by David Boyle
After the attentions of Stumpf and a few like him, mainly Nazis who had lost control of whatever used to restrain them, Xanthe felt she needed advice from a tough woman. “Listen Sigrid, can I ask you something else? What can you do when they hit on you – the Nazi ones, I mean?”
Sigrid looked suddenly concerned. “Are you having trouble with anyone? If so, we can tell Boris. He’s our senior government handler, a lugubrious type who I don’t trust at all. But he probably has the power to haul someone off to the concentration camp if we ask him nicely…”
“Heavens no, nothing like that.” The last thing Xanthe wanted was to attract any kind of attention. But there was a worryingly intense element to some of the men she had met, something frenetic, almost frightened. She was unsure quite how to conduct herself as a foreign correspondent. The men never received this kind of attention. It made her nervous. And on one occasion, she was forced to slap a young army officer who had tried to pull her, quite literally and bodily, out of the hotel foyer with him.
“No,” said Xanthe, attempting to reassure. “Just want to be the best reporter I can.”
“Listen honey, I know what it’s like. The thing is to cultivate a formidable hide like a rhinoceros and not to look anyone in the eye except to spit in them, if you can possibly avoid it. Then no blushing, no intense gazing, no smiling, just tough rawhide. With me? Attagirl.”
Xanthe thought about this conversation as she headed down to the hotel bar in the Adlon, hoping that Ralph would keep his word and come and find her later in the evening.
“Fraulein!” said a voice as she steered through the large wooden revolving doors. It was hardly the greeting she had expected, and the usual impromptu American party was already well under way. The alcoholic noise was rising. In the corner were the usual crew from the Herald Tribune, with their correspondent Barnes in his habitual spot, holding court. For a moment, she could not see where it came from.
It took her a moment or so to recognise Gustav Stumpf, in his party uniform with black armband; he carried a cap under his arm and was wearing what appeared to be glorified riding gear. Xanthe blanched a little, wondering what she would have felt if she had seen someone dressed in this way in Cincinnati Main Street. Might she not have felt he looked a little ridiculous?
“Oberleutnant. I didn’t expect to see you.”
“The pleasure is all mine, Fraulein Xanthe.”
She realised she had to think swiftly. Why was Stumpf there? Was it the usual reason – basically lust – or was it some other reason? Was he actually suspicious of her or was he trying to impress her in that insane get-up? She had done nothing to engineer the reunion with Ralph in Kiel, apart of course from becoming the accredited correspondent of the Chicago Tribune. Still, she had to assume the worst.
Now he had pushed his way through the Americans and was there before her. “Fraulein,” he said. “Let me say how delightful it is to be in the same city as you.”
She felt stupid, aware that – if she had been older, or more sophisticated – she would have known how to reply to this. She um-ed and ah-ed.
“Let me immediately explain my reason for trespassing upon your time. I would like to invite you to the theatre next week.”
She searched for a valid excuse but the time elapsed before she had one.
“Thank you, I very much appreciate it,” she said.
What would an experienced foreign correspondent do? Play for time…
“Listen, Oberleutnant, as I’m sure you understand, I haven’t been in Berlin long and I want to do the best I can. I don’t want to appear ungrateful. But I am unsure how best to…”
Then she had a brainwave. Of course she wanted to go to the theatre: what reporter would fail to seize the chance to forge a relationship with a contact at a high level?
“I tell you what. I will come with you on two conditions,” she said. “First, that it will be partly work for me, that you understand that and don’t mind it – I want to write about life in Berlin in wartime. Second, that you don’t mind if I bring a friend.”
“A friend! Why of course. And I will bring one too. We shall be a foursome. Do you Americans not have a phrase, ‘double date’? I shall meet you here on Tuesday, if that is agreeable. That is excellent news – at six thirty?”
“You want to be a little careful of that one,” said another voice in her ear, as Stumpf clicked his heels and withdrew with a punctilious bow.
She swung round and found that Ralph had sidled up behind her. The bar was now extremely full and it was possible to move around unnoticed. Then he kissed her, full on the lips.
“Listen, Ralph. I’m a working reporter now – I can’t go round kissing men like that.” She smiled as she said it to soften the criticism.
“Oh yes, I know and all that. Now, where shall we go? We have a great deal of catching up to do. I tell you what, we’ll go to Horcher’s – we don’t need coupons to eat there!”
*
“So,” said Ralph after they had ordered their off-ration meal. “Like the Savoy, this place seems immune to wartime deprivations. What on earth brings you to Berlin? I remember you wanted to be a journalist.”
They had walked through the Tiergarten. It was a warm summer evening, and old gentlemen were walking slowly home from the park now that the sun was beginning to go down. It occurred to her that, whatever reason he was here, he may have been lonely.
“Well, I was in touch with the Chicago Tribune in London and wrote some things for them. Then one of their reporters got ill on their way out to Germany and they couldn’t find anyone nearer, so they asked me to replace him. It was a huge piece of luck. I think even foreign correspondents think twice about crossing the Atlantic right now.”
“I expect they do. The U-boats are pretty effective.”
It was time to take the plunge.
“Look, Ralph, isn’t the real question what you’re doing here. Have you gone over to the Nazis?”
He glanced over her shoulder and then tentatively over his own. Then he lowered his voice.
“Do you believe that?”
“Well… You are here…”
“Well,” he said, grinning. “You can’t believe everything you hear, now can you…”
Xanthe felt irritated. He was teasing her.
“You’re still on the same side?”
Ralph breathed a long, somewhat exasperated sigh. Then the pork arrived. It was hard to believe they were eating real meat. He waited until the waiter had gone.
“Xanthe, Xanthe – still a lovely name, by the way – it isn’t that at all. I think I said something about what I was planning to you once before. I expect it to be a masterstroke. Don’t let’s talk about it now.”
“You mean about codes?”
He made frantic hand signals to keep her voice down. “Well, what do you think, Xanthe? You don’t think perhaps everything hangs on what happens next in the west?”
For a moment, she wondered what he meant. France was now divided and ruled. Belgium, Holland and most of Scandinavia were so-called protectorates. It was hard to see what else could happen – unless he meant the invasion of Britain.
Xanthe said nothing. But she began to wonder about the strange paths that had brought them both to this foreign city in such unusual circumstances. She knew she must not leap to conclusions. She would meet him again, either because he wanted to or she ran into him somewhere, and in the meantime she would be instructed by her contacts.
She also had work to do and she asked Ralph what he thought about rationing, about the non-availability of soap, and the strange behaviour of Berlin taxis. The band began playing something that sounded remarkably modern. Was it swing? Was it actually American? It wasn’t jazz exactly, which she knew had been banned from the Reich, but it had a certain jaunty air about it. She began to relax a little.
“Ralph, can I ask – what did your colleagues think when you left? They must think you’re some kind of traitor. They must be wondering about you a
t least?”
Ralph stared at her for a moment as if he had not quite considered this possibility. For some reason – it can’t have been a surprise – the question seemed to trouble him. “My real friends will know whose side I’m on,” he said. It was obviously the formula he used to reassure himself, yet it seemed to give him little relief.
“Because codes are different now aren’t they – I mean compared to Zimmerman and all that, last time round? What about Enigma?”
She was unsure how he would react, but this time he fell about laughing. One tear ran theatrically down his cheek.
“Enigma. Of course, Enigma. You’re well informed, my love. I should put the same question back to you – what do you know about Enigma?”
“Almost nothing,” she admitted. “Except the name, of course.”
“Well, I shall enlighten you. Enigma is the coding system used by all the German armed forces and diplomatic services here and has been for decades now. It’s like a typewriter. You set the system for the settings of the day, you type in a code that allows you to set their machine the right way at the other end. Then you type your signal and – hey presto! – you get a code which they can read the other end. But nobody else can read it, because they don’t have the same settings. It is actually completely uncrackable.”
He explained about the permutations. She immediately forgot the huge number of possible solutions, but it was big. Clearly the old idea that you just find a clever crossword puzzle expert and arm him or her with a great deal of coffee and a hot bath at the Admiralty, was hardly going to work this time. It was fascinating. They both knew, without having to say, that this could hardly be an exercise in journalism – it would need permission from the censors to write anything and no end of trouble from people like Stumpf – but it was useful deep background, or so she told herself.
But there was a contradiction here and it bothered her, because of his obvious belief in the sheer sophistication of the Nazi code system. She wondered how to raise it.
“Ralph, listen, I keep thinking about one thing and it worries me – can I ask you?” He nodded generously. How could he not? “You worked at the Admiralty – you must have known this then, mustn’t you? And the story you told me in London…”
She deliberately lowered her voice again and he leaned a little closer.
“You remember, the story about comparing texts? How will that help them in London to crack Enigma?”
He smiled enigmatically and, for the first time, she wondered if Fleming’s assessment was correct and that the man was insane.
“That, my dear Xanthe, is going to have to wait. Now, I find myself at something of a loose end in the evenings, and I very much enjoy your company. Would you perhaps have dinner with me again? Not tomorrow night – I have a dinner with the German Admiralty – but the day after tomorrow, if I meet you same time, same place?”
*
Xanthe lay in bed that night, listening to the noises of the city, waiting for the telltale roar of the arrival of the RAF on one of their leaflet distribution visits. It sounded remarkably like London, with its traffic hum and the occasional honking of horns or bass sirens. She could hear the footsteps of people walking home below her window in Charlottenburg. It sounded like a great city breathing in and out, going on its way regardless, which in many ways is what it was. The smell of sausage wafted over from the cafés in the next street – a poignant smell since, as Xanthe knew very well, the sausages would not be real. The evening with Ralph had been frustrating, because he really came nowhere near telling her anything, but also rather lovely. It almost felt like it had been in those afternoons in London, except that this time he had been engaged in a different way.
She could not get Ralph’s laugh out of her head. It was free and infectious. It seemed in some ways the very antithesis of Nazism and everything she knew about it.
She knew she also had to finish the story she had been researching the previous day, so her mind was already cluttered with details of agricultural statistics. There was also a press conference at eleven the next morning at the Propaganda Ministry which she didn’t want to miss.
As it was, Dr Goebbels himself strode, with a slight limp, into the room on the dot of eleven. Xanthe had not seen him before in the flesh and he would have seemed wizened and pathetic were it not for his sheer self-belief, and his rather public rages.
He was pretty furious this time, mainly with Shirer, who was still on his way back from France having been the only radio journalist to have been an eyewitness to Hitler’s armistice signing with the French in Compiègne. “I gave specific instructions that German radio was to have priority. Yet one of you allowed himself to use unofficial transport to a forbidden area and to have broadcast uncensored reports. And let me tell you…”
He dropped his ranting style to a fierce monotone.
“Let there be no doubt,” he said. “There will be the severest consequences for those who helped him. As members of the foreign press, you get considerable privileges. It would be most unfortunate if they were to be withdrawn because of the actions of a few irresponsible individuals.”
The flow of fury began to abate. Xanthe noticed Sigrid putting up her hand to ask the first question. Goebbels glanced up, saw her stand up in her place, went a kind of beetroot colour and stormed out.
“What privileges did he mean?” she asked Sigrid as they all filed out again, suitably battered.
“Oh, didn’t you know? We have been designated as heavy labourers. It means we get double the rations.”
She had not quite understood this. She still thought the eggs and bacon from Denmark delivered in little packages were just a friendly gesture, now they had begun to arrive in her pigeonhole at the Adlon. The packages made her feel a little uncomfortable before; now they felt like a bribe that is forced upon you. For some reason, the discovery frightened her – it made her realise how much she was living this peculiar life under false pretences. She had always claimed to hate pretence – now look at yourself, she said quietly and under her breath.
“Remember what I told you,” said Sigrid. “Trust nobody. Not even yourself.”
*
The whole experience of being shouted at, along with the rest of the foreign press – most of them Americans – was, she felt, deeply radicalising. There was something about the ferocious arrogance of Goebbels which made her want to dig her heels in and resist. It was not exactly that she had been trying not to take sides; she felt she was trying to see things clearly without getting her various and obvious bias in the way of the truth. She now saw that was wrong.
It was also nonsense, given that she was pursuing journalism as a means of gathering the information her real employers needed. It was silly to pretend otherwise, at least to herself. She had already chosen a side and her priority had to be to survive and find out what she was supposed to do.
In fact, perhaps she had been wrong to act out the role of an open-minded journalist. She was anyway beginning to suspect that Dr Goebbels may be a threat to human civilisation. Ironically, that gave her renewed respect for Bill whose journalism was absolutely committed, but who was still tolerated by the regime because he and his censor genuinely respected each other – and because of his influence back home and on world opinion. She decided that there were powerful reasons why even the Nazis needed to respect someone like that.
Xanthe was thinking about this the following night, a couple of days before Stumpf was due to come round. She asked around their tiny office for someone to come with her, but the truth was she knew too few of her colleagues in that way – and it was too embarrassing to ask Sigrid. Both of her office colleagues were busy and looked at her a little oddly. In the end, she asked Mathilde, a girl about her own age who worked next door and who lodged with her.
Was her German adequate to the task? “You want me to come to the theatre with you?” said Matilde, as if Xanthe had asked her on a date on her own account.
“Well, there are two others,
both men,” she said, a little embarrassed.
Her face lit up. “Ah, doppeldate!” said Mathilde.
*
On the morning of the impending theatre visit, she made her first trip to meet the man who was to be her contact in Berlin. She had no idea what his name was but she had been given detailed instructions about how to find him. In fact, it was almost the only area of her life in Berlin where she had been given detailed instructions about anything.
She had registered with the American embassy back in June, when she had arrived in the city, and she had gone there also to talk to the consular department to get her ration books and the paperwork accrediting her as a journalist and a foreign national in the city. But this was her first visit in earnest.
It surprised her slightly that there were links between diplomatic channels in the USA and the naval intelligence division of the British that she had been working for, but apparently there was at least some co-operation. She assumed it was not something that either side was entirely comfortable about. The American embassy was, after all, supposed to be neutral territory. She had asked Fleming the last time they had met why she was able to go into the American embassy and effectively leave a message for him and he had refused to tell her.
“Xanthe, you really don’t need to know,” he had said. “And if I tell you more than you need to know, it doesn’t just put us at risk, it puts you at risk too. So don’t ask so many questions…”
Follow the instructions, she was always being told. Just follow the instructions. Her instructions in this case were, luckily, pretty unambiguous. She was to go to the reception desk inside the embassy and have a conversation with the uniformed man at the desk, during which she was to mention ‘Uncle Sam’. This was the sign, when she was ready, that would trigger a meeting with her contact at a specific spot in the zoo, in the first instance, by the elephants.
It stretched Xanthe’s credulity to believe that they would happen to overhear her or that, somehow, the man at the desk would note down if a blonde American woman used the phrase – but she put these worries to one side. It was time to do what she was told without thinking about it too much.