by D A Kent
Sylvia chatted to Manny for most of the meal. He knew London a little and had attended lectures there one summer. After coffee, as people began to make their excuses, Gunn stood up and made theirs.
‘I feel totally humbled,’ Sylvia commented, on the way back to the cabin. ‘I really hope it all works out for them all now. I’m glad I met them.’
‘Yes, me too,’ replied Gunn vaguely. Back at the cabin, he unzipped her dress and unfastened her necklace. She turned to him, unsure, but he simply planted a tentative kiss on her shoulder. Her eyes opened wide, but he appeared not to notice, simply saying:
‘I’m off for a snifter with Sol. You get yourself into bed, sweetheart. Look after our baby. Sleep tight and I’ll see you in the morning.’
Seething with rage, Sylvia climbed into her bunk, pulling the scratchy sheet around her. Of course, they were deeply ‘under cover,’ but surely this was unnecessary. A snifter would have rounded the evening off properly. Then, thinking about the people she had just met, she felt ashamed of complaining about something so petty. Tomorrow was going to be an early start.
‘Not quite Homer’s wine dark sea, but it will do,’ Solomon smiled as Gunn joined him on the forward deck. The breeze was fresh and the sea eager beneath them. ‘I used to quote from Homer in my head when the Germans beat me.’
‘You must know Achilles and Hector pretty well.’ Gunn sat down and leaned back against a crate marked ‘Capernaum.’ He handed Solomon his hip flask. ‘Whisky?’
‘Don’t mind if I do.’ Solomon grinned. ‘Yes, I got to know them very well. Especially Hector… Hector of the glinting helmet, the Master of Horses. He paused and took a shot, coughed and passed the flask back to the Englishman. ‘I always wondered why he didn’t just hand Paris over to the Achaeans or kill the irritating schmuck himself.’
‘Oh, that is good,’ Gunn laughed out loud. ‘Chop the little bugger up and have him thrown from the topless towers of Ilium to land at Menelaus’s feet?’
Their laughter rose, then faded away on the breeze. Their silence was companionable. Then Sol shifted slightly and observed:
‘Of course, it would have made no difference. The Achaeans would still have launched their war on Troy and Hector would have lost a brother for nothing.’
‘You know there is a legend that Aeneas fled Troy and founded Britain.’ Gunn took a sip from the flask and passed it back. ‘Not well-known, but accepted as fact for a long time.’
‘So you lot are descended from those who lived on the windy plains?’
‘Explains a lot, doesn’t it?’
‘Of course. No wonder you are such a cold and awkward people.’ Sol’s expression darkened a little, as clouds obscured the moon. ‘In the end, Hector was bonded by the deep ties of blood. That is something I see on this ship, and in what is happening in Israel. Ties of blood and memory kept us going for two thousand years from the day the Romans burned the temple and we began to wander again, and through everything such things kept us alive. Even in the camps they kept us alive.’
‘And now you are going home.’
‘Yes, home, a place I have never seen other than in stories or my imagination.’
‘Make it a good one then.’
‘Oh, I will, my friend. I will grow lemons and oranges and, when I grow old, I will sit on the porch and watch the sun set on Galilee.’
‘Good plan.’
‘First of all, I will be heading for Jerusalem just to see it.’ Solomon brought himself up short. ‘Listen to me, I talk too much.’
‘Don’t all soldiers, given the chance?’ Gunn grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘We have to.’
‘True.’ Sol turned and looked at Gunn. ‘So, why are you going to Israel, you and your ‘wife’?’
Gunn noted the quotation marks in Sol’s tone.
‘Long story short, to bring a family a legacy and to save their lives.’
‘That is quite a thing.’ Solomon pursed his lips and gave a nod of appreciation. ‘And do you know this family?’
‘No,’ replied Gunn.
‘So why do this? It’s just another Jewish family. Would their loss make that much difference?’
‘It would to me.’ Gunn folded his arms and closed his eyes for a moment. ‘It matters to me.’
‘I see.’ Sol pressed no further. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a journal bound with string. He tore off a strip of paper and scribbled an address, using a stub of pencil he retrieved from behind his ear. ‘Take this. You can reach me care of this address if you ever need me.’
‘I will.’ Gunn nodded and stood up. ‘I will bid you good night. I will come and sit with you on that porch one day.’
‘Good.’ Solomon laughed and handed Gunn his hip flask.
Gunn shook his head. ‘Keep it, and remember Hector every time you drink from it.’
‘You and Hector.’
Gunn crept into the cabin, trying not to wake Sylvia. He stood watching her for a moment, then pulled the sheet back over her gently, gave her a kiss and climbed into his bunk.
Chapter 9
Next morning, Gunn was surprised to find Sylvia already up, sitting on the balcony with several large sheets of paper which the purser had given her. Jones’s papers were spread out on the table, starting with the letters Marta, Louise’s sister, had sent through about Mueller and his work. As his secretary, she had access to everything. Sylvia knew from working at the trials how meticulously the Nazis had documented things. Marta’s material was no exception. Mueller, who had qualified as a doctor, had been involved in the early stages of a programme of sterilisation and euthanasia. After a while, he was moved to High Command, where his influence burgeoned and became more general. Then, in 1940, he was sent to France, near Chartrettes. That was around when Marta’s letters stopped. It was almost as if Mueller had ‘dropped off the radar.’ However, he had certainly been a prolific correspondent. Sylvia recognised some, though not all, of the names mentioned from her time in Nuremberg. As she skimmed through the letters, she made notes in colour on her chart and drew a diagram, which resembled a slightly mad spider’s web.
Something stopped her in her tracks. ‘Gunn, come and have a look at this.’
‘Explain it to me, Sylv. My brain is all fogged up with wine and whisky.’
‘You’re just impossible,’ she said crossly.
‘Probably. But that’s not relevant.’
She glared at him. ‘Right, it seems that Marta has given the names of various men who would be involved in a pipeline in the unlikely event that the German regime were to fall. Odd really, because at the time she was working for Mueller, they all still thought the Reich would last a thousand years. Anyway, it’s as we thought.’ She paused and took a sip of water. Gunn did not react, beyond a grunt of acknowledgement. ‘One of those named, and quite high up in the command structure, is one Lothar Kaltenbrunner.’
‘Nothing remarkable about that name, except I get an image of a severe haircut and rolls of fat over the back of an SS collar. German by Central Casting.’
Sylvia laughed, despite herself. ‘In parentheses, it gives an alias for Kaltenbrunner.’
‘George Cumberland?’
‘In one.’
‘That could be awkward at Whites and the British Motor Racing Club.’
‘Extremely. We’ve got him bang to rights now. Kaltenbrunner was on that scrap of paper of Joneses.’ She pulled it out again to show him. ‘I suppose we just stick to our original plan, and get all of this safely to Israel. But what happens when we don’t show up in London, as George expects? Won’t he smell a rat?’
‘Sylv, he won’t know where to start,’ Gunn reassured her. ‘France is a big place. I know Le Mec clocked us in Marseille, but I reckon I put the frighteners on him sufficiently. I think we’ve got a few days and that will get us well on the way to Haifa. I’ll go and see about some coffee and breakfast. We can’t have you wasting away. The baby needs to eat.’
He was off again, she tho
ught. Well, it kept him amused. When he got back, he could damn well make himself useful, help her to tidy up the diagram and put a report together to hand over in Israel. Putting Marta’s papers carefully away, she started on Jonathan and Louise’s story. As she had predicted, it felt almost voyeuristic. Their letters, and every single one had been kept, from the time they first met, revealed that Jonathan had been something of a black sheep in his youth. He was sent down from university. His family had to bail him out of a few debts. Then, his father cut him out of his will. He was reinstated to the Jones family fortune when Clarence was killed at Loos.
The Paris trip, where he met Louise, was financed by some birthday money from his mother. Louise’s family were extremely wealthy. Their origins were in Austria but they had been settled in France for some years. They did not practice Judaism, and in fact Jonathan and Louise were married in the little church at Chartrettes, in a quiet ceremony. Sylvia remembered passing it. They had decided to settle there simply because an opportunity came up to buy the house and the land. It had appeared in a newspaper advertisement. They didn’t know the area before but fell in love with it. It was the ideal compromise between town and country, with Paris an easy train journey away. That answers that question, Sylvia thought.
They enjoyed working on the property together. Their one sadness had been that they were unable to have children. They enjoyed entertaining friends and extended family at Chartrettes though. Marguerite and her husband were frequent visitors from Paris; Marta less so. The youngest of the Vogel girls, almost an afterthought for their parents, she had attended university in Berlin in the twenties and had fallen in love with it. For Marta, these years really were ‘the Golden Twenties.’
Marta had stayed on in Berlin afterwards and found secretarial work. There was some talk of her becoming an actress. Movies with sound were being produced by then. Marta was a stunningly attractive girl, with blonde hair and blue eyes and spoke German like a native. Nothing much came of those plans; they were shared by many other girls. However, one evening, Marta had met Dr Mueller at a party, a married man with four young children. The attraction between them was electrifying, like a moth to a flame, as Marta herself had described it. She always portrayed him, even in those early days, as rather a dangerous man.
For the sake of propriety, he had taken her on as his secretary and had installed her in a small apartment not far from the Zoo. After Hitler came to power, Marguerite and Louise implored her to come back to France. She refused. It was as if she was in denial; as if all the measures which were being taken did not and would never apply to her. Marguerite had described Marta in a letter to Louise as ‘a bird in a gilded cage.’ Then, in 1939, just before war broke out, Marta became pregnant.
At a stroke, she woke up to her situation. She had noticed that Mueller had become abstracted and distant, even sometimes looking at her with distaste. Before, he had enjoyed going to parties with her on his arm. He was losing interest in her sexually. She could see for herself what the nature of his work had become and had charitably attributed his new attitudes to stress. However, her eyes were fully open now. As insurance, and in desperation, she began copying everything she could lay her hands on, and sending it to Chartrettes.
Her last letter was particularly poignant. One evening, Mueller had surprised her in the office with a sheaf of papers; her last batch, she had decided, before she tried to leave for France. It might of course already be too late. She was like a rabbit caught in headlamps.
‘Working late?’ Mueller had enquired, menacingly.
She had blurted out the news of her pregnancy, in a clumsy attempt to distract him from the papers. It didn’t work. He tried to get her to tell him where she had been sending the copies. She refused. He was horrified about the pregnancy, called the baby a monster and an abomination, and kicked her hard in the stomach, repeatedly. He had to break off to take an urgent telephone call, whereupon Marta fled back to the apartment, where she miscarried the baby and would have bled to death, had her landlady not found her. Perhaps that would have been a mercy. Her letter was written from the hospital; someone kindly posted it for her. She was arrested there the next day. Jonathan’s enquiries after the war had revealed that Marta had died whilst under interrogation at Gestapo Headquarters.
‘I’ve got you some breakfast, sweetheart,’ called Gunn, giving her a kiss on the cheek. ‘Sorry I’ve been so long. Got chatting. Come on, let’s get you inside. It’s too chilly for you out here; the sun needs to come round a bit more.’ He gathered her up, and all the papers. ‘You’ve been crying’ he observed, when they were back in the cabin.
Sylvia told him Marta’s story. ‘I suddenly felt all emotional. I even got upset about this ridiculous baby of ours, and I know that’s absurd, when I read what Mueller had done. Fancy dragging that poor woman out of her hospital bed.’
‘Not absurd. And it’s not a ridiculous baby.’ He held her gently for a moment and then said: ‘Let’s get some breakfast into you.’
‘What I can’t understand,’ mused Sylvia, fortified by some bread and jam, ‘is why, with all that evidence, Jonathan didn’t turn everything over to the authorities.’
‘Perhaps he had a cynical view of epuration,’ commented Gunn. ‘And he probably didn’t speak German, so he wouldn’t have been able to translate Louise’s correspondence. He and Louise used to write in English, didn’t they’?
‘The other thing’ ventured Sylvia ‘is that Mueller’s name has just been cleared. His ugly mug was in the paper only the other day. I wonder if he worked out though that Louise was in Chartrettes and took a special interest in her? Was it just fortuitous that he was transferred to France? We’ve still got to go through Jonathan’s own papers of course. There are lots of them. I only had a quick look in the Tea Caddy the other afternoon but it’s almost like a diary. There are a few more letters too, from Cumberlands. Anyway, my head is spinning; so many questions.’
‘I think we need to get you on deck for a little walk and some sunshine first. You look decidedly peaky’ said Gunn firmly. ‘Have a look at this amazing scenery and I’ll help you properly later, I promise. You’re doing a fantastic job.’
The breeze on deck was quickening, and the Sidonia was slipping through the waters like a hound let loose from the leash. They had passed Bonifaccio, on the southern tip of Corsica, and were heading out across open sea towards Naples. There was a cry from a child pointing at the starboard bow, and Gunn grinned at the dolphins racing ahead of the ship. He took a few shots with his camera.
‘Like something from a Greek myth.’
‘They do have a word or story for it,’ Sylvia returned. ‘But seriously, what about the papers?’
‘I think it would be naïve to turn them over to the British authorities. They won’t do anything to look after the family, and they won’t arrest Cumberland either, as the father of a Spitfire pilot. Leaving him a free agent, with all that entails.’
Sylvia could see the muscles in Gunn’s jaw tensing. He exhaled. ‘The family will be inheriting some money; that will enable them to get protection, but I really think we should persuade them to speak to the Israelis. There’s bound to be some way of getting close to whatever intelligence services they have in place. I would be quite prepared to take care of Cumberland.’ He smiled, a sad little smile. ‘Almost makes me feel sorry for Edward.’
‘I’m getting cold out here. Let’s go back to the cabin and work on our report. Can you believe we’ll be waking up in Naples tomorrow? Have you ever been there before?’ Arm in arm, and chatting happily about ideas for the next couple of days, while the ship was in dock, they went back to the cabin to continue their reading.
At Queen Anne’s Gate, George Cumberland, who was becoming, it had to be said, somewhat lax with security, took a call from Dr Mueller himself. He didn’t even bother to close the door to his office. Dr Mueller told him that a man and a woman answering the descriptions of the English assets had been seen boarding a boat for Naples. They
would probably arrive in the morning. A little puzzled, Cumberland reiterated his instructions that the female asset was to be brought to him immediately, with the papers. The male asset should be liquidated. All was still well with Operation Crown Jewels in Rome; things were indeed ‘moving into place’ at high levels. Implementation had already begun; it could continue whenever required. They ended their chat with a few pleasantries and reminiscences about boyhood days. Then Cumberland complimented him on his new assistant, Klara Schmidt.
Mueller told him he didn’t have an assistant called Klara. Cumberland made some excuse and ended the conversation in some confusion. Who the buggering hell, then, was that on the telephone the other day? He realised, and swore loudly in German, just as Louis walked past, and threw his cup of tea against the wall. That little bitch was going to wish she had never been born.
‘Good night, Mr Cumberland,’ called Louis. ‘Would you mind locking up, only I have an appointment this evening?’
‘Idiot Pole,’ thought Cumberland. ‘Well, he won’t have overheard anything. Or nothing he can decipher. Let’s hope Mueller can arrange something quickly for tomorrow.’
On board the Sidonia, Sylvia and Gunn were startled to realise that the sun was setting already. They had scarcely looked up from the papers all afternoon. Jones had written a diary which carried on where Marta’s letters left off. It was a very moving account. Because Louise’s family had not practised their religion for many years, they did not consider at first that the measures which were coming in were of any relevance to them. However, they soon realised that they were. As 1941 wore on, life became more impossible. Going to their beloved Paris became unpleasant, as Louise was barred from certain shops, then cafes and, painfully, theatres and restaurants. She had to cram into the last carriage of the Metro. Jonathan would always squeeze in with her, of course, but they soon no longer saw the point in going. The radio was confiscated, and Louise’s bicycle. Jonathan angrily handed his in at the same time, in solidarity.