The Other Side of Silence (10 page)

U
p at the Villa Mauresque they were finishing dinner; at least they were until I showed up with the money and the photograph. For a while I let them all think I'd done a great job of getting back the prints and the neg and somehow the fifty thousand dollars as well. I couldn't have felt more popular there if I'd been Noël Coward wearing just a pair of sandals. I hadn't the heart to tell any of them that the whole thing had been merely the first act in an opera that threatened to be longer than
Tristan und Isolde
. So we sat on the terrace under the starry sky, watched by a Pekingese dog and a couple of blackamoor wooden bishops, and I ate some corned-beef hash and drank amarone
and even permitted Somerset Maugham to put my hand to his pink, rictus mouth and say that whatever they were paying me at the Grand Hôtel, he would double it if I came to work for him at the Villa Mauresque.

“Doing what, exactly?” I asked.

The alligator eyes narrowed in their folds of brown skin as he considered the proposition. “I'm a r-rich man,” he said, “and it strikes me that I need protection of some kind. Especially at my time of life. I might be kidnapped. Or blackmailed again. And there are always unwanted visitors at the front gates wanting a book signed. You have no idea. But if you became my security adviser, Herr Wolf, then I'd feel a lot safer. And not just me. My guests, too. Some very famous people come and stay here from time to time. Very famous and just as often even richer than I am. Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Zipkin, the Queen of Spain. And then there's my art collection. As you will doubtless have observed, I have paintings by Gauguin, Matisse, Renoir, Pissarro, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Monet, Utrillo. A man with a gun is just what the place needs most, I think.”

“Who painted that one?” I said.

But Robin Maugham agreed enthusiastically. “This is a brilliant idea, Uncle,” he said. “Your very own Simon Templar.”

“You don't know the first thing about me,” I said, with no idea of who Simon Templar was. “I am not a good man.”

“Look around,” said Searle. “There are no honors and decorations coming the way of anyone in this house.”

“No, indeed,” said Robin.

“I know that you returned with fifty thousand dollars I thought I'd never see again,” said Maugham. “I think that b-bespeaks a certain devotion to principle.”

“Then try this, sir. I'm not sure I could handle the predominantly male atmosphere up here at the villa. Pool parties and rent boys.”

“We're much too old for all those shenanigans now,” said Maugham. “Aren't we, Alan?”

“Speak for yourself,” said Searle.

“What about you, Mr. Wolf? Is there anyone in your life? A woman, perhaps.”

“You managed to make that sound queer,” I said.

“It is,” he said. “To us.”

“I'm not interested in anything like that anymore.”

“You sound exactly like a man with a broken heart,” he said. “You fascinate me, Mr. Wolf. Who was the woman who made you so bitter?”

I laughed. “It took more than just one.”

“Love is just a dirty trick that's played on us to achieve a continuation of the species,” said Maugham. “That's what I think.”

I shook my head. “It isn't like that at all, Mr. Maugham. It isn't something simply mechanistic, as you put it. Love and hate, human feelings and emotion, they're all the same God-given illusion. It's what convinces us that we're here and that we count for something in this universe. When we don't. Not for a second. Everything we feel and that we think—it's all the same cosmic joke. You should know that more than most people, Mr.
Maugham. You've been playing God and inflicting cosmic jokes on your characters for sixty years.”

“I'd no idea you were a philosopher, Mr. Wolf.”

“I'm a German, Mr. Maugham. For us, philosophy is a way of life.”

I'd finished my dinner and now I asked him to show me the garden, and he took his pipe and I my cigarettes down to the grotto by the swimming pool, where there was a large Chinese bronze gong that sounded once a day to announce the cocktail hour. I'd missed that, of course, but Maugham had thoughtfully asked Ernest to prepare me a jug of cold gimlets and while we sat there, we talked and I drank myself into a slightly better mood. Or so I thought.

“One of the disadvantages to playing G-God,” said Maugham, “is that I notice much more than most people. God is merely all-seeing. But I have other senses, too, and while my hearing may not be as good as it was, I can still detect a certain
weltschmerz
in your voice and manner that was not there before. Which is saying something, I can tell you. At the best of times you're just bone dry. But tonight you make Heinrich Heine sound positively full of the joys of spring. So then. It's not over, is it? With this man Hebel, I mean. It was kind of you to pretend it was, but there's something else he's got for sale. Something bigger than that photograph, I can tell.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you for sparing the boys,” he said. “That was decent
of you. They do worry so. But I think you'd better tell me now, don't you?”

“Yes, sir.” I lit another cigarette. “It has to do with your friend Guy Burgess, again.”

“He's not my friend, let's make that quite clear now, shall we? The man is an absolute scoundrel.”

“Clear. Well, it seems that after he and his fellow spy, Donald Maclean, escaped from England in nineteen fifty-one, they traveled by boat to Saint-Malo, where they were met by KGB officers and then driven south to Bordeaux. There they boarded a Soviet freighter bound for Leningrad. According to Hebel, that's a voyage of several days, during which time they were debriefed, at length and separately, by KGB case officers as there was still some suspicion that the British had been complicit in the escape of these two traitors. Anyway, that debriefing was recorded on tape and it's one of these tapes that Hebel's now offering for sale. The unexpurgated confessions of Guy Burgess, is how Hebel described it to me. This is just one tape, but there are others being offered as part of the deal.”

“Good God,” said Maugham. “Dynamite, in other words. Absolute dynamite. The man was a Russian spy at the heart of MI5 for two decades. There's no telling what he knows.”

“I think that's the point of the tape. He is telling. All of it. I haven't heard the tape but I'm to bring a copy here to you tomorrow, after it comes into my possession. He's even lending you the tape recorder to play it on.”

“But what's this tape got to do with me, Walter? I haven't seen Guy Burgess in almost twenty years.”

“Look, this is as much as I know about it, sir. Apparently, Guy Burgess is a drunk and his conversation on the tape—which was described to me as uncensored and wide ranging—includes the allegations that the British suspected he was a spy for years but let him go in order not to compromise relations with the Americans; that he was here for an orgy at the Villa Mauresque, in nineteen thirty-seven. And that immediately following this, Burgess joined the BBC and then MI6. It seems as if the photograph was just the lure to get you to bite. As a way of involving you.”

“If any of this is true, how on earth did Hebel come to be in possession of this tape? And what the fuck does he want me to do about it? I'm not in the service anymore.”

“Look, without hearing the tape, my opinion is this: The whole thing has been cooked up by the Russians to blackmail the British secret service using Burgess and you as cutouts. You're the back door to MI6 and MI5.”

“Story of my life,” muttered Maugham.

“Harold Heinz Hebel is possibly working for Soviet intelligence. The GRU. The KGB. Who knows which service? But it has to be a strong possibility that he came by this tape because the Russians gave it to him. He tells me he wants money for the tape or else he'll send it to the
New York Times
.”

“How much money does he want?”

“Two hundred thousand dollars.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I expect Hebel thinks you are best placed to pay the blackmail money yourself and then persuade—not to say blackmail—the British to pay you that money back. There's Hebel's security to think about, too. It's one thing blackmailing the British down here on the French Riviera. It would be something else to try it in London.”

“Could the Russians really be in it for the money? Nothing else?”

“I don't know. Look, this isn't supposed to be a joke, but the opportunities for the USSR to trade with capitalist countries for some much needed foreign currency are limited. It just might be that extortion is their best export right now.”

“And who better to extort money from than the British security services?” said Maugham. “It's like something out of a novel by John Buchan. Yes. I may not be in the security service loop anymore, but undeniably the last few years have been an intelligence disaster for my country. Richard Hannay may save the day for queen and country, but there are plenty of others who have managed to comprehensively fuck it up: Alan May, Burgess and Maclean, and the fellow now serving fourteen years in prison for handing all our atomic secrets over to the Russians—Klaus Fuchs. By all accounts, the American FBI thinks the British security services are a contradiction in terms, a laughingstock, and they're probably not wrong. A lot has changed since my own service in nineteen seventeen. We were good then. Formidable. Back then boys went up to Cambridge from their public schools to learn how to be lawyers and civil servants, not Russian spies.
Undoubtedly the British government would indeed prefer to keep all of this very quiet. Especially now there's a possibility of our two countries renewing their cooperation on atomic research. And while there's no danger of any of the British newspapers being permitted to publish any of these revelations, American papers are a lot harder to control. Two hundred thousand is probably cheap next to the price of what it's costing Britain to develop an atomic bomb on its own account. Having said that, two hundred thousand is a lot of money for me. A hell of a lot.” He sighed. “Suppose I stump up the cash and the British refuse to reimburse me? What then? Some of these Whitehall people are very tight with money, you know. I mean, really stingy.”

“Then you send it to the
New York Times
yourself.”

“Would that make me a traitor? I don't know.”

“I'd say a good lawyer might convincingly argue that you bought the tape to protect the interests of your country. But that your country let you down.”

“Yes, there is that argument, I suppose.”

I shrugged. “Wait and hear the tape. Who knows? Maybe you'll think it's someone else's problem after you've listened to it.”

“Tell me about this man, Harold Heinz Hebel. What else do you know about him?”

“He's a rat who's giving rats a bad name.”

“You already told me how he blackmailed that poor German captain, von Frisch, in nineteen thirty-eight. But you also said that you met him again, during the war.”

“That's right. It was East Prussia. The winter of nineteen forty-four to forty-five. And that was the last time I spoke to him until this morning at the Grand Hôtel.”

“I think that before we go any further you're going to have to tell me about that. In fact, you need to tell me all you know about our friend Harold Hebel. If I'm going to contact my friends in MI6 to ask for their help here, they will certainly need to know everything you know about this awful man.”

“He's an opportunistic survivor who lives near humans and needs to be exterminated because he carries disease. He's a rat. A rat that deserves to be drowned in a bucket. Now, let me explain why. Let me tell you about what happened in
Königsberg.”

KÖNIGSBERG

1944–1945

I
always loved Königsberg. The capital of East Prussia, it was a beautiful old city and, in many ways, very like Berlin. My mother was from Königsberg, and when I was a child, we used to go there to visit her parents, who ran a Viennese-style café and confectionery near the Kaiser Bridge, and occasionally, to take a beach holiday at the nearby seaside town of Cranz. But most of all I remember the Königsberger Zoo in the Tiergarten, which was one of the best in Europe and I can still recall, aged four, riding on the back of the elephant and seeing the bears. The bear pit at the zoo was even bigger and better than the one in Berlin. My grandfather owned a Mercedes-Benz—one of the
first cars in Königsberg—and, to me, riding in the back of that car was almost as good as riding on the back of the elephant. Until they lost everything in the inflation of 1923 my grandparents were reasonably well off, I think. My grandmother was a good woman, always helping other people. There was a Jewish convalescent home in Luisenthal where she often took unsold cakes from the café and I used to wonder why it should have been this place that should receive her charity. Now I know why; she was herself half-Jewish. Much later, in 1919, my first wife and I went there on our honeymoon and we stayed in my grandparents' villa on the Upper Pond, which seemed to us like the last word in gracious living. We must have visited every attraction the city had to offer, including the Amber Museum—Königsberg is famous for its German gold, as amber is sometimes called—the Prussia Museum, and the zoo, of course, but mostly we just sat in the front garden and stared out at the pond. It was a very happy time for me. The war was over and I was still alive, with all my limbs intact, and in love. My wife adored the place and for a while we even thought about living there. In retrospect, I wish we had. Maybe she would have been spared the influenza that killed her not long afterward. The flu wasn't as bad in Königsberg as in Berlin. Fewer people to spread it, probably; there were only three hundred thousand people living there in the twenties, as opposed to the four million in Berlin.

My being sent to Königsberg in 1944 was supposed to be a punishment and feel like an exile from Berlin, but to me it felt like I was almost going home, especially as, until that summer,
the city and most of East Prussia had been largely untouched by the war. As things turned out it was perhaps fortunate I was away from Berlin and out of anyone's mind when Count von Stauffenberg made his failed attempt at a coup in July 1944, otherwise I might have been swept up in the wave of executions that followed. More than a hundred kilometers to the southeast of Königsberg, Hitler came on German radio and announced he was alive, and if anyone was there to witness a demonstration of loyalty and affection—but only if they were—people breathed a great sigh of relief.

I was a lowly lieutenant, an officer attached to the 132nd Infantry Division and the FHO—the branch of German military intelligence responsible for the Eastern Front—and it was my job to help make meaningful assessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions, and communicate these with the army commanders on Paradeplatz. Those assessments were very simple: The Red Army was poised to annihilate us.

As an officer I was entitled to a room at the Park Hotel, on Huntertragheim Street and close to the Lower Pond. Built in 1929, the Park was the last word in modern luxury; at least it was until almost two hundred RAF Lancaster bombers turned up on two consecutive nights at the end of August 1944 and bombed the city to bits. Almost every building to the south of Adolf-Hitler-Platz, including the famous castle and the cathedral where Kant was buried, were destroyed or damaged. Thirty-five hundred people were killed and tens of thousands made homeless—a foretaste of the terrible fate that was soon to befall
Berlin. The upper floors of the Park Hotel and many of the men living on them disappeared in fire and smoke, but the second floor I lived on was spared and somehow the restaurant next door survived, too, which was just as well as it was one of the few places where German officers were allowed to take girls from the women's auxiliary services who, even in 1944, were sometimes strictly chaperoned.

There was one girl in particular, Irmela Schaper, a signals officer with the German naval auxiliary, of whom I was very fond. I had recently remarried, but that didn't make much difference to either Irmela or me since the city was more or less encircled by the Red Army and it was obvious to both of us that we were probably going to be killed. Irmela was a local girl. Her father worked for Raiffeisen Bank on Sträsemanstrasse not very far away from naval headquarters in the old seaport. I worked in the basement of what had been the post office close to Paradeplatz and we first met in a tobacconist's on Steindamm a short way north of there. We'd both heard that the cigarette ration had arrived in the city and went there simultaneously, only I got there first and bought the last packet. Not that these were much of a smoke, just a roll of cardboard and a few centimeters of inferior tobacco. It's hard to credit what we used to smoke back then. Anyway, she looked very smart in her double-breasted naval uniform, blond and buxom, which is just the way I like them, and as soon as I saw her I offered to share this last packet with her. I'm telling you all this because Irmela is the key to the whole story of what happened with Harold Heinz Hebel, or Captain
Harold Hennig as he then called himself. But you'll have to let me tell this story in my own way; I'm not a professional like you, Mr. Maugham; you'd probably tell me to start more fashionably in the middle instead of at the beginning. Well, maybe I can still do that.

—

T
en each,” I said to her, filling my cigarette case and then handing her the packet.

“That's very gallant of you,” she said, and let me light one for her. She smoked it like a schoolgirl, hardly sucking the stuff in at all, and it made me smile, a little, but not so much that she might have thought I was laughing at her; that would have been impolite and foolish. Most women like to believe they're sophisticated, even when you're pleased that they're not.

“Don't be fooled. My armor is all rusted up and we had to eat my trusty white steed before he starved. If I tried to bow I'd probably fall flat on my face. Since the RAF left town my sense of balance isn't so good. My ears still feel like there's a brass band just around the corner.”

“You mean there isn't? These days I don't hear so well myself. In fact, I may never sleep through a thunderstorm again without thinking Thor is an English bomb aimer in a Lancaster.”

“As far as I'm concerned, ‘sleep' is just a nice word in a fairy story. I'd like to believe in it, but experience and the Ivans have taught me different.”

“Maybe we should get together for a drink one night and see who yawns first.”

“It won't be me. I'm wide awake. You're the most interesting thing that's happened to me since I arrived from Berlin.”

“Don't you like Königsberg?”

“As a matter of fact, I love it.”

“It's my hometown. I used to live here.”

“And now?”

“You call this living?”

“It's better than the alternative, perhaps. Well, now I know it's your hometown I love it even more.”

“It was a nice place to live before the English decided to redecorate it.”

“Let's not think about that now. What do you say we get a boat and you let me row you around Castle Pond?”

“Why would you want to do something so arduous on a warm day like this?”

“I don't particularly, but I can hardly offer to show you around your own hometown.”

“Why not? Frankly, your guess about where anything is now is as good as mine. Yesterday I went for a walk along Copernicus Strasse before I realized it was Richard-Wagner-Strasse. I feel like a stranger here myself.”

“It doesn't matter. The streets are all going to have Russian names soon. This time next year Richard-Wagner-Strasse will probably be Tchaikovsky Prospekt, or Borodin Street.”

“That's a pleasant thought.”

“Sorry. I'm an intelligence officer, but sometimes you really wouldn't think it.”

“I think it's best to know the worst that can happen.”

“That seems to be my job description.”

“We could talk about it over dinner.”

“That's the most pleasant thought I've heard in a long time. Where would you like to go? The safest place for dinner used to be the Blutgericht in the Castle courtyard basement.”

“I know. Until they bombed it.”

“Which leaves the Park Hotel.”

“There's another place I know near the zoo on Erich-Koch-Platz.”

I shook my head. “It can't be the Stadtkeller. That's closed, too.”

“No, this is somewhere else.”

“Not the naval nunnery.”

Nunneries were what we called the dormitories where most of the women's auxiliary services were housed.

“No, but it's somewhere quiet, candlelit, with just the one exclusive table. Mine.”

“I like the place already.”

“After the bombing my parents left their apartment and went to live at their country house in Pillau. I stayed on. The auxiliary service commander thinks they're still living there.”

“Which means that you don't have to keep the service women's curfew.”

“Exactly.”

“Nice.”

“So. You're invited for dinner. It's canned stuff, mostly. But my father did have quite a decent selection of Mosels.”

“Suddenly I seem to have quite an appetite.”

“Shall we say eight o'clock?”

I glanced at my watch. “That's going to be the longest five hours of my life. What am I going to do with myself until then?”

“So go row a boat.”

And that was it. I went to her parents' apartment in Hammerweg Strasse for dinner. She cooked me a meal, I drank a couple of bottles of nice cold Mosel, and within a couple hours of me arriving there, we were lovers. That's how things were in those days. Implausibly fast. Uncomplicated. Nobody mentioned love or marriage or consequences. Nobody thought about the future because nobody thought they had a future. Really, you can't beat how easy life can be when you think there isn't going to be a tomorrow. Weeks passed like this and together, as winter arrived, we celebrated what we assumed might be our last few months on earth.

Irmela was tall and athletic. She was also highly intelligent, which was why she was working as a lightning maid in the naval signals section. She had to be intelligent to encrypt all communications using a special four-rotor code machine called the Scherbius Enigma before sending them. Before the war, she'd studied mathematics at Albertina University on Paradeplatz. The university was destroyed, like almost everything else in Königsberg, and while many people, including me, still took the risk of going into
the remains of the university library in search of books—Gräfe und Unzer, the largest bookstore in Europe and opposite the university, had been completely consumed by flames after a napalm bomb fell through the glass roof—General Lasch, the military commander of Hitler's northern army, had his army headquarters in a bunker deep under the ruins. For several weeks I was just happy to see a lot of Irmela, who was an enthusiastic and noisy on-the-top kind of lover with considerable experience of men, which I came to appreciate. She knew I was married and didn't want anything from me except my company and my jokes, which in those days were a lot better than they are now. Experience has taught me that it's better to be serious, and I should know; I've tried and failed to be serious on thousands of occasions.

After the British bombing, the Russians halted their attack on the city for the winter and regrouped. Somehow the Alhambra movie theater on Hufenallee managed to keep going despite having been hit by a bomb, and while plays were no longer performed we often went there to see a movie, even though that always meant having to sit through newsreels telling us how well the war was going for Germany, and how victory would be ours in the end. Sometimes, after the film, Irmela would ask me if things were really as good as the Ministry of Truth and Propaganda described, which was a safe and secure way of asking if they were as bad as everyone said they were. Mostly I said that reports of mass rape and atrocities that stemmed from East Prussian towns nearer the Russian front were always exaggerated. But she knew I was lying and not because she thought that I
believed in the final victory; she knew I was trying not to scare her, that's all. And one day toward the end of October 1944, she confronted my lies and evasions head on. Of course, she'd read some of the signals traffic about a place called Nemmersdorf, which was about a hundred kilometers east of Königsberg; she also knew that I'd been there to report on the situation for the FHO. We were in bed at her parents' place in Hammerweg Strasse at the time, and had just finished a particularly noisy bout of lovemaking.

“Christ,” I said, “I hope the neighbors don't complain. Anyone would think I was raping you, or something.”

That was the only time she hit me.

“Don't make jokes about that kind of thing,” she said gravely. “I don't know a single girl in the auxiliary service who isn't petrified about what's going to happen when the Ivans turn up. You hear things. Bad things. Terrible things. We're all terrified.”

“It's not as bad as people say.”

“Liar,” she said. “
Liar.
Look, Bernie, neither of us is a Nazi. The Gestapo aren't listening. Just for once don't spare my feelings. I know you're trying to stop me from worrying, but I also know you were somewhere near Nemmersdorf. Your name is on the report. You don't have to give me the details, only please tell me if anything of what I've heard about that place is true or not. If the Ivans really are as monstrous as people say they are. Or if the whole thing really is meant to deter us from surrendering. Which is the other rumor, of course. That the Ministry of Truth is trying to scare us out of surrender.”