The Other Side of Love (49 page)

I

The bells of London’s churches and cathedrals boomed their exultation through the open windows of Major Downes’s flat. From Morpeth Terrace came laughter and off-key voices singing

“There’ll Be Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover’. Horns honked in joyous discord in Victoria Street.

It was Tuesday, 8 May 1945, officially designated by His Majesty’s government as Victory in Europe DaywAfter almost six years of war, tens of millions dead, a continent laid waste, the Third Reich was no more.

Aubrey, slumping in the major’s sagging horsehair sofa while his superior poured two large Scotches, was thinking of those who hadn’t made it through - of Araminta, of Peter. Kathe, he thought. For months now the Swedish agent had received nothing from her, and no matter how often he told himself that wartime mail at best was uncertain, that the saturation bombing surely had disrupted if not destroyed the German postal system, that numerous post offices had gone up in flames along with tons of letters, he could not stem the fear that she was among his dead. He had been summoned here to be given his next assignment. His mind was made up. If ordered to Germany, he would search for her; if ordered to stay m England, he would request leave and find his way over there to search for her.

To peace,”

the major said, raising his glass. To peace,”

Aubrey echoed in a subdued tone.

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Downes sat behind his desk.

“We’re going to have a bad time of it with the Russians,”

he said.

“The Russians, sir? Not the Germans?”

“What’s the matter with you, Aubrey? You know better than I that all Germany’s crawling in the mud. Whatever Nazi brass are left will be taken care of by the War Crimes Commission. Stalin’s another story. This is top secret, but we’ve managed to obtain the Soviet plans to take over the other three sectors of Germany.”

The previous February, at a conference in the Russian city of Yalta, Churchill, Stalin and the dying Roosevelt had hammered out the fate of their not wholly defeated enemy. The Reich would be divided into four zones of occupation: British, American, Russian and French.

“The Russians aren’t in any condition to start another go round,”

Aubrey said.

“Those plans outline Stalin’s strategy to communize all of Europe and Germany’s their beachhead. The Prime Minister has stressed that we must keep our CI4 network intact and secure. The day after tomorrow you’re to fly to Hamburg. You’ll see who’s left in our own sector.”

“What about Berlin, sir?”

Berlin, deep in the heart of the Soviet sector, would be administered by the four occupying armies.

“Later. Even in our own sector, it’s going to be a bit dicey, finding who’s left of our people.”

Aubrey winced and thought: Please God, finding Kathe.

“Millions of Germans’re already on the move getting out of the way of the Soviet armies,”

the major said.

“And, now the war’s over, there’ll be millions of conscripted labourers and displaced persons finding their way back to their own countries. Jews trying to discover if they have any of their families left. Our estimation is that this’ll be the greatest mass migration in human history.”

“Chaos.”

“Yes, but that’s to our advantage. It will be easier for our agents to remain submerged and operational.”

“Operational, sir? The war’s over. Don’t they deserve some peace?”

“It’s up to you to assess who has communist leanings.”

The level Canadian voice held a warning that Aubrey’s last remark was out of line.

“Approach only those who remain unimpeachably loyal to us. Now, about Fraulein Kingsmith”

At her name, Aubrey’s hand jerked and his drink splashed.

“Have you heard from her?”

“Not since that January message about evacuating German farmers from Poland. You decoded it.”

Aubrey slumped back in the horsehair. .

“She’s not strictly one of your network,”

the major continued.

“If you find her - when you find her you’re not to ask her to do

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anything further. However, you are to issue a stern reminder that she signed the Official Secrets Act.”

“She won’t break her oath.”

“No, of course not. But she should be aware that she can’t expect the least recognition from us.”

Aubrey’s eyes narrowed.

“Are you saying, sir, that if she needs help we won’t give her any?”

“Nothing would please us more than to pin on the medals she deserves. But unfortunately that’s impossible.”

“So we’ll leave her high, dry, and nailed to the wall?”

Aubrey asked in low clipped anger.

“KingsmithF

“Sorry, sir.”

“The same goes for every one of our people. Exposing CI4 is a luxury we can’t afford.”

The major set down his glass, and it vibrated with the force of the Catholic cathedral’s bells.

“Go on home, Aubrey. Spend the rest of the day celebrating with your family.”

Captain Wyatt Kingsmith now was part of G5, the United States Military Government. He went about his tasks with an angry-eyed vigour that was buttressed by two words: Araminta, Buchenwald. Araminta had been robbed of her life and he of their shared future by a Nazi rocket. And as for Buchenwald … He had arrived at the concentrationcamp the day after its liberation, and at that hour for him the clear German sunshine had turned forever black.

He was in the Legal Division. According to Military Government Law Number 1, all Nazi laws were to Jfe abrogated. Some of the thousands of pieces of legislation enactew since 1933 were harmless enough. Others were connected either openly or deviously to the racial laws and to maintaining Hitler’s absolute dictatorship. Every law shadowed with the swastika must be wiped from the books a staggeringly complex task that Wyatt realized would take many people many years to complete.

In early August, just after the atom bombs were dropped on Japan, he was transferred to Berlin.

The fallen Quadriga atop the battered Brandenburg Gate looked down on macabre destruction. The Tiergarten with its shady trees and magnificent flowerbeds had vanished into the mud of battle, with burned tanks and army vehicles rusting where they had been abandoned. Weeds grew rankly in the ruins of the Hotel Adlon and the Pariser Platz. The government buildings of the Wilhelmstrasse, including Hitler’s beige marble Chancellery, were toppled. Along the Unter den Linden, the famed trees had burned to stumps while the magnificent museums, the palace, the opera-house, the Lutheran

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Cathedral, the fine hotels and shops - including the Berlin branch of Kingsmith’s were either shells or craters. Decaying corpses reeked corruptly beneath fallen buildings, broken sewer lines spread hideous odours. Berliners whispered and scurried like ghosts.

The Griinewald was in the American Sector. Several days after his arrival, Wyatt drove out there. The small lakes must have acted as bull’s-eyes for Allied bombardiers: every house that edged the water was destroyed.

He turned off the ignition at his uncle’s home, pushing open the gate and walking slowly along the drive, halting. Hands in his pockets, shoulders slumped, he gazed at the shambles of the gingerbread mansion where he had been welcomed first as a kinsman then as a suitor. One side had collapsed into a mound of rubble, while the other was a facade with chimneys pointing up at the clear blue sky. As he stared, a flight of starlings burst from the gaping bay window of what had been the drawingroom.

The ruins depressed him utterly. Then into his mind popped the memory of the toothless skeletal ancient with a star on his striped uniform who had shuffled painfully to greet him, an ancient who had turned out to be twenty-five years old, a former student at the Sorbonne, who had collapsed while telling Wyatt his background, dying a few hours later. They deserve whatever they got, the Germans, he thought.

” steer clear of them all, and that goes for the Kraut Kingsmiths, too.

He kept his resolution slightly over a month.

Wyatt and thirteen other officers were billeted in the formerly fashionable district of Dahlem not far from the Kommandatura building. The roof and attics of the big yellow stucco house had been damaged, but the two other floors had miraculously survived intact, even to the window-panes. On this balmy afternoon in midSeptember, as he drove up, the door was flung open by a scrawny jug-eared old butler, who smoothed his patched green apron and bowed obsequiously. The housekeeper, Frau Lowe, welcomed him with equal deference. (Though the servants were paid by the local German authorities, they would have worked for nothing: the house was heated, and they were fed one meal a day for which they didn’t have to surrender food coupons - a meal that represented two days”

calories in German terms.) Wyatt responded with brusque nods, trotting up the stairs.

His airy room, papered with pink flowers as if for an adolescent girl, had windows that overlooked the front garden. At shrill cries, he went to look out.

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The two little boys who lived in the basement of the ruins opposite were at it again. The taller child pulling at the other’s ear, they danced around. The frailer boy screeched with pain but refused to unclench his fist; obviously he had found a treasure, maybe a scrap of potato peeling, maybe even a cigarette butt that could be traded for a thumb-size potato. With German adults, Wyatt never failed to conjure up Araminta or Buchenwald. But what did Nazi war crimes have to do with these hungry six-year-olds? He trotted downstairs to the diningroom, where the long table was already set, spreading butter thickly on a couple of white rolls. Outside, the combatants rewarded him with smiles and polite Nazi salutes.

When he got back to his room, Lieutenant Joe Hedpeth was sprawling on the pink chaise-longue. Hedpeth, a goodnatured gold brick in the Counter-intelligence Corps who shared the big blue-tiled bathroom, often dropped by to shoot the breeze.

“Got any Jerry relatives, Kingsmith?”

“Why?”

“Bunch of papers came in from the Public Safety guys. One for a Frowline Kingsmith. It’s not your regular German name.”

Wyatt occupied himself with lighting a cigarette.

“What sort of papers? A FragebogenT Every German was compelled to fill out a Fragebogen, a six-page single-spaced questionnaire that included questions about Nazi affiliations.

“Nope. Just this.”

Hedpeth extended a smeared white-on-black photocopy.

Kingsmith, Kathe

Age 26, birthplace Berlin. Father AlPed Kingsmith, British subject at time of her birth. Deceased. Mother Clothilde von Graetz Kingsmith. Deceased. Halfbrother, Colonel Siegfried von Hohenau, aide to uncle, General Baron Klaus von Hohenau of the OKW, both deceased.

Worked in Secret Files of the OKW 1940-5. Admits to having Top Security Clearance. Admits to knowing Hitler so well as to be invited to Berchtesgaden. Denies being party member. This checks out with party register. Held at Ober Tappenburg for further questioning.

Just as well she’s not related,”

Hedpeth was saying.

“OK, she wasn’t on the Big List”

- he meant the party register: the entire Nazi Party membership rolls had been discovered awaiting pulping at a Munich paper mill -

“but everything else about her spells N-A-Z-I.”

He g° to his feet.

“See you at chow,”

he said, leaving through the connecting bathroom.

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Wyatt still held the photocopy. The chemical smell acrid in his nostrils, he told himself: She spells Nazi. Leave her alone. Leave her the hell alone.

IV

He hitched a ride on a Flying Fortress to Frankfurt, headquarters of United States Force, European Theater. Borrowing a jeep, he wound through farmland and destroyed villages of half-timbered medieval houses. Beyond Aschaffenburg, with its square palace, he drove up the Odenwald - Odin’s wood. Mythical home of the king of the Norse gods, great rolling hills clad in evergreen. He turned into a deep forest posted with warnings that trespassing was strictly forbidden Streng Verboten. He came to great barbed-wire walls. He showed his pass. Sentries admitted the jeep through the gates with Ober Tappenburg carved into the overhead arch. He moved slowly among thousands of Germans clad in oddly assorted civilian clothes and ragged uniforms who milled between the barracks. He parked in the designated area, walking briskly. But as he neared the hoops of barbed wire that set apart the women’s detention-centre, his footsteps lagged. What was he doing here? Why couldn’t he dig a moat between the past and the present? Why couldn’t he lock Fraulein Kathe Kingsmith in the streng verboten dungeon of his memory?

A WAC corporal with pillar legs and a plain pleasant red face led him up an echoing wood staircase. Women’s voices ebbed and flowed around them on the long corridor.

“You’ll have no problems talking to her, Captain,”

the WAC said tentatively.

Wyatt didn’t respond.

“She speaks terrific English, just like she was born in jolly old London town. I hope this isn’t out of line, sir. But she’s been locked up for two months and she’s not in tip-top health.”

“Have you suggested she should ask for a medic?”

“Yes, sir, I have. But all she wants to know is when she’ll be questioned so she can get out of here.”

“A whiner, then?”

“No, no, I’m putting it all wrong. The way I figure it, she’s sort of