As Time Goes By (26 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
T
HREE

Fr
ä
ulein Toumanova," said the pursed-lipped Aus
trian secretary who sat in the outer office and surveyed
the world with a gimlet eye, "the
Herr Direktor
would
like these reports typed up at once and delivered to him
personally by four o'clock this afternoon."

Irmgard Hentgen was the gatekeeper, Reinhard Hey
drich's last line of defense against unwanted intrusions on his working day. She was not, strictly speaking, his
private secretary: in the Nazi scheme of things, that job
was reserved for a man. But she oversaw who came and
who went, and she handled the details of Heydrich's
schedule.

"Sofort, Frau Hentgen,"
replied Ilsa Lund. She did
not like Frau Hentgen and suspected that the woman
had very little use for her.

"
By
four o'clock,"
repeated Frau Hentgen, in case
she hadn't been heard the first time. "It is imperative
that these
..."

Ilsa ignored her. Life was too short to listen to Frau
Hentgen repeating herself. Besides, she had work to
do.

In the space of just four months she had risen from the anonymity of the typing pool to Heydrich's secretariat, where she was one of three women under the
supervision of Frau Hentgen. Ilsa was not sure whether
to attribute her rise to her intelligence, her skills, her
looks, or some combination of the three, but she was
not about to question it. She was close to Heydrich
now, very close. All she had to do was get one step
closer.

Her entrance into the headquarters of the
Reichsicherheitshauptamt
had been surprisingly easy. White Russians were seen as natural, if inferior, allies in the
war against Bolshevism and Marxism, and their bona
fides were accepted with alacrity. Everybody thought
the Germans were omniscient as well as omnipotent,
which was what the Nazis wanted everyone to think. In
many ways, though, they were surprisingly lax, shoddy
even, so certain were they of the rightness of their
cause and the inevitability of their victory.

"... and this must be done immediately!"

"Yes, thank you, Frau Hentgen," said Ilsa, accepting
another sheaf of papers with feigned good grace. With
out even looking at them, she knew what they were.
Reports on real or imagined activities against the
Reich. She also knew in advance what the recommen
dation of the reporting agent, which was inscribed at
the bottom just above the signature, would be: death.
Death appeared to be the Nazi solution for everything.

Some, not many, she managed to lose. Even in the
Reich, documents got misfiled or mislaid, and she had
no reason to fear that Frau Hentgen or anyone else had the slightest idea of the double game she was playing.
She had saved some lives, as surreptitiously as possi
ble. Names were passed along, so that their owners
might be warned, and some of them even managed to
get away. But she couldn't save everybody without
eventually directing suspicion back upon herself, so she had to choose, choose among perfect strangers,
who should live and who must die.

A heart-stopping moment had come a week or so
ago when, thumbing through the stack of death war
rants, she had come across the name of one of their minor operatives, a laborer named Anton Novotny,
who was involved in the construction of a new Gestapo
prison. Novotny's arrest, however, turned out to have
nothing to do with the Resistance at all; he had been
denounced by a boy in his
Wohnquartier
for making a joke about Heydrich. A joke was all it took these days,
and sentence had been both pronounced and carried out
before what little laughter there had been had died
away: a pair of RSHA men barged into a tavern where
Anton was taking his leisure, frog-marched him outside, and shot him right there in the street.

Due to security considerations, she could have no
direct contact with Victor, and she could only hope that
her reports were filtering back to him and the rest of
the team in London via the various cutouts and inter
mediaries along the network.

She couldn't tell whether she was having much suc
cess. The British, she learned, had been right: Czech
resistance to Hitler was feeble. Unlike the citizens of
Norway, Denmark, France, and Holland, the Czechs
showed little inclination to throw the Germans out.

Even Hitler's well-known contempt for the Slavs did
not seem to offend them, and they continued their twin trades of arms making and beer brewing with the same aplomb they had shown before the war. Certain mem
bers of the Underground, she knew, were carrying on
Victor's work of pamphleteering, printing their broadsides in farmhouses and trucking them into the squares on donkey carts and the backs of old women. She even knew of a few partisans who were still waging a guer
rilla war in the countryside, although their numbers
were dwindling practically daily. Still, the uprising that
everyone hoped for had not come; indeed, it seemed
farther away than ever. Maybe Rick had been right.
Maybe the whole thing was crazy. She went home each
night feeling angrier and more discouraged.

They needed a bold stroke. What stroke bolder than
to cut off the very head of the evil itself? Watching Heydrich's arrogant procession into and out of his office every day made her wish that she could kill him
herself right at his desk, to avenge the torture of her husband, the rape of her country, and the death of her father at one blow.

British Intelligence had also been right about another
thing: Reinhard Heydrich was a man of exceedingly fixed habits. Every morning he rose at precisely 6:30 a.m. in his bed at his villa. Breakfast was invariably preceded by a vigorous game of handball, after which
he showered and shaved and put on a fresh uniform
laid out by his valet the night before. At 7:25 a.m. his
chauffeur appeared at the villa's front door with the
car, its motor running, and Heydrich hopped aboard.
The car arrived at his office in Hrad
č
any Castle on the dot of eight. Although the staff officially went on duty
at eight, everyone knew it was professional suicide to
arrive after Heydrich did, so
they generally got to work
half an hour earlier. He worked straight through the
day, stopping only for lunch at one p.m., which lasted
until precisely two o'clock. He left the office at six p.m.,
took some exercise in the form of a brisk walk around
the castle grounds no matter what the weather, boarded
his limousine, and went off to dinner at seven-thirty
p.m. He rarely dined alone, and he never slept alone.
Heydrich had the reputation of tiring of his mistresses
rather quickly, and word around the office was that his
current partner was rapidly losing his interest.

Ilsa had encoded all this information and duly en
trusted it to a rotating series of Underground couriers with whom she could meet without raising suspicion:
postmen, waitresses, boarders in her rooming house on
Sko
ř
epka Street, across the river from the castle.
Whose eyes it may have found she did not know. Major
Miles's? Victor's? Rick's?

She had heard nothing of Rick since she'd left Lon
don, and she had tried to put him out of her mind as best she could. How hard that was, with the memory
of their last night together still so vivid.

Her hands trembled slightly as she leafed through
the reports. She was just loading a piece of paper into her typewriter when a voice behind her startled her.

"How pleasant it is for me to see your glowing face
each morning, Fr
ä
ulein Toumanova." It was Heydrich
himself, reading the pages over her shoulder. He had
never spoken to her before.

She put the papers down, folded her hands together
on her desk, and waited. Now that the moment was
here, she was not sure what to do next. "Thank you, Herr Heydrich," she managed to reply.

From his height of well over six feet, the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia stared down at the blonde
secretary who had caught his eye. Truth to tell, he had
spotted her some time ago, but the chief of the Reich
security office could not be seen to have taken such
quick notice of a girl in the typing pool. Better to wait
to see if she had any brains—but not too many!—in
that pretty head, to see if she could force her way past
the other girls and into the secretariat, there to fall
under the basilisk gaze of Frau Hentgen, who kept
track of everything for him and whose instincts about people he had found to be unerring.

Frau Hentgen had been less than enthusiastic about
Fr
ä
ulein Toumanova, which was easily attributable to
the young lady's Slavic ancestry: like a good Nazi and a better Austrian, Frau Hentgen thought the Slavs fit
only for servitude. Or, perhaps, her antipathy was due
to Miss Toumanova's uncommon skills; not only was
she an excellent typist and fluent in several languages,
but she even played the piano rather well. Not to men
tion that Miss Toumanova was beautiful and Frau Hent
gen was ugly. One could never rule out jealousy when
it came to women. It was one of the many ways in
which he found them irrational. Just as the Germans
were having to get used to all kinds of climates, however, so also would their rulers have to get used to all
kinds of women. He was willing to experiment for the sake of the nation.

"Indeed," said Heydrich, resting one hand lightly
upon her shoulder, "a beauty such as yours brings light
to the darkness of a cursed and evil world. It reminds men like me of why we fight, why our struggle and ultimate victory is so important."

She felt herself blushing, as if basking in bis praise
instead of flushing in rage. She kept her eyes lowered,
toward the floor, until she realized she could see her
own reflection staring back at her from the man's polished boots.

"Such very good work you have been doing, Fr
ä
u
lein Toumanova," he continued. "The Reich is pleased
and proud to be able to employ a woman such as your
self in the ongoing struggle to the death against the
Bolshevik usurpers of your homeland." Almost imper
ceptibly, he began to caress her. "Such initiative as
well! Your tip about the reactionary cell in the B
ö
hmen
wald last week proved most accurate. Isn't that right, Frau Hentgen?" he concluded loudly.

"Ja, Herr Heydrich,"
Frau Hentgen replied curtly.
Cued by Frau Hentgen, the other women in the office
took absolutely no notice of this conversation. They kept their heads down, bent over their work. No one
dared type, and so create a disturbance, but each found
plenty to do that needed the urgent attention of a foun
tain pen.

Heydrich's reference to the B
ö
hmenwald made her
shiver. From time to time the Underground would feed
her information about a hideout for which it had no
further use; very infrequently the Resistance would
give up a comrade, one whose loyalties were suspect
(so they assured her) and who had therefore been
deemed a danger to the entire movement. She hated
condemning those men to death, but she did not know what else to do.