Berlin Red (12 page)

At that same moment, in the Flossenburg Concentration Camp in southern Germany, Leopold Hunyadi was preparing to meet his maker.

He was of medium height, with thinning blonde hair and a round and cheerful face. Hunyadi was in the habit of tilting his head back when he spoke to people, at the same time narrowing his eyes, as if to hide whatever emotions they might disclose. He was not a man who had ever been prone to physical exertion and now, as a result, possessed a belly that sagged over the old army belt he still wore, whose buckle was emblazoned with the words ‘In Treue Fest’, from his time in the Great War, when he had served as a sergeant in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment.

In 1917, in a battle near the town of Zillebeke in Flanders, he had saved the life of another German soldier who had become entangled in barbed wire while attempting to deliver a message from the trenches to a battery of artillery located just behind the lines. Due to a miscommunication, the battery had opened fire on German trenches, instead of the English lines. In the course of this bombardment, several soldiers were killed and the radio lines had been cut. In desperation, an officer scribbled out a message ordering the artillery to cease fire, handed it to a nearby corporal and told him to deliver it as quickly as humanly possible.

The name of this corporal was Adolf Hitler. Shortly after leaving the trenches, he was blown off his feet by an incoming shell and, although unwounded, became stuck in a nest of barbed wire.

At that same moment, Sergeant Hunyadi emerged from the bunker where he had been seeking shelter from the guns. Seeing the corporal tangled like an insect in a spider’s web, and hearing the man’s cries for help, he used a pair of pliers to cut the soldier loose from the snare of rusty talons.

When the war was over, Hunyadi went on to become one of the most successful detectives in the history of the Berlin police force.

Even though he had refused to join Hitler’s newly founded National Socialist Party, an act which would normally have guaranteed the swift termination of his career, Hitler never forgot the debt he owed Hunyadi and refused to have him dismissed.

Although frustrated by Hunyadi’s stubbornness, Hitler allowed the detective to continue his work unhindered by any lack of political affiliation.

But Hitler’s patience with his old friend came to an end in 1938, when he was informed by his intelligence service that Hunyadi’s wife, Franziska, a woman of legendary beauty in Berlin, had been born into a family of Sephardic Jews, who had emigrated from Spain generations before.

Hunyadi was summoned to the Berlin Headquarters of the Security Service. There he was informed that he should immediately begin divorce proceedings against his wife. An excuse would be provided by the courts. The paperwork would be expedited. The whole thing would be finalised within a week, after which his wife would receive permission to leave the country.

When Hunyadi protested, saying that he would rather leave the country with his wife than divorce her and remain in Germany, he was told that this was not an option. His services were required in Berlin. Any failure to carry out Hitler’s wishes would result in the arrest of his wife and the certainty of transport to the women’s concentration camp at Belsen.

Faced with this ultimatum, Hunyadi had no choice but to agree. The divorce papers were drawn up, Hunyadi signed them, and Franziska departed for Spain, where she was taken in by distant relatives.

With Hitler’s blessing, and under his personal protection, Hunyadi continued his work as an investigator, adding to his earlier reputation with a string of successful cases. Hitler himself called upon Hunyadi to undertake a number of investigations, including one in which a British major with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist had washed up on the coast of Spain. It appeared that the dead man, whose name was William Martin, had been killed in a plane crash off the Spanish coast. Although Martin had managed to make his way into a damaged life raft, he succumbed to injuries and drowned before reaching the shore, where he was found by fishermen as they prepared to set out their nets. Spanish authorities, being sympathetic to the German cause, had allowed German intelligence to open and photograph the contents of the briefcase before turning the body over to the British Embassy. The documents turned out to be a complete work-up of a planned invasion of Sardinia, signed by several members of the Allied High Command. In spite of the fact that Martin had been carrying tickets to a London theatre production, as well as a letter from his fiancée – details which did as much to convince the German High Command as the contents of the briefcase itself – Hunyadi’s recommendation was to treat the whole thing as a trick.

Disregarding the detective’s warning, Hitler ordered more than 20,000 combat troops to Sardinia, where they prepared for the imminent arrival of the Allies. By the time they figured out that Major Martin and his battle plans had indeed been a decoy all along, the invasion of Normandy had already begun.

Even before Hunyadi had returned from Spain, it came to Hitler’s attention through an informant in the Spanish government that the detective had secretly met with Franziska and, in a private ceremony, married her a second time.

Seeing this as a personal betrayal of the trust he had placed in Hunyadi, Hitler ordered the detective to be arrested, stripped of his membership in the Berlin Police Department and sent to Flossenburg. There, he was to await a trial whose outcome was a foregone conclusion.

In November of 1944, Leopold Hunyadi was dragged from his cell, and hauled before a magistrate in an improvised courtroom at the Flossenburg mess hall, where he received the news that he had been sentenced to death by hanging.

From that day to this, Hunyadi had lived in a kind of suspended animation, never knowing which day was to be his last. In the beginning, each time he heard footsteps in the hall outside his cell, his heart would clench like a fist at the thought that they were coming for him now. This happened so many hundreds of times that he grew numb to it, as if a part of him had already departed from his body and was waiting, somewhere beyond the concrete wall, for the rest to follow.

Although the tiny window in his cell was too high up for him to have a view, he could sometimes hear the wooden trapdoor of the gallows clunking open in the courtyard just outside his room. Rather than terrifying Hunyadi, the sound gave him comfort, because it meant that the Flossenburg gallows was operating on a drop system, which would kill its victims quickly, rather than a different method, also in use, by which men would be hoisted up a pole and left to dangle while they slowly choked to death.

To pass the time, Hunyadi made contact with the men on either side of him. He could not see or speak to them, so he employed a system known as the Polybius Square, which separated the alphabet into five rows of five letters, each letter in its own box, and with C and K in the same box. By tapping a heating pipe that ran through the rooms, the first set of taps indicating the horizontal position and the second set showing the vertical position within the box, it was possible to spell out letters.

Hunyadi had learned the system early in his career and had often eavesdropped on conversations between prisoners when carrying out investigations, sometimes even using the system to communicate with prisoners he had arrested, who mistook him for another prisoner and often divulged information that they would never have told the police.

Men came and went; all of them high-ranking officers, government officials or political prisoners. From this, Hunyadi came to understand that this particular prison block at Flossenburg had been selected as the final destination for those whose exits from this world had been decreed by the Führer himself.

From newcomers, Hunyadi learned about the advance of the Allied armies, and he guessed that it would not be long before either the Russians or the Americans overran the camp. While his fellow prisoners tapped out their messages of hope that the Allies would save them, Hunyadi realised that the approach of these armies would only hasten their deaths.

The sun had just set that day when the door swung open and a guard named Krol walked in.

Hunyadi had been lying on his bunk. Now he sat up in confusion. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘Get undressed,’ ordered the guard.

Hunyadi, who had been asleep when Krol opened the door, was at first so confused by this command that he just sat on his bunk and did not move.

Angered by Hunyadi’s stupor, Krol stepped forward and fetched the detective a mighty slap across the face. ‘Strip, damn you!’ he bellowed.

Blearily, Hunyadi obeyed.

When at last he stood naked in front of Kroll, the guard turned and marched out of the room. ‘Follow me!’ he commanded.

As Hunyadi left his cell for the first time in months, another guard fell in behind him and he walked between the two men, the almost noiseless shuffle of his bare feet in stark contrast to the crunch of the guards’ hobnailed boots upon the concrete floor.

It was only when they turned a corner and he could see the courtyard dead ahead, that he finally grasped what was happening.

His heart began to thunder, as if it was trying to hammer its way out of his chest.

He could see the gallows now, and on it were three nooses, hanging side by side. Two men, as naked as Hunyadi, stood with the nooses in front of them, hands bound behind their backs. Nobody stood behind the third noose, and Hunyadi understood that it was meant for him.

He did not recognise the men. The paleness of their flesh appeared grotesque.

Why do they need us to be naked? Hunyadi wondered to himself. What final insult is this?

He was halfway across the courtyard now. Little pebbles in the gravel dug into his heels.

He thought of Franziska. He wondered what she was doing now. He had heard stories of people feeling something they described as a kind of snapping shock at the moment when their loved ones passed away, as if some invisible thread were snapping. I wonder if she’ll feel it, thought Hunyadi.

And then suddenly Hunyadi realised that the terror which had haunted him for so many days that he could no longer recall what it felt like to live without it was only the fear of dying and not of death itself.

As soon as he understood that, even the fear of dying lost its grip on him and faded away into the still air of the courtyard.

Krol turned and looked back at Hunyadi, to make sure that the man had not begun to falter. And the guard, who had led so many men to their deaths these past few months, was astonished to see Hunyadi smiling.

‘Stop!’ called a voice.

All three men, the two guards and Hunyadi, came to an abrupt halt. They turned in unison to see a man, wearing the finely tailored uniform of a camp administrator, come tumbling out of the same doorway from which they had only just emerged.

‘What is it?’ demanded Krol.

‘Bring him back,’ said the man.

‘I will not!’ roared Krol. ‘I have my orders!’

‘Your orders have been overruled,’ said the administrator, ‘unless you’d care to take it up with General Rattenhuber in Berlin!’

Krol blinked, as if a bright light was suddenly shining into his face. Grabbing Hunyadi by the arm, he marched the naked man back inside, followed by the second guard, who looked as confused as his prisoner.

As the three men stepped into the shadows of the concrete block house, they heard the heavy clunk of gallows trap doors swinging open.

‘What is happening?’ stammered Hunyadi.

To this, Krol just shook his head in stunned amazement.

‘What’s happening,’ explained the administrator, ‘is that your death has been postponed.’

‘But why?’

‘You have a friend in high places, Hunyadi. Very high places indeed.’

‘Hitler?’ gasped Hunyadi.

The administrator nodded.

‘But he’s the one who put me here!’ shouted Hunyadi. ‘I demand an explanation!’ But even as he spoke, Hunyadi became aware of how difficult it was to make demands of any kind when fat, middle-aged and the only naked man in the room.

The administrator, who had retrieved Hunyadi’s clothes from his cell, now dumped the reeking garments at his feet. ‘Ask him yourself when you see him,’ he said.

‘Pekkala,' said Stalin, as soon as Major Kirov had left the room, ‘there is something we need to discuss.'

‘Can this not wait?' asked Pekkala. ‘Every minute that I linger here in Moscow brings Hunyadi one step closer to Lilya.'

‘It concerns Lilya,' answered Stalin, ‘and her family, as well.'

‘You mean her husband and their child?'

‘Exactly. So you have not forgotten them?'

‘Of course not,' replied Pekkala. ‘I still remember the photograph you showed me, back when I first agreed to work with you.'

‘Yes.' Stalin paused to clear his throat in a long, gravelly eruption from his smoke-clogged lungs. ‘Let us talk about that picture.'

When Stalin had sent the young Lieutenant Kirov to retrieve Pekkala from Siberia, it had been with one purpose in mind – to conduct a secret investigation into the death of the Tsar and his family. Although a statement had been issued long ago, confirming the executions in the basement of a house in Ekaterinburg, which had once belonged to a merchant named Ipatiev, Stalin had harboured his own suspicions about the accuracy of the report. He had become fixated on the possibility that one person in particular night have survived – the Tsar's only son, Alexei, whose frailty, caused by haemophilia, had consumed the royal couple even to the end of their days. It was this very frailty, combined with the young man's youth and innocence, which led Stalin to believe the executioners might have taken pity upon the boy, and perhaps even on some of the daughters as well. A steady flow of rumours had circulated, not only in Russia but throughout the world, that various members of the Romanov clan, once thought to have been butchered in captivity, might still be alive, after all. Eventually, inevitably, these suspicions loomed so large in Stalin's mind that he knew he must find out the truth. And even as the thought occurred to him, he realised that there was only one man alive who knew enough about the Romanovs to dig out the truth once and for all. It was the Emerald Eye.

Stalin had kept Pekkala alive for a reason, even if he had not known at the time what that reason might amount to. The execution order had been there on Stalin's desk and he had been about to sign it when he hesitated. Such a thing had never happened before. Even he did not know what had caused his pen to hover over the page. It was part fear, part admiration, part practicality.

Stalin knew where to find Pekkala. What he did not know was whether the Inspector would agree to join forces with a man who had once been his enemy. It would not be enough to simply order him. In order to tip the balance in his favour, Stalin had made Pekkala an offer – complete the investigation, and then Pekkala could go free.

And he had intended to keep his word, at least in the beginning, but by the time Pekkala's investigation was completed, Stalin had changed his mind. Not only would Pekkala's brand of expertise prove useful in running the country, Stalin could not imagine how he'd ever do without it. But he knew that Pekkala could never be forced into such an arrangement. He would have to be persuaded.

In the end, all Stalin needed was a single photograph.