Berlin Red (21 page)

The sun had not yet risen above the trees when Kirov and Pekkala, still handcuffed to the bench of the truck, were awakened by the sound of someone shuffling towards them through the leaves.

The boy named Andreas climbed in and sat beside Pekkala, a sub-machine gun laid across his lap.

His friend, Berthold, clambered into the cab, started the engine and soon they were driving down the road, heading west towards Berlin.

Andreas studied the two men, who avoided his gaze.

‘Do you speak German?’ asked the boy.

Pekkala had been staring at the floor, but now he raised his head. ‘A little,’ he replied.

Kirov kept silent.

‘We have to do what the captain says or we will get in trouble,’ explained Andreas, ‘but do you know what Major Rademacher will say when we arrive with you?’

Pekkala shook his head.

Now Andreas leaned forward. He had no gloves and wore a dirty pair of grey wool socks with the ends cut off, allowing his fingers to poke through. His pale skin and dirt-rimed fingernails stood out against the black sides of the sub-machine gun. ‘Major Rademacher will say we should not bother him with questions. He will say that we have wasted valuable fuel on this foolish errand.’

‘So you will get in trouble, either way,’ said Pekkala.

Andreas nodded. ‘Exactly.’

‘And what will he say then, this Major Rademacher?’

‘Maybe he will tell us to shoot you.’ Andreas shrugged. ‘Maybe he will shoot you himself. It all depends.’

‘Depends on what?’

‘On whether he is drunk or sober. On whether his wife yelled at him. On whether he enjoyed his breakfast. You see,’ explained Andreas, ‘there is no rule but what he says, and what he says will be a mystery, even to himself, until he says it.’

It was mid-morning when Fegelein's car pulled up outside the brick building in which Himmler had established his headquarters at Hohenlychen, located in the countryside not far from the village of Hassleben. The Hohenlychen compound was, in fact, a rest home managed by Himmler's medical adviser, Dr Karl Gebhardt. Himmler had moved there shortly after Hitler's descent into the Reichschancellery bunker complex.

The building which Himmler had taken over had a sharply angled roof, scaled like the skin of a snake with red terracotta shingles. From a height of a tall man up to the gutters on the top floor of the three-storey building, the bricks had been painted bone-white. Below that, they had been left plain. The windows on the ground floor were curiously arched, in order to allow in more light than the windows on the floors above. But Himmler kept the windows shuttered. The ground floor had once been a day room for recuperating patients, but now served as a place for Himmler to conduct his meetings with a daily stream of visitors.

Himmler himself rarely appeared before 10 a.m. His early mornings were taken up with bathing and a daily massage from his steward, Felix Kersten.

Knowing his master's schedule, Fegelein had scheduled his visit to coincide with the moment when Himmler would emerge from his private quarters; a time when his mood was likely to be at its best.

‘Shall I wait here?' asked Lilya, sitting behind the wheel. She was dazed and tired. Fegelein had left her sitting in the car for the entire night, while he bedded down with Elsa Batz. She had not kept the engine running, for fear of draining the fuel tank, and it had been a cold night. Even the blankets, which she kept in the trunk for such occasions, had not been enough to keep her warm. At 6 a.m., just when she had managed to doze off, Fegelein had rapped his gold wedding ring upon the driver's side window, jarring her awake, before jumping into the passenger seat and ordering her to drive to Hohenlychen.

Fegelein cast a glance at his driver.

She looked exhausted.

He knew it was his fault. With anyone else, he would not have paused even to consider this, but Fraülein S was different. ‘No,' he said. ‘No need to wait outside. Come in and get warm by the fire.'

Normally, she would have driven the car to a stable which had been converted into a garage for Himmler's various automobiles. There, she would have waited for Fegelein to send for her.

It was useless to protest.

Following in Fegelein's footsteps, Lilya entered the building.

It was the first time Lilya had been inside Himmler's headquarters.

She found herself in an immaculately tidy room, with Persian carpets on the floors, a leather couch and two upholstered chairs beside a hearth in which a small coal fire had been lit, to fend off the chill of the morning. There were several paintings on the walls, all of them of landscapes depicting gardens congested with wildflowers, tumbledown farmhouses and quiet streams, surrounded by drooping branches of great willow trees. She was struck by the sense of confinement in these pictures, a feeling which was amplified by the shutters on the windows, excluding all natural light. Electric lamps with heavy, green glass shades cast their glow across the polished wooden side tables on which they had been placed.

One other thing she noticed was the absence of the smell of cigarettes. It was such a constant everywhere else that, like the ticking of a clock, the very lack of it caught her attention. Only then did she recall that Himmler could not stand the smell of tobacco and that he had attempted, unsuccessfully, to cut it from the rations of his soldiers in the field.

I have entered the lair of the beast, thought Lilya. And yet she was not afraid. Having come this far, and in the company of Himmler's trusted adjutant, she realised that she had moved beyond the greatest danger.

At that moment, the inner door opened and Heinrich Himmler stepped out of the shadows. He was of medium height, slightly built, with close-cropped hair, a small chin and shallow, grey-blue eyes, almost hidden behind a set of round silver-rimmed glasses. He wore a clean white shirt, slate-grey riding breeches, and close-fitting black riding boots.

‘Ah!' he said, gasping as he caught sight of Lilya Simonova. ‘I see we have a guest.' In spite of his jovial tone, there was menace in his voice at this unexpected intrusion.

Fegelein, attuned to every inflection of his master's voice, quickly introduced them.

‘The celebrated Fraülein S,' remarked Himmler. ‘Fegelein has sung your praises many times.'

Fegelein's face reddened. ‘She was cold,' he struggled to explain. ‘I brought her in so she could warm up by the fire.'

‘I will not detain you any further,' said Lilya, turning to leave.

‘Nonsense!' exclaimed Himmler. ‘Sit! Sit!' he gestured to a chair. ‘I will have coffee brought to you.' The rigidity had vanished from his tone, now that his authority had been established. It was he, and not Fegelein, who allowed strangers to stand in his presence.

The two men retired to the inner room, where Himmler kept his office.

As the door opened and shut, Lilya caught a glimpse of wood-panelled walls, dark green curtains covering the windows and a large desk heaped with paperwork laid out in ordered piles, like some architect's half-finished vision of a city not yet built.

As Lilya stared at the sputtering flames, she struggled to hear what the two men were saying.

‘Another mistress, Fegelein?' laughed Himmler.

‘No, Herr Reichsführer!' he protested. ‘It is nothing of the sort.'

‘Do not play coy with me. I know about that little pied-à-terre you keep on Bleibtreustrasse.'

‘One lady friend is enough.'

‘Apart from one's wife, you mean?'

‘I swear there is nothing between us. She is my driver, nothing more!'

‘If you say so, Fegelein. But now, having seen her for myself, I must admit I might forgive you the transgression.'

‘I bring good news,' said Fegelein, anxious to change the subject. ‘The Diamond Stream device is fully operational.'

‘Are you certain?'

‘Hitler himself made the announcement. Diamond Stream is to be installed in all remaining V-2s.'

Himmler grunted with approval. ‘You realise, Fegelein, that this could change everything?'

‘Yes! That's why I came here in person, Herr Reichsführer, just as soon as I possibly could.'

‘We must find a way', said Himmler, ‘to ensure that, from now on, Hagemann answers to us. To us and to nobody else.'

‘But how?' asked Fegelein.

‘We'll try a little flattery and, if that doesn't work, I'm sure we can come up with some way to blackmail him into seeing things our way. He must have some weakness. Have you seen him at the Salon Kitty?'

Fegelein shook his head. ‘I don't think he goes in much for cabarets.'

‘Gambling?'

This time Fegelein only shrugged.

‘Well, find something!' ordered Himmler. ‘And if nothing turns up, invent it. A well-placed lie can break him just as easily as the truth and as soon as we have shown him we can do it, he will come around.'

Fegelein said nothing, but he knew exactly what was going on.

At this stage, even rockets equipped with the Diamond Stream device would not be enough to ensure a German victory, as Hitler perhaps believed.

But they, and control over the men who had built them, might well be enough to alter the peace that came afterwards.

Even Himmler understood that the war was lost and that nothing could be done until Hitler was out of the picture. But that day was fast approaching and Himmler had convinced himself that he had to be ready to take his place as leader of the country, or whatever remained of it.

Himmler had even gone so far as to send out feelers to the Swedish diplomat Count Bernadotte, hoping to make contact with the Allies.

‘They respect me,' he had confided to Fegelein. ‘They view me now, as they have always done, as a worthy adversary.'

In this, Fegelein knew, Himmler was as delusional as Hitler.

But he was right about one thing – the Allies would indeed respect the weaponry he still commanded.

Fegelein knew perfectly well that he was about to become irrelevant. From now on, he would have to fend for himself, or else be banished to the same corridor of hell where a place had been made ready for his master. But Fegelein wasn't worried. He had already begun to prepare for his departure from this doomed city and for the new life he would begin far away, with Fraülein Simonova at his side.

Hunyadi opened his eyes.

He had fallen asleep, still seated on his throne of ammunition crates, with his elbow on his knee and his chin resting in the cup of his palm.

Someone had hold of his shoulder and was shaking him gently awake.

Blearily, Hunyadi focused on a man wearing the blue woollen tunic of a Luftwaffe flak gunner.

‘They’ve picked up a signal,’ said the man. ‘Our radio man says you’re to come up at once, before we lose it.’

With his feet effervescing from pins and needles, Hunyadi hobbled after the man, following him up to the firing deck.

It was dawn. Mist blanketed the city, punctured here and there by monstrous cobras of smoke where buildings had caught fire.

Men, stripped to the waist, were washing the soot from their faces in a bucket of water. One man was busy painting another white ring around the barrel of the gun.

The radio operator beckoned him over. ‘We have a signal on one of the frequencies you gave us.’ He took off his headphones and handed them to Hunyadi.

Hunyadi pressed one of the cups to his ear and heard a series of faint beeps, divided into sets of five.

‘Definitely some kind of code,’ remarked the operator.

Hunyadi nodded in agreement.

‘The signal is strong,’ the radio man continued, ‘but I have no way to pinpoint its location.’

‘You let me worry about that,’ replied Hunyadi. ‘Just tell me if the signal cuts out.’ On the flak tower’s telephone network, he put in a call to the Plotzensee power station, which managed the western districts of the city. Earlier in the day, Hunyadi had contacted each of the four major power stations in the city, with orders to wait for his call, at which point they would cut electricity to the entire district under their control. ‘Now,’ he commanded.

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ said a voice at the other end.

‘Now!’ shouted Hunyadi. Through a pair of binoculars, he watched a carriage of the city’s S-Bahn electric-railway system grumble to a halt at the edge of the western district. People came out of their houses and looked around.

‘Anything?’ he called to the radio man.

‘Still transmitting,’ came the reply.

Over the next minute, Hunyadi put in three more calls to other power stations scattered across the city. The Humboldt station, in the north of Berlin, had been hit by incendiary bombs during the raid and was already suffering a black-out. The rest, in turn, cut their power for five seconds before switching it back on again.

Such losses of electricity were not uncommon in a city constantly struggling to repair bomb damage. Some power cuts lasted for days.

It was only when the Rummelsburg station, which governed the eastern district of the city, cut its electricity that the radio man called out that the transmission had ceased abruptly.

Five seconds later, Rummelsburg switched the power on again.

‘Nothing,’ said the radio operator.

‘Wait,’ ordered Hunyadi.

Seconds passed.

Then, suddenly, the radio man called out, ‘He’s back! He’s back!’

Hunyadi walked to the eastward-facing corner of the platform and looked out towards the Friedrichshain Park, the sprawling cemetery and the Baltenplatz circle in the distance, as if to glimpse the signals, rising like soap bubbles into the morning sky.

‘Congratulations, Inspector!’ called the radio man. ‘Whoever you are looking for, he is as good as in the bag.’

But Hunyadi’s face betrayed no sign of satisfaction. As far as he was concerned, his work was only just beginning.