The Other Side of Love (61 page)

She examined it.

“He looks like

“Minta,”

she pronounced.

“Not you.”

“How did you get the job at OKW?”

he asked.

She continued to stare at the picture.

“Is his hair red, too?”

“Will you quit playing games!”

The guard cracked his gum and poked his head in the cell.

“Sorry, sir, but time’s up.”

Wyatt jumped to his feet, extracting his fountain pen and a paper that he’d typed up before leaving Berlin.

“No time to argue. Just sign this.”

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Without reading the request to have Wyatt Kingsmith, Captain, US Army Legal Division, act as her counsel, she signed her name.

“Your case is on the docket,”

Wyatt said on his first official visit.

“When?”

she asked without interest.

“The second of February. Which means I have to get a defence together in less than three weeks.”

He took out a yellow legal pad.

“Why were you at Berchtesgaden?”

“Eagle’s Nest,”

she corrected.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake quit the nit-picking! Berchtesgaden’s the generic name. Answer the question.”

“Hitler called a meeting of the High Command. Sigi went with his uncle. The lunch was a social event, women were included, so he invited me along.”

“Was it a Nazi function?”

“Hitler was there.”

“God damn it!”

“You knew Sigi,”

she said reproachfully.

“He wasn’t in the party. Neither was General von Hohenau.”

Til check.”

Wyatt received a written deposition that neither Sigi nor the general was listed in the Nazi register. But so what? They were Prussians with a

“von”

in front of their name. The Army had been their career. They were part of the OKW. Wasn’t Field Marshal Keitel, chief of the OKW, one of the defendants at Nuremberg?

“What about conspiracies against HitleriPWyatt asked as a matter of routine on his next visit.

“Sigi and General von Hohenau took part in the assassination attempt at Wolfsschanze in 1944.”

“The July plot?”

His spine had straightened.

“Why the hell didn’t you throw that on the floor my last visit?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“Kathe, for Christ’s sake! I’m your counsel, not the prosecution. Don’t you realize that this is the only line of defence we’ve got?”

Defence?”

she asked.

“I keep dreaming about those pictures taken in the concentrationcamps.”

Right now our people are having the same nightmares.”

He spoke impatiently.

“Tell me about Sigi.”

Rain had begun drumming on the roof, and several of the women were tapping on the bars, a primitive improvised form of dissonance. Kathe said something.

“I didn’t quite catch that,”

he said.

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‘Could you bring me a chocolate bar the next time? Magda - the woman in the next cell is pregnant.”

“I’ll bring the whole goddam PX if you’d come a single step in my direction!”

“She’s having a bad time.”

Suddenly, without understanding why, he yanked Kathe to her feet. Forcing her chin up, he kissed her.

For a moment her lips parted softly.

He put his arms around her, splaying one hand above her waist, the other below, drawing the slender body tight against his. With the embrace it seemed as if his life had come a full circle. He was back in the flower-decked Tiergarten on that summer evening when he’d first held her. A decade had passed, yet he remained as powerfully attracted - and as ambivalent about her Nazi beliefs. His fingers sought the roots of her breasts.

She struggled to pull away, then slammed her palm at his shoulder.

He released her. Turning to hide his erection, he muttered:

“Finally got your attention, didn’t I?”

After that she reported the little she knew of Sigi and General von Hohenau’s involvement in the plot against Hitler.

After leaving the prison, he drove by the red limestone cathedral. With the tower and spire gone, Frankfurt’s Dom squatted in its nave. Near the sacristy, a woman sauntered along under an umbrella. Her skirt was short, her heels high. Because of the rubble, women wore flat shoes except those who were soliciting.

Since 1 October, when the unenforceable non-fraternization regulation had ceased to be official Occupation policy, whores were everywhere. Most weren’t professionals but what the GIs called

“fraternazis”

or

“furlines’, women seeking to support a family or a child or merely to stay alive themselves, exchanging their bodies for cigarettes, a meal, a Hershey bar. Since Araminta’s death, Wyatt had paid for joyless sex, a release during which he invariably thought of the starvation that had forced his partner into his arms, and of the fact that she probably had cheered herself hoarse at the Fiihrer’s anti-Semitic howls.

This particular

“furline”

spoke excellent if heavily accented English, and there was a hint of derision in her tone as she directed him along Niddastrasse, a reasonably intact street that radiated from the main station. The traffic was heavy. Americans cruising in their cars eyed doorways where shivering women loitered and sometimes a brightly painted young boy.

His woman led him up the dark staircase of a boarding-house that smelt of rancid food and cabbage. Unlocking her door, she

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turned to him. Her face was too strong-featured and arrogant to be pretty, but under her shabby well-cut raincoat she was all slender curves, like Rathe.

She helped him off with his overcoat, draping it on a hanger. Standing by the high-legged bed, she slowly, provocatively unbuttoned her dress, revealing her naked breasts. The nipples were brown, with large aureoles. Kathe’s were pale rose and delicately shaped.

“I’ve changed my mind,”

he said abruptly.

“What is the matter, Captain? Do you crave something exotic? Oh, we can invent such pleasures, you and I. Shall I get another girl? Yes, a trio. Or would you prefer a boy for our third?”

Til pay you anyway,”

he said, reaching for wallet, handing her a five-dollar bill, a fortune in Germany.

He drove the few hundred yards to the station, parking in front of the Excelsior Hotel, where he had a room. He didn’t get out. He stared at the rain beating on the windscreen.

395

1946

Though at the outset many questions were raised about the legality of the Nuremberg Trials, the leaders of the Western Allies, torn on many issues, remained united in their decision: Those responsible for crimes against humanity would be brought to justice. The voices againsjtthe trial grew silent as one after another Aptness testified to the monstrous aberrations within the Third Reich.

The marble-and-mahogany courtroom in Nuremberg’s Justizpalast cast a long and dark shadow over the unpublicized tribunals being conducted across the divided land.

SIR AUBREY KINGSMITH, In the Wake of Hitler

I

Wyatt could find no evidence in the captured records that Sigi or his uncle had been connected to the July plot. Sigi’s death was listed

“In the Service of the Fiihrer on the Ukrainian Front’.

“That was the official reason,”

Kathe told him. She had emerged from her torpor to keep a wary distance in the miniscule cell.

“So many people were involved that it began to reflect badly on Hitler.”

f

“Poor old Sigi.”

Wyatt’s voice was a lovlfrumble.

“So they shot him without a trial?”

“Leave my brother out of this!”

“We have to get some sympathy going here, Kathe, and it’s not like there’s a lot else to grab on to. Sigi arranged for your job at the OKW; that makes him crucial. What we need is a witness that he was in on the plot. Didn’t he have a secret lady-friend, a dentist’s widow?”

“Frau Salzwebel? He never would have talked politics with Frau Salzwebel.”

|Were you under the bed?”

I won’t have Sigi used, or his friends”

“Hold it right there! You’re the client, I’m the lawyer. How did she spell her name?”

“I haven’t a clue,”

Kathe said coldly.

Wyatt, controlling his temper, didn’t say goodbye.

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II

It was a clear breezy afternoon, warm for winter. In the An Der Hauptwache, rubble women were clinking away at the pyramids of ruins while their children played tag around the twisted girders. Adolescent boys chased Wyatt’s car in hopes of a tossed cigarette-butt. Turning into Grosse Bockenheimerstrasse, which in prewar days had been nicknamed Fressgasse,

“Guzzling Street’, for its numerous cafes, pastry-makers and delicatessens, he halted at a shop with a restored window. Here, the International Red Cross was setting up cross-references in an attempt to help the millions of displaced people find each other. Every wall was covered with snapshots and photographs of missing relatives. The three long tables were crowded with people poring over files.

Wyatt took his place in the queue at the desk, well aware that everybody was darting curious glances at the American officer. Him. The clerk with the deep twin furrows between her eyes insisted on helping him ahead of the others.

“My colleagues and I will seek to find a Frau Salzwebel or Salzwedel - we will try every possible spelling in both Berlin and the surrounding area,”

she said officiously.

“If you would be so kind as to take a seat, Herr Captain Kingsmith.”

An elderly hollow-cheeked man looked up, staring openly, then pushed to his feet. Wyatt, dreading being offered a chair, turned to light a cigarette.

“Pardon the intrusion, Captain.”

The hollow-faced man had come over and was speaking in English.

“But I believe that the lady called you Kingsmith?”

Anticipating a question about the Unter den Linden shop, Wyatt nodded.

“Are you by any chance related to Fraulein Rathe Kingsmith?”

“She’s my cousin,”

Wyatt scrutinized the older man. His English was cultivated, and he lacked the obsequiousness currently endemic in Germany. In fact the lines around his mouth would have indicated sardonic humour if it weren’t for the brooding deepset eyes. Because of his age, Wyatt dropped him into Alfred and Clothilde’s circle of friends.

“Were you acquainted with my uncle?”

“I met Herr Kingsmith on a business matter. A highly generous gentleman. But it’s marvellous to hear you speak of Fraulein Kingsmith in present tense. That means she’s in good health?”

“Yes.”

Wyatt stared at his cigarette.

“Thank God for that. Would it be possible to have an address? You see, she saved my life.”

With a slight bow, he said:

“Heinrich Leventhal at your service.”

The small muscles around Wyatt’s eyes tensed. He was remembering a dim, stiffly formal room, Judge Leventhal and Mrs Leventhal

400

not admitting any relationship to him while the judge obliquely worded a request to Kathe for information about his cousin Heinrich Leventhal. That blazing-hot Manhattan afternoon he had told Kathe to steer clear of the Leventhals”

affairs - and later proposed to her. Stunned, he didn’t take the proffered hand.

Leventhal quirked an eyebrow, as if inwardly acknowledging an expected reaction.

“I’m sorry to have disturbed you,”

he said drily.

Wyatt reached to grab the bony fingers.

“Weren’t you in a camp?”

he blurted.

“Twice. It was after my first release in 1937 that I met Fraulein Kingsmith - but possibly she’s told you?”

“Nothing … When you said she’d saved your life, that was a figure of speech, wasn’t it?”

“Hardly. It’s quite a story. Perhaps when you’re finished with your business we can talk?”

“I’m finished,”

Wyatt said.

Heinrich Leventhal glanced at the clerks bent over filing-drawers, then smiled at the younger man.

“I can see that, Captain.”

“You owned the Leventhal department store, didn’t you?”

“It was Aryanized with a more appropriate name, The Berliner.”

“Aryanized! They stole your business.”

“A perfectly legal sale. Not top mark, mind you, but a legal sale according to the laws of the time. The new owners were happy, the Government was happy. As for me, after the deductions I had enough left to help thirty-seven people with their immigration taxes, so I was happy, too.”

Jb

They were sitting in the parked car. Irou have a cousin in New York,”

Wyatt said.

“Judge Abraham Leventhal.”

“Yes. As a matter of fact that’s how Fraulein Kingsmith heard I was in a camp.”

He hit the side of his head.

“How dense of me. She must have been visiting your branch of the family when she met him.”

“He had a son,”

Wyatt said, and clenched his hands on his knees.

“They had a son who died.”

Yes, Myron. My second cousin,”

Leventhal said.

“We were good friends.”