Flight from Berlin (38 page)

‘Of course.’

The man led Friedl into the guardhouse and turned the register round for him to see. The last name on the list was Rex Palmer-Ward’s. He had arrived less than ten minutes ago.

‘I told him he had to go in or leave,’ the man said. ‘No one’s allowed to wait out here. Gauleiter Weinrich lives on this street.’

‘Thank you,’ Friedl said. ‘We just want to check on him.’

He got back in the car, and Martha drove through the gates, past the puzzled guard.

The main building, a neoclassical villa with a modern annex and outbuildings, could be seen at the end of a long driveway. Pine-shaded grounds and a high surrounding wall afforded the requisite seclusion. It was also, Denham thought, the perfect place to confine an inconvenient Jewish celebrity: the world could see, if need be, that she was being treated well, but they had total control over her.

Rex was not outside the main doors when they parked in the forecourt.

‘He must have gone in,’ Friedl said.

‘Take the dossier with you,’ Eleanor said, a resolute look on her face. ‘Give it to him quickly before that SS car arrives here with Jakob and Ilse.’ She got out, opened the boot, and took it out of her case, placing it in Richard’s open satchel.

Denham and Friedl entered the building with the satchel, leaving Eleanor and Martha with the Hanomag.

Inside was a panelled hall with a reception desk. Flower arrangements beneath spotlit portraits of bespectacled medics. The receptionist was talking to a hefty blonde in a blue and white nurse’s uniform, who turned to look at them without smiling. Denham glanced around.
Where the hell was Rex?

‘What can we do for you, gentlemen?’

Denham hesitated. How to play this. Charm? Or the cold tap
. . .
He took out a cigarette.

‘There is strictly no smoking here,’ she said.

The cold tap.
‘I am Standartenführer Willi Greiser,’ he said. ‘We’re here to question the Jew Liebermann.’

The woman did a double blink. ‘I’m afraid that isn’t possible. She’s a quarantined patient.’

‘Why, does she have TB?’

‘You’ll have to apply to Dr Pfanmüller if you want to see her, but apart from that she’s expecting visitors from Berlin at any minute.’

‘Look,’ Denham said, ‘we can stand here arguing, and you’ll be out of a job tomorrow, or you can stop wasting SS time and take us straight to her. The only thing stopping me shoving you out of the way is your size. I don’t want to put my back out.’

The woman blushed scarlet, her lips forming a perfect O. She said, ‘If you’ll follow me.’

They walked behind her out of the hall and into a bright, modern annex, almost Bauhaus in style, with curved, factorylike windows. Shiny floors had a pleasant smell of ether. On the right they passed a gymnasium with a class in progress. A woman instructor in a leotard was saying, ‘
Hup
,’ trying to get her millionaire ladies to do squat jumps. They left the annex through swing doors and entered the grounds along a winding stone path lit with waist-high lamps.

The lamplight dotted among the pines made the place resemble a lavish stage set. Eventually they came to a sign that read
HAUS EDELWEISS,
and some hundred yards behind it saw another handsome modern building, white and cuboid, also with a reception area but this one with a uniformed guard.

The nurse showed a pass. ‘Werner, I’m taking these gentlemen to see the Liebermann patient.’

The guard unlocked a door that opened into a corridor lined with framed paintings. The nurse led the way. Turning a corner at the end she almost collided with a tall man in a white coat.

‘I’m so sorry, Dr Pfanmüller,’ she said.

A dark man with a square jaw and pomaded hair, he reminded Denham of Luis Trenker, the rugged star of Alpine films. He looked embarrassed.

‘I’m glad we’ve run into you,’ she went on. ‘These men are here to question the Liebermann patient, and I’ve told them they must apply to you—’

‘It’s all right,’ he said with a nod. ‘They can go in.’

‘Oh, but you said—’

‘I’ve sedated her,’ he said to them, holding up a medic’s bag. ‘So you’ll have to be quick. Let’s leave the gentlemen to it, shall we Frau Klott?’ He turned her around by her elbow and guided her at a trot back down the corridor, her face looking up at his for an explanation. Friedl met Denham’s eye. What was going on? They continued along the corridor and heard dance music from a radio, one of the big Berlin dance orchestras. They could still turn back.

The apartment door was open. A narrow vestibule with a lavatory on the left, and, straight ahead, the sitting room. Friedl followed Denham through. Low lighting from a table lamp. Two armchairs strewn with magazines and books, a rug, a table and chairs, and the radio playing, its dial lit with an amber light. He turned it off.

‘Hello, Hannah?’ Denham called, knocking on the open door.

The window was open. Rustling foliage, and a breeze smelling of pine needles. Somewhere in the bushes beneath the sill, a thrush singing.

‘Hannah?’

Another door led from the sitting room, to her bedroom, he presumed, and it was closed. They approached it, treading softly.

Something was wrong.

He tapped on the bedroom door. ‘Hannah?’

There was more than a smell of pine needles in the room.

‘Come in.’ A young woman’s voice. Drowsy.

He pushed open the door to the bedroom, dark inside, and could make out the bed facing him, and Hannah lying under white sheets. She lolled her head towards him, but it was too dark to see her expression.

A loud slam.

The apartment’s door closed behind them; in front of them the bedroom door was pulled fully open. A figure stood in the dark, with the rose glow of a cigarette in his fingers. Its resinous aroma filled the room. A Turkish cigarette.

‘Good evening, Denham,’ said Rausch.

Chapter Fifty-three

T
he black form of a second SD man filled the doorway to the apartment, barring the exit. Denham recognised the same hulking figure with the broken nose who’d demanded his documents on the train.

He turned and met Rausch’s face: the glazed-back brown hair, the high cheekbones, the cold, aphotic stare. A glint against the dark suit, and he noticed the gun, a Mauser automatic, pointing at him. He exhaled slowly, feeling that same strange calm he’d felt when the Gestapo came for him. Some survival instinct, perhaps. Remain still when circled by an aggressive beast, lest motion provokes it to slaughter. Terror, he knew, came later.

‘What have you done with Rex?’ he said.

‘He didn’t make it,’ Rausch said. A mock sadness. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint. It was I who wrote his name in the visitors’ register. Now who have we here?’ He looked past Denham. ‘Friedrich Christian? The warm boy?’ He gave a short, mirthless laugh. ‘An unexpected bonus, I must say.’

‘You should be more careful who you call a warm boy,’ Friedl said.

Rausch stepped into the light of the lamp, a look of profound disgust on his face. He beckoned to the SD man, who walked forwards, pistol drawn, and struck Friedl hard across the head with the butt, sending him crashing to the floor. Rausch watched him writhe for a moment.

‘Denham,’ he said, stubbing his cigarette on the rug next to Friedl’s face, ‘I am filled with admiration. I wanted you to know that before we shoot you. All that time you denied knowledge of the dossier . . .’

He held out his hand for the satchel. Denham did nothing, and the Mauser’s aim moved up to his face. Then he reached over and took it gently from Denham’s hand.

‘You were willing to sacrifice yourself if the hour demanded. You resisted even when you had no hope; you overcame pain; you did not break. In another life, perhaps, you would have made an exemplary SS man.’

Denham gave a melancholy smile. ‘I really didn’t know anything, Rausch. And as for the SS, I drink and smoke too much.’

Rausch sat down in an armchair, the Mauser still trained on its target, the satchel held to his chest. ‘You really wanted to exchange this for a family of Jews? That’s the bit we didn’t buy. What was your scam, tell me. Was the old man offering a king’s ransom if you helped them escape?’

On the floor Friedl moaned.

‘No scam, Rausch,’ said Denham. ‘They’re just people I like. Fellow human beings.’

The eyes narrowed. ‘Fellow human beings . . .’ He gave a thoughtful grunt, lit another Murad with a steel lighter, and leaned back, observing Denham through a ring of yellow smoke. ‘Ye-es, I suppose the Jews are part of our species. But they are not part of our race . . . That’s the point. They are sublimely clever, Denham, to survive as they do by destroying cultures from within, like parasites, like bacilli . . .’ He glanced at Hannah’s sleeping form through the open bedroom door. ‘So few of them, and yet such influence—in the law, in medicine, in banking. We continually underestimate them . . . But here I am, talking away.’

The Mauser cocked with a fluid click.

‘D
’you think they’re all right?’ Eleanor said, not taking her eyes off the main doors.

She and Martha were still seated in the Hanomag in the forecourt of the clinic.

‘Stop biting your nails,’ Martha said. ‘That’s the fifth time you’ve asked in fifteen minutes . . .’

‘Oh Jesus.’

The dark interior of the Hanomag was suddenly lit by the headlights of a car coming up the drive.

Martha turned to look through the back window. ‘All right, get down in your seat . . .’

The two women slid down, almost crouching on the floor of the car, as the grey BMW rolled into the forecourt and parked in a space between two other cars.

Peeking over the door Eleanor made out the heads of Jakob and Ilse in the backseat and saw the driver’s door opening.

A wave of danger washed over her.

‘How are we going to handle this?’ Martha whispered.

T
he SD man held his gun to Denham’s neck while Rausch carefully removed the List Dossier from the satchel. His hand trembled slightly, Denham noticed, as if it were a holy relic, or charged with some astral energy.
Führerkontakt.

Friedl moaned again on the floor. Denham turned to him, but the SD man pushed the gun hard into his neck.

‘Don’t you speak?’ Denham said to him, his face forced back towards Rausch.

Still Rausch stared at the old oilskin cover of the dossier, touching the charred corner, the frayed edges, not opening it. Yellowed corners of paper, the drawings, peeped from the side.

‘Go on, Rausch,’ Denham said. ‘Aren’t you going to take a look?’

He could see the man was struggling with himself, duty fighting temptation.

Heydrich warned you not to look.

Finally Rausch said, ‘It is not my place to know.’

‘What, that your god, your great Hitler, is nothing but a—’

Rausch dropped the dossier, moved quickly, and punched Denham in the stomach, doubling him over
.

The SD man pulled Denham up by his hair to give Rausch another hit, but the Hauptsturmführer was talking now, bare-teethed, his face crimson. ‘Tonight’s report was going to state that British spy Richard Denham was shot while resisting arrest. But you have just inspired me to make you an
extraordinary
offer, to accept or decline as you wish.’

He jerked the barrel of the Mauser towards the open bedroom door. ‘Go in.’ Denham stepped forwards, hands half raised, still gasping for air from the punch. ‘Go.’

In the dim room Hannah slept, breathing in a deep rhythm, long hair covering half her face. A princess in a fairy tale, slumbering under an evil spell.

Rausch said to the SD man, ‘Guard the other one.’ Then he followed Denham in, still aiming the Mauser, and turned on the bedside light. ‘An experiment,’ he said, sitting on the edge of the bed. His face was contorted with hate. ‘We’re going to test your love for your fellow human beings.’ He pointed the gun at Hannah’s temple with a straight right arm. ‘My offer is to spare you, and kill her . . .’

‘No—’ Denham’s head reeled.

‘Your life . . . for
a Jew’s.
’

‘Wait—’

‘I’m going to count to three. One . . .’

‘Rausch, you’ll be well rewarded if you—’

‘Two . . .’

‘You’ve got the dossier, damn it, what more do you want—’

‘Three!’

Rausch looked at where the gun touched Hannah’s temple.

‘All right, take me, not her.’

His trigger finger squeezed, and the sheets surged violently.

Staring at Denham, Rausch’s eyes were bulbous with disbelief.

A syringe was plunged deep into his neck.

He dropped the Mauser on the bed, struggled with Hannah’s fist, and pulled the needle out. The vial was empty. He’d received the full dose.

Noises bubbled from his throat as he tried to stand, alerting the SD man, who clomped in, pistol drawn.

A discharge flash-lit the small room. Denham’s ears were deafened.

The SD man’s head thumped softly as it hit the door. His body crumpled, leaving a red trail down the white gloss, the hole in his forehead small and dark, like a cleft cherry, his final expression surprise.

In Denham’s hand the Mauser felt leaden and filthy. A sharp smell of cordite filled his nostrils.

Rausch had fallen back onto the bed, still gurgling and clutching his throat.

‘You were right about one thing,’ Hannah shrieked, kneeling on the bed, a knee on either side of Rausch’s chest. ‘You—continually—under—esti—mate—us.’ Each word was punctuated with a stab of the needle—in his arm, in his shoulder.

Denham grabbed her wrist and prised the syringe from her hand, feeling all the strength in her body ebb away.

‘Enough,’ he said.

She threw her arms around him and sobbed. ‘Horrible, horrible,’ she said.

‘M
artha, look.’

The pig of a man in a seersucker jacket they’d seen earlier, the one who had changed the tyre, got out of the BMW and walked towards the building’s main doors, where he was greeted by a fat woman in a nurse’s uniform.