The Fortunes (37 page)

So he had gone to see the film the next week, to prove something. He arrived early and slipped into a seat towards the rear, hoping it would be a small crowd, but by the time the main feature began the theater was full. He sat through the first half hour, his shoulders hunched, his arms crossed tightly to avoid any contact with the fellows sitting on either side of him. They were with their girlfriends—it had been a mistake to sit near the back—and when, after about ten minutes, the boy to his left started to kiss his girl, Rotheram didn't know what was making him more uncomfortable, the film or the couple. He was actually grateful when someone behind them harrumphed loudly, “Show some respect.” When twenty minutes later the boy on his right tried something, Rotheram distinctly heard the girl slap the fellow's hand away.

By then, though, he was caught up in the film, its ecstatic pageantry. The fervent masses on the screen seemed to merge with the crowd around him in the theater. It might have been the two couples flanking him, but by the time the film was over he felt violently lonely. He wanted to have even a bit part in this great drama, and for a brief while in the darkened cinema, invisible in his seat, he felt as if he did. But then the lights came up and he hurried out, panicked by the sudden piercing thought that, if he could, he would want nothing more than to join the Nazis. In his haste, he trod on the toes of one of the girls, fleeing before he could apologize, fleeing from her little hiss of anger, her pointing finger. Outside, he must have run half a mile, feeling as if the crowd were at his back, ready to kill him for stepping on some girl's toes.

That was the day he realized he and his mother would have to leave.

IT WAS HER OLD
Canadian connections that made it possible for them to come to England. Rotheram wondered what his father, killed at Verdun, would have made of that. Conceived in 1915 during his father's last leave, Rotheram had never met the man, although he still kept his frayed campaign ribbons pressed in his wallet, as proud of them as he was ashamed of having run from Germany.

He'd shown them, with a kind of shy defiance, to Colonel Hawkins one night in 1941, shortly after he'd been seconded to the Political Intelligence Division as a document translator.

“Ypres?” The old man had whistled in admiration, pointing to one decoration. “Lord, we might have traded potshots. Staunch soldiers, those fellows. Took everything we threw at them.”

Rotheram's mother had been killed in the Blitz months earlier, and it was the first time he'd talked about his father to anyone since.

“Neither fish nor fowl, eh?” Hawkins said when he told him his background, and Rotheram nodded. He still wasn't sure what he could call himself—not German, not Jewish—but serving under the CO, he'd felt for the first time as if he weren't running from something, but being led somewhere.

Back in 1941, the war had seemed as good as lost, the papers filled with defeats, yet Hawkins was winning small victories every few days across the interrogation table. The first story Rotheram heard about him was how he once questioned a suspected spy for thirteen hours straight, cracking him in the end only when he told the man he was free to go—told him in German, that is—and saw the fellow's shoulders sag in relief. Hawkins made winning the war seem a matter of wit and will, and Rotheram had been thrilled when the CO personally selected him from the translation pool to sit in on interrogations. Hawkins spoke excellent German himself, of course—he made Rotheram self-conscious of his own accented English—but he didn't always want to let on to the prisoners. “Helps sometimes to let them think they know more than me.” It was a tactic he'd learned from his days as a journalist between the wars. Springing his German on them when they weren't expecting it was one of his simpler tricks.

Over the months they came up with other stunts. A couple of times, Hawkins had Rotheram translate so sloppily that the infuriated prisoners lost patience and broke into English themselves. Later, he began leaving Rotheram alone with a prisoner, stepping out to the WC while Rotheram offered the man a cigarette, warned him what Hawkins was capable of, advised him to talk: “It's nothing to be ashamed of; anyone would.” He posed as a British student of German literature, professed an affinity for things German. “You've a talent for sympathy,” Hawkins told him.

In truth Rotheram despised the prisoners, loved to see Hawkins break them. Once, they'd reversed the roles—boredom, as much as anything, dictating their tactics—and Hawkins had played the sympathetic one, hamming it up so much Rotheram thought he was being mocked. He listened from behind the door as Hawkins offered the prisoner a smoke, warned him that Rotheram was a German Jew, implacable in his desire for revenge. The man had talked even before Rotheram returned to the room. He'd felt a stark thrill, but afterwards, in Hawkins's office, he told him, again, that he wasn't a Jew, and Hawkins eyed him carefully and said, “I know, old boy, I know. It was just a ruse. No offense intended.”

“None taken,” Rotheram told him. “Why do you think he believed it though?”

And Hawkins said, “The reason most men believe anything. He was scared it was true.”

Rotheram had laughed. He couldn't say if loyalty to one man could grow into patriotism, but the harder he worked for Hawkins, the more suspects he questioned, the more British he felt.

Still, by the late summer of 1944, there were fewer and fewer prisoners at the London Cage, and Rotheram was missing the interrogations, missing the war, really. He'd been agitating for a transfer for a month. Quayle and his gang had moved across the Channel in late July; most of the questioning was being done in Cherbourg or by roving teams at the front. According to Hawkins, it was a miserable detail, France or no. So many men surrendering, hundreds a day—it was nothing but paperwork. “Besides, I need you here, dear boy, to help put the jigsaw together.” They were beginning to identify defendants and witnesses for the prospective war crimes trials. The pieces of the puzzle. Rotheram had nodded and gone back to the dry work of processing the boxloads of interrogation reports coming in from Normandy.

There wasn't even much doing at Dover by then. In June and July, in the wake of D-day, he'd been used to heading down there two or three times a week, to the old racetrack where the POWs were processed, for a “chat,” as they called it, with the more interesting and recalcitrant cases. Once or twice he persuaded the local MPs to give him a captured uniform and put him in with the unprocessed men to eavesdrop. He'd been shocked by the thrill of it—playing with fire, he'd thought—delighted in calling himself “Steiner.” He'd gotten results, too, bagged a handful of officers posing as noncoms. By mid-August, the Allies closing in on Paris, he'd begged permission to make another visit to Dover, and tried the stunt again, but he must have seemed overeager. He'd been rumbled, had a rib broken before the guards could get to him.

Hawkins was furious when he heard about it. “Why would you take such an idiotic risk? Seriously, what do you think you were playing at?”

Rotheram shrugged. “I was going round the bend, sir. And now with Paris liberated . . .” The news had broken two days earlier. “Sometimes it feels like I'm the bloody prisoner here.”

Hawkins smiled thinly.

“Then you should be able to fake it better. How did they spot you, by the way?”

“Lice,” Rotheram said, making a face. “I didn't have any. They saw I wasn't scratching.”

The other shook his head.

“And how's the rib?”

“Sore, but I can work.”

“All right. You want some excitement, then?”

“Sir?”

Hawkins began writing out a chit on his blotter, and Rotheram felt a surge of excitement. Paris!

“I'm giving you a staff car, sending you on a little trip. You're off to Wales, my boy.”

“Wales?” It sounded like a joke. “With respect, sir, I want to go east, not west.”

“Think of it as a little holiday,” the CO said drolly. “You're going to see Hess.”

Rotheram paused, watching Hawkins's pen twitch across the page.

“Rudolf Hess?”

“No, Rudolph ruddy Reindeer. Who do you think?”

Rotheram had seen Hess once before, in Germany, in '35. The only one of the party leaders he'd ever glimpsed in person. It was at a football match. Hertha Berlin and Bayer Leverkusen. Hess had arrived with his entourage a little after kickoff. There'd been a popping of flashbulbs, a stirring in the crowd, and then the referee had blown the whistle and stopped the game for the players to give the Heil Hitler. Hess had returned the salute smartly and gone back to signing autographs. He'd been deputy führer then, a post he'd held until 1941 when he'd flown to Britain. It had been a sensation at the time—was he a traitor? was he on a secret mission?—but now Hess was almost an afterthought.

“Even if he has any secrets left they'd be old hat,” Rotheram observed.

“He still has at least one, apparently,” the CO said, placing the travel orders on top of a thick file. “We don't know if he's sane or not. He's tried to kill himself a couple of times, and he's been claiming selective amnesia for years. Says he has no recollection of anything important. Not of his mission, not of the war. It's all a fog, supposedly.”

“He's acting?”

“If so, he's doing a splendid job. He's been maintaining the same story pretty much since landing in Scotland.”

Rotheram looked at the file on the desk between them, the dog-eared pages bound together with ribbon.

“What makes you think I'll be able to crack him?”

“Not sure you will, my boy. Plenty of others have had a go. Medics, intel bods. The Americans.”

“But you don't trust them.”

The CO sighed. “Hess is the biggest name we have so far, and if there's a trial when this is all over, he's likely to be a star in it. Only not if he's gaga. Not if he's unbalanced, you follow? It'll make a mockery. Problem is, if we don't put him up, it'll smell fishy to the Soviets. They're convinced he came here to conclude a peace between us and the Nazis to leave them free to concentrate in the East.” Hawkins shook his head. “The one thing for sure is if he does end up in the dock, we'll be the buggers building the case. I just want someone I know to have a look-see.”

“This isn't exactly what I had in mind when I asked for a transfer.”

“‘In which we serve,' dear boy,” the CO told him with a shrug. “You're going up the wall, so I'm giving you something.” He smiled, then craned forward again. “You want a role in the trials? You want to play a part in that? Well, this is the beginning. Do this right and you might do yourself some good.”

IT HAD BEEN DAMP
and overcast in London—Rotheram needed to let out the choke to get the car started—but by Cheltenham it was warm enough to roll his windows down, and motoring through the Marches into Wales, he found himself lifted by the rippling emerald country, the bright broad skies, so different from the narrow greyness of London.

Still, climbing into the Black Mountains felt like crossing into autumn. Fat drops of rain splattered the windscreen, and by the time he arrived, the metal of the film canisters was cold enough to sting his fingers as he carried them in from the car. He walked up the gravel drive to the manor house, remembering something Hawkins had once told him, that the gentry had put in gravel to announce their visitors. He had a moment to take in the ivy-bearded brick, the leaded windows crosshatched a second time with safety tape, and then he heard the bolt draw back on the heavy oak door.

“Ah,” the pinch-faced lieutenant who met him declared, “I see you've brought our feature presentation.”

The lieutenant, a doctor in the RAMC who introduced himself only as Mills, showed him into the parlor, where a projector had been set up. “You've eaten already?” he asked brusquely, but Rotheram shook his head. There'd been only a meager ploughman's at a sullen pub outside Cirencester. The doctor looked disconcerted. “Well, look, not to be inhospitable, but could you possibly wait? Unless you're ravenous, I mean. Only, he's an early riser, so if you want to show it this evening, best start soon.” He smiled apologetically. “Can't promise he won't nod off, otherwise.”

“It's fine.” Rotheram began loading the film. His fingers were so chilled they trembled, and it took him long minutes to thread the first reel through the sprockets.

“Nervous?” Mills asked.

“Cold,” Rotheram said, rubbing his fingers. “Those will have to be turned,” he added, indicating the neat row of chairs and making a circling gesture, “so we can watch him.”

“Right you are,” the other replied agreeably enough, although Rotheram noticed he didn't offer to light the fire in the grate.

Finally the film was ready, and Rotheram ran it forward for a few seconds, watching the test numbers flicker and count down, and then the opening shots from a plane descending over the city, the image ghostly in the still-bright room.

“Action,” Mills called jauntily.

Rotheram snapped the machine into reverse and the camera lifted back through the wispy clouds, the medieval rooftops dwindling, the soundtrack discordant and garbled. He'd tracked down the print at the censor's office—they'd impounded half a dozen copies at the start of the war—and he'd run it for himself the night before in his office, to make sure it was whole and to refamiliarize himself. He'd waited until everyone had left for the evening, afraid of being caught, as if it were pornography.

“All right,” he said, and Mills opened the door.

Someone must have been waiting for the signal, for less than a minute later there were footsteps in the passage outside.

Rotheram expected a guard to come first, but it was Hess himself, stepping into the drawing room as if it were his home. He was greying and more drawn than Rotheram recalled from his pictures, his nose as sharp as a beak and his cheekbones swept up like wings under his skin, as if his face were about to take flight. Out of uniform, in a navy blue cardigan, darned at one elbow, he seemed stooped, retired, more a shy uncle than the fiery deputy führer. His shirt was pressed and buttoned to the throat, but he wore no tie, and Rotheram recalled he'd made two suicide attempts, according to the file: once opening his veins with a butter knife he had stolen and sharpened on an iron bedstead; a second time hurdling a third-story banister. He was limping from that fall still, as he approached and held out his hand. Rotheram stared at it, slowly held out his own, but to one side, gesturing to the armchair. Hess ignored the insult, taking his place with only a wry “
Vielen Dank,
” to which Rotheram found himself automatically mumbling, “
Bitte.
”