Authors: Alex Gerlis
‘If you’re quiet, Sophia, and behave very, very well,’
said Henry, ‘then I promise that when we get to the safe place you’ll get a
present. But you have to be quiet.’
‘What kind of present?’
Henry shrugged. ‘Chocolates.’
The little girl said nothing but pulled a face.
‘What about a new rabbit? That one looks very old – it’s
only got one ear.’
‘But I love Mr Rabbit! You can’t take him away!’
The little girl started crying again. Rosa pulled
her close.
‘No-one is going to take Mr Rabbit away darling.
Henri
meant we’ll
buy you a friend for Mr Rabbit.’
During the long silence that followed the light dimmed
quickly and when Sophia spoke again it was almost dark.
‘It’ll be nice for Mr Rabbit to have a friend, won’t
it Mama?’
‘Yes darling. You try to rest now.’
‘Because we don’t have friends anymore, do we?’
‘What do you mean darling?’
‘Alfred told me that. He said the reason we had to
be so quiet in the house and not go near the window is because no-one is our
friend. Is that true?’
Rosa said nothing, but busied herself arranging a
blanket around Sophia, allowing the rabbit’s head to poke out of the top.
‘Here are some biscuits darling. Eat those then try
to get to sleep.’
She munched at the biscuits, her eyes looking around
the car, unblinking.
‘Why is no-one our friend, Mama?’
‘Don’t keep asking questions, darling. Where we’re
going, everyone will be our friend.’
‘Is
Henri
our friend?’
In the rear-view mirror Henry caught Rosa’s face as
she hesitated briefly before replying.
‘Yes, darling. Sleep now.’
Henry watched through the mirror, waiting for Sophia
to fall asleep. When she finally did,
he cleared his throat and turned around
to talk. Now was the time, he had decided, to be honest with Rosa. Maybe then
she would see him in a better light.
But when he turned, Rosa was fast asleep too and the
moment had passed.
***
On
the Tuesday morning, before the Opel had even left Berlin, Franz Hermann was
becoming increasingly worried. He had been unnerved by the encounter with
Alois Jäger
in
Oberwallstrasse
and even more so by the way his colleague had been since then. First of all
Jäger
had only
walked with him part of the way to the office, then had suddenly stopped and
said he needed to go back and check something. Back at the office he had come
in to see him.
‘If you had not told me otherwise, Franz, then I’d
have thought you and that Swiss man knew each other. You looked like you were
acquaintances, rather than one stranger giving directions to another.’
He assured
Jäger he was mistaken: he had been
to morning Mass and, as he’d left the cathedral, the man had asked him for
directions. He had even gone somewhat out of his way to make sure the man went
the right way.
‘And fancy the coincidence of me having met him in
Bern last year!’
Franz agreed with Jäger it was indeed a coincidence.
It’s a small world, as they say.
‘But so strange. When I was in Bern, he was about to
travel to Stuttgart on business – I even helped him with his visa at our
Embassy there. He was staying at the
Schweizerhof, which, I tell you,
Franz, is a very expensive hotel. And now look – he’s a mere courier.’
‘Perhaps he fell on hard times, Alois.’
‘Perhaps.’
Both men continued to be uneasy about the encounter.
As was the custom on Tuesdays, the senior lawyers at the practice lunched
together and the two men eyed each other throughout the meal. Hermann was
worried
Jäger
did not believe him and Jäger was convinced Hermann was nervous. When they went
back into their respective offices, each man closed his door and made a phone
call. Jäger made his first, telephoning a good friend of his who was in charge
of the Gestapo office in Treptow. ‘Tell me Lothar,’ he said after a brief exchange
of pleasantries, ‘you must have good contacts with your colleagues at
Tempelhof, no? You’re practically neighbours… Good, I thought as much. Do me a
favour will you, Lothar? I’m sure it’s nothing, perhaps just me being
suspicious, but could you discreetly check whether a Swiss citizen called Henri
Hesse travelled on a flight from Tempelhof to Stuttgart at around 12.30 today?’
Lothar asked one or two questions.
We are very
thorough in the Gestapo, you know Alois!
Both men laughed. Lothar checked
the exact spelling of the man’s name.
And could you describe him?
‘Perhaps mid-thirties; average height, slightly
overweight. Pale complexion, darkish hair as far as I could tell, but he was
wearing a trilby hat.’
‘I’ll see what I can do Alois.’
At the same time in his office one floor below
Jäger’s, Franz Hermann was pacing up and down. Something was not right, but he
had no idea what he could do about it. He picked up the telephone and dialled
his mother’s number in Dahlem. At least he could be reassured all was well
there.
***
Captain
Edgar and Basil Remington-Barber had travelled to Geneva after spending the
weekend with Henry in Zürich. They based themselves at a perfectly decent if
somewhat anonymous hotel within sight of Cornavin railway station, where they
hoped to meet Henry late on the Tuesday night.
The hotel had been chosen carefully: as well as
their proximity to the station, they had been able to book two rooms on the top
floor, set apart from the others on the corridor. Each room had a telephone and
they made sure, from the moment they arrived, one of them would always be
beside it. They did not expect to hear anything until 4.30 on Tuesday afternoon
at the earliest, when Hunter’s flight from Stuttgart was scheduled to land at Zürich.
Rolf would be waiting at the airport to see Henry arrive and check he travelled
onto Zürich; one of Rolf’s men would then be at the station to watch Henry
meeting with the Russians and catch the train to Geneva. Edgar and
Remington-Barber ensured they were both waiting by the phone in Geneva from
four o’clock on the Tuesday afternoon. At a quarter past, Remington-Barber
observed Henry’s flight ought to be landing and they should be hearing from
Rolf at any moment.
‘It’s a tight schedule we’ve allowed him, Edgar. He
has to go to Bank Leu, then meet up with his Russian chap, allow them to copy
the document and still make that last train to Geneva.’
‘He’ll be fine Basil. Why don’t you sit down and
relax? Hedinger will stay on as late as he needs to and the last train to Geneva
leaves at a quarter to eight. Please stop worrying. You can pour us another
drink if you think that’ll help.’
By five o’clock Edgar, if pressed, would have
described himself as concerned. Five minutes after that the phone rang and both
men jumped. Remington-Barber answered it.
Yes, Hello Rolf
…
I see… Yes…
No… Are you sure?… And you’ve checked there?… Do it again please Rolf… Yes… Probably…
Call us back in ten minutes.
As he replaced the phone his hands were
shaking.
‘Well?’ asked Edgar.
‘Henry wasn’t on the flight.’
‘Are you sure?’ Edgar’s face was just inches from
his colleague’s.
‘You heard what I said, Edgar. Rolf Eder is no fool,
he’s one of the best men I’ve ever had in the field, doesn’t miss a thing. He
said there were 12 passengers who came off the Swissair flight and Hunter wasn’t
one of them.’
‘Maybe he missed the connection at Stuttgart? After
all, there was only a 20-minute gap between the Berlin flight landing and the Zürich
flight taking off…’
‘Yes, but they’re connecting flights. If the Berlin
flight is late they hold the Zürich one. It’s possible he missed the flight
from Berlin, but it’s unlikely: he had ample time to meet Hugo, go to the
Reichsbank then get to Tempelhof.’
When Rolf called back ten minutes later he said he’d
been able to check the flight’s manifest with a Swissair contact: though a
Henri Hesse had been booked in, he had not been on the connecting flight from
Berlin. Edgar snatched the phone from Remington-Barber.
‘Rolf? It’s me, Edgar. Look, your best bet is to get
to the station in Zürich as soon as possible and join your man there. See if
you can spot Viktor and his chaps. If Henry’s not going to show up they’ll
probably get worried at some stage and break cover. Just see what they’re up
to. If we see them looking for him, then at least that tells us something.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Edgar, slamming the phone down
and pacing the room. ‘Basil… You telephone Hedinger and ask if his courier has
arrived from Berlin. I can’t imagine he will have done, but there’s a distant
possibility he may have heard from him or Reinhart. In fact, ask him to send a
telegram to Reinhart asking if all went well with the courier, then tell
Hedinger to stay on until at least seven. Jesus Christ.’
By eight o’clock they knew little more. Michael Hedinger
told them he had neither heard from nor seen his courier and promised to send a
telegram to Reinhart that night. Rolf reported he had managed to get to the
station by six o’clock, where he was joined by three of his men. At seven they
spotted Viktor prowling around, looking anxious. There was no sign of Hunter
boarding the last train to Geneva or any of the ones before it. Viktor had been
waiting by the ticket barrier, his face creased in anger as the train departed.
‘At least he’s let them down too.’
‘What do we do Edgar?’
Edgar continued to pace the room angrily, cursing
under his breath. ‘It’s that bloody woman, I’m sure it is. Jesus Christ. We’d
better get on the first train to Zürich in the morning.’
***
The
mood in a dingy rented apartment between the railway tracks and the river in Zürich
was scarcely any better. Each of the four men who had been with him at the
station were brought in one by one and questioned by Viktor, but, as he had
been there himself, there was little point in it. Henry had not come anywhere
near the station.
‘He seems to have disappeared,’ said Viktor.
‘When we met him last week, he said something about
having asked you for the details of any comrades he could contact in Berlin, in
an emergency,’ said one of Viktor’s men.
‘So…?’
‘So I was thinking that if you did give him details
of any comrades in Berlin, then they might know what’s happened to him.’
Viktor said nothing for a while, thinking how little
he could trust even those closest to him.
‘You’re mistaken. I’ve no comrades left in my
network in Berlin: they’ve all gone – either escaped, disappeared, dead or
become Nazis. I told him to contact
the Embassy.’
‘Really? I thought you didn’t trust anyone there?’
‘I don’t,’ said Viktor ‘I don’t trust anyone.’
***
Back
in Berlin that Tuesday evening
Alois Jäger finally heard back from his friend
in the Gestapo. It was 6.30 and Jäger had remained behind in his office
awaiting the call.
‘You say his name is Henri Hesse and he’s a Swiss
citizen?’
‘Yes,’ said Jäger.
‘Well, I not only contacted Heinrich at Tempelhof
but I actually went over there to his office myself, so I was able to look at
all the paperwork. There were three Swiss nationals on the
Deutsche
Luft Hansa
flight that left for Stuttgart at 12.30, but none of them had
that name. The officer in charge of checking the papers as the passengers
boarded the plane said, as far as he could recall, one of the Swiss was a woman
and the other two were men in either their fifties or sixties.’
‘He wasn’t on that flight then, obviously.’
‘However,’ said Lothar, ‘he was
booked
onto
that flight, he just didn’t turn up for it. And furthermore, there’s a record
of him having arrived at Tempelhof yesterday, on the flight from Stuttgart. What
is it that concerns you about this man, Alois?’
Jäger thought long and hard.
‘I’m not sure, Lothar. Something about him doesn’t
quite add up. And now missing his flight like that…’
Very odd, they both agreed – so much so they decided
to meet up the next day to discuss the matter.
***
Franz
Hermann had telephoned his mother’s house five times on the Tuesday afternoon
and each time the call went unanswered his anxiety increased. By 4.55 he
decided he had to go down to Dahlem to check, but he was wary of
Alois
Jäger; he decided it would be unwise to leave the office before him. Normally
his colleague was so preoccupied with Nazi Party meetings in the evening he
invariably departed the office no later than five o’clock, but that day it was 6.30
before he left.