gaze, shaking his head, somehow still in disbelief. Then he turned back to stare silently at the grey sea. Stefan had the feeling he was wondering if he couldn't find an answer and an end to it all out there. He doubted Byrne had the guts for that, but he didn't much care if he had or not. There was more self-pity in Francis Byrne than Stefan had the stomach for. He had been on Kilmashogue when the earth spewed up Susan Field's body. That was something to feel pity for. All this was a waste of time. He grabbed the priest's arm and pulled him back round again, hard.

‘Where did Hannah go?' Stefan demanded.

Byrne looked at him blankly.

‘When she left you, where did she go?'

‘I … I don't know.'

‘The police were looking for her. Why?'

‘I don't know anything about the police. Why would I?'

There was a brief hesitation. It didn't sit with all that gushing truth.

‘Who did you speak to?'

‘She came here, and we talked, and she went away. That's all.'

‘What were you saying to Hugo Keller this morning?'

‘Nothing. Nothing that concerns Hannah or you.'

The defences were going up again, but Stefan already knew that when Hannah left him the priest had contacted Keller. It wouldn't have been difficult to find where she was staying, and the first thing the police would have discovered was that the name Hugo Keller had given them wasn't the one on the Danziger Hof register, or on her passport. She was supposed to be Mrs Anna Harvey, not Hannah Rosen.

‘You're still lying, Father. You told him she was in Danzig.'

‘All right. I panicked. I didn't know what else to do.'

‘What did he say?'

‘He said not to worry. It didn't matter. He said he'd sort it out.'

‘With a little bit of help from the Gestapo.'

‘No, of course not. He said she wasn't important.'

‘But you're important, aren't you? Important to Keller. I don't know why exactly, but I do know what his speciality is. He's blackmailing you.'

Byrne didn't answer, but the answer was in his eyes.

‘It wouldn't be so hard would it, not with your track record? An affair, an abortion, a dead woman. It's not going to get you a job in the Curia.'

There was grim silence now. Perhaps the hold Hugo Keller had over the priest was stronger than the fear inside, stronger than guilt, stronger than what, once, he felt for Susan Field. But Stefan had to push. He had to know what he was dealing with.

‘Would you know what a captive bolt pistol is, Father?'

It felt like the words barely registered; they meant nothing.

‘They use it to stun animals, before they slaughter them.'

The priest looked puzzled. Stefan watched his face.

‘Susan Field took a bolt in the head from one before she was buried.'

If anything Byrne had said was real, so was his disbelief.

‘But she was dead! The guard said she was dead!'

‘I'd say the guard who drove the car from Merrion Square that night was a man called Jimmy Lynch, Father. He's a guard all right, a detective sergeant. He was taking backhanders from your friend Keller. But I don't think he'd have killed Susan Field without Hugo's say so. That's the man you handed Hannah Rosen to, to sort things out. Now no one's seen her since.'

*

A day earlier, around the time Stefan Gillespie was boarding the midday Deutsche Luft Hansa flight from Croydon to Berlin, Hannah Rosen was standing in the library of a big apartment in the Danzig suburb of Langfuhr. Through the window most of the view was taken up by a large building of red brick and stone with a highly decorated, crenellated frontage that echoed the Hanseatic houses of the old town. It was the city's university, the Technische Hochschule. Behind it were the wooded hills she had seen from the tram on her way to Oliva. Half an hour earlier the men who had pulled her into a car in front of the Danziger Hof had unlocked the door of the small bedroom that had been her cell. They led her through the apartment to a library. It was empty. They left her there with a cup of coffee and a roll.

That morning she had heard the sound of shouting and cheering outside, even in the locked room. Now she watched through the library window. The ever-present swastikas hung along the front of the university building; hundreds of students stood in front of it with flags and banners. Somewhere a man was speaking, but she could make out none of the words, only the ebb and flow of roaring and chanting from the crowd. She felt their wild enthusiasm. They were laughing and applauding. Without the flags, and with the words unheard, they seemed almost like people she knew. They looked like people she knew. She turned round, startled, as the door opened.

A man entered. He wasn't one of the people who had snatched her off the street. They were around her own age, not much older than the students outside. This man was in his sixties. He looked at her hard. His face was stern, but there was nothing about him that felt threatening to her.

‘Why am I here?'

She spoke in German. He replied in English.

‘Just be glad you are. There are worse places to be.'

‘What do you want?'

‘They were waiting for you, at the hotel.'

‘Who was?'

‘The Gestapo, Fräulein Rosen, Frau Harvey. I don't suppose you knew we had the luxury of our own Gestapo here in the Free City, did you?'

She said nothing. He was right. There was a lot she hadn't known.

‘My information is that when your room was searched, they found two passports. One Irish, in the name you registered in at the hotel. The police believe that's false. The other issued by the British Mandate in Palestine.'

‘I could be of no interest to the Gestapo,' she said defensively.

‘Nevertheless, they are interested. That's all that matters.'

A great roar erupted again beyond the window. The old man walked past her. He stood looking out at the rally. It was coming to an end now.

‘When I was a student, we protested about the books they wouldn't let us read. That was our passion, freedom. Now my students pull books out of the university library to burn. That's their passion, hatred.' He turned back into the room. The noise outside had suddenly stilled. The rally was over.

‘You will stay here today, Fräulein. Tomorrow Leon and Johannes will go up into the hills with you. The borders are policed very aggressively at the moment, but they'll take you across into Poland through the forests. Leon will get you to the train that runs from Gdynia to Bromberg, that's Bydgoszcz now, in Poland. You can get to Warsaw from there without re-entering Danzig. You have a ticket to Trieste, via Warsaw and Vienna. You'll have a week or so in Trieste before your boat leaves for Palestine. It's pleasant at this time of year. A lot pleasanter than our Free City anyway.'

‘You're very well-informed.'

‘And you're very lucky. You were very stupid to come here.'

‘I had a reason to come.' The words didn't convince her the way they would have done two days earlier. They didn't convince the old man either.

‘There are a few decent men left inside the Schutzpolizei. When they can, they pass on information, especially about people the Nazis want to pick up. Perhaps you can imagine the risk someone would take doing that.'

Hannah nodded. She knew people had taken risks for her.

‘We heard about you by chance. The Gestapo put a call out for you. Some kind of passport irregularity. No one knew who you were, but the information came to a friend of mine. And as this irregularity involved a passport issued in Palestine he contacted me. I didn't know who you were either, but it felt like you and the Gestapo might not get on very well.'

‘They had no reason to know who I was.'

‘Well, somebody knew you were Fräulein Rosen, not Frau Harvey. Somebody knew something. Who have you been speaking to in Danzig?'

‘The only person I've talked to is a priest, an Irish priest in Oliva.'

‘You came here to see a priest?'

‘Yes.'

‘Why?'

‘Because nobody else would do it.'

‘It must have been very important in that case.'

‘My best friend was killed. He was one of the last people to see her alive. I think that's important. But I'm about the only person who does.'

‘That all sounds very worthy. And you think you've got the right to put other people's lives at risk because of your very important personal life, do you? All sorts of people, all over the place, now here in Danzig as well.'

‘This has got nothing to do with anybody else.'

‘You don't think so?' He shook his head. ‘I had to find out who you were. I did, this morning. A Jew with a British Mandate passport and a ticket from Trieste to Haifa? I telephoned the Jewish Agency in Trieste. Not an easy conversation, given the Danzig exchange's propensity for listening in to overseas calls, but with a lot of guesswork and a little Hebrew to hide what I was saying, I got there. You're working for the Haganah. Whatever you've been doing in Europe, I don't doubt you've met dozens of people. All names the Nazis would like to have. Don't think they wouldn't ship you off to Berlin if they believed you had anything useful to tell them. Nobody in the world would even realise, because nobody knows you're here, isn't that right? Your friends in Trieste are pretty pissed off with you, Hannah.'

‘I'm sorry. I wasn't even going to be here two days.'

‘I don't know what you did to draw attention to yourself, but the sooner you're out of Danzig the better, for your sake and everyone else's. I'm not a Zionist myself. Fighting fascism here in Europe is more important than making the desert bloom. It's a disease. You can't run away from it.'

‘It's not about running away.'

‘No, probably not. I used to believe that. There are a lot of things I'm not sure about any more. I'm an old man who didn't expect to spend his old age gazing into the darkness I thought we'd left behind a long time ago.' He looked at her and smiled more warmly; his irritation had gone. ‘I'm sorry about your friend. But that's the way the world is now. I've got friends who didn't die a natural death too. Before long we'll all have friends like that.'

‘Doesn't that matter?'

‘Of course it matters, but the personal life doesn't. Not now. No one has a personal life any more. That's gone. All we have is our survival.' He touched her arm. ‘Good luck, Hannah,' he said softly; then he walked out.

She stood in the room, alone again. She felt all the more alone because of those last, bleak words. She walked slowly back to the window. The students had gone. The swastikas still flew on the front of the Technische Hochschule. Behind it the dark hills rose up. That was where she had to go tomorrow. The man was right. She shouldn't have come to Danzig. But though she understood what he said, she refused to believe it – it was the personal that mattered most of all now, now more than anything else.

*

Stefan sat in the bar at the Danziger Hof with a beer that he thought might help. It didn't. He knew he'd got most of the truth out of Francis Byrne, except for one thing. Whatever was going on between the priest and Hugo Keller wasn't about Hannah Rosen, or Susan Field, even if Susan Field's death was what gave the abortionist the leverage to blackmail him. Father Byrne mattered, that was very clear; he mattered a lot. He was an important asset, and whatever he was doing for Keller, Hannah had been a threat. If she had been arrested it was because the abortionist was protecting his asset. Stefan sensed that he stood on the edge of something darker than he understood. He had seen the fear in Francis Byrne's eyes. But he didn't really care what it was about; the two men deserved each other. All he cared about was that he wasn't finding Hannah. Hugo Keller had to be his next stop.