The Vogels: On All Fronts (The Half-Bloods Trilogy Book 2)

by Jana Petken

  Kurt’s fingers went to his mouth, but they instantly retreated as Biermann strolled in. Kurt stared up at the Gestapo Kriminaldirektor, Dieter Vogel’s friend, and Paul’s father-in-law. It was hard to imagine now that he and Biermann had shared a toast at Paul and Valentina’s wedding. He’d been in Frau Biermann’s kitchen numerous times drinking tea, eating her sponge cake while waiting for Dieter to finish some meeting or other. It was difficult to reconcile Freddie Biermann, the good man, to this torturer with the sadistic eyes of a monster and a razor-thin smile.

  Biermann pulled Kurt to his feet and then pushed him into the chair he’d been doubled over earlier. Kurt flinched again with pain. “I’d rather stand if you don’t mind – sore arse.”

  Biermann, ignoring the request, took two cigarettes from his pack, put them to his lips, and lit them both. He gave one to Kurt before pulling over another chair and sitting opposite his prisoner.

  “What’s just been done to you is only the start of our new relationship, Kurt.” Biermann smiled. “I call this round one, as in a boxing match that might or might not have ten or twelve or even more rounds to go.” He waved his hand. “Ach, you know what I mean. I’ve also decided to leave you in solitary confinement a while longer, and on days of my choosing, you’ll be brought here for your shower.” He sighed. “Call me selfish for not sending you to the camp I mentioned, but I’m not ready to let you go until you tell me the truth.”

  “I told you I don’t know anything about anything. You’re wasting your time.”

  “Maybe I am, but I’m betting you will eventually tell me where the traitor, Dieter Vogel, is. Precisely where he is.”

  Biermann leant in and the stench of stale wine and tobacco hit Kurt’s nostrils.

  “Can you imagine, Kurt, how it must feel to find out that your closest friend in the world is a man you never really knew at all, a lying, deceitful stranger with no empathy or conscience?” Biermann asked. “I know he’s alive and laughing at me and the country he claimed to love. I am suffering a torrent of misery…”

  “Is it like the torrent of nonsense you’re talking now?”

  Biermann sat back, eyes blazing. “You-will-tell-me!”

  “Fuck off,” Kurt croaked.

  Biermann wagged his finger in Kurt’s face and sniggered. “I expected that answer today. It’s your first time under the whip, shall we say, and you still feel you can beat me at my own game. But I wonder if you’ll feel the same way when it’s your third or fourth time, when your arse is so sore you can’t sit down, and every limb is out of joint. By the second go around, your sores will be infected by your excrement and piss. You’ll be starving because we’ll only feed you enough to keep you alive. You’ll not know if it’s day or night, or for how long you’ve been here, and a part of you will want your life to end. I admit, Kurt, the predictability of this job gets tedious after a while. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t tell me what I wanted to know at some point or another.”

  “Does your wife know you’re a cruel sadistic predator?” Kurt asked. “Or does she only see the loving husband and father who cried at his daughter’s wedding?”

  “Mention my family again and I’ll kill you where you sit!”

  Kurt enjoyed his small victory then spat a lump of blood from his mouth onto the wet floor. “You have nothing on me, Biermann.”

  “I have enough evidence on you to shoot you here and now…”

  “… why don’t you do it, then?”

  Biermann slapped Kurt’s face. “I have enough proof to write a report stating that Dieter is a traitor, and as such, so are his children by association. Do you really think I want to go to Russia or Paris to arrest Willie and Paul? Boys I’ve known from the day they were born?”

  “No, not unless you want to break your daughter’s heart.” Kurt held Biermann’s eyes. “Leave the Vogel boys out of this sham. Whatever this is, it’s between you and me.” He tried to sit up straight but couldn’t breathe without feeling a stab in his side; cracked ribs. “Come on, Herr Direktor, do you … do you really want to drag this ludicrous investigation into the open? You’ll be laughed at from here to the Russian Front … hypothetically, even if Dieter is alive, which I know he’s not, what are you going to do about it?” Kurt steadied his gaze and despite the pain pushed his shoulders back and his chest out. “Do you really want to risk your career on an absurd accusation?”

  Biermann charged to his feet, knocking his chair over, then went to the door and yelled for the guards. Before he left, he said. “Kurt, I’m a patient man. I can wait a day, a month, a year for the information I need. Can you?”

  Five minutes later, Kurt was taken back to his cell. It had been cleaned, and a dish of cold, congealed stew and a lump of bread were sitting on a tray. He choked as he ate, his hunger more urgent than swallowing the meat carefully. Afterwards, he curled up on the floor and closed his eyes. Ten minutes later, the guard with the horn arrived.

  Chapter Twenty

  Romek Gabula

  Madrid, Spain.

  December 1941

  Romek was living in the Legazpi neighbourhood of Madrid, a vast complex of ornate stone and brick buildings standing near the banks of the Manzanares River. The sparsely furnished and somewhat dilapidated lodgings didn’t bother him in the slightest, he’d told his handler upon his arrival. He wasn’t a snob who needed to be surrounded by fancy ornaments or furniture; in fact, he much preferred staying in a working-class area with people he could relate to.

  One wet mid-morning, he left his tiny one-bedroom flat, said buenos dias to a crinkly old man in the hallway, and then ambled down three flights of stairs. At the exit, he kept the door open for a young woman struggling to get her baby’s pram inside. She thanked him with a broad smile and then rummaged in her shopping bag, her eyes lighting up with excitement as she unwrapped three pork chops from newspaper.

  “I bought them…”

  Romek listened to her rambling in Spanish, not understanding most of what she was saying apart from she’d bought them and tu y yo, esta noche, which meant you and me tonight. She was inviting him to dinner.

  “Si, gracias … comida,” he responded when she’d stopped talking.

  Romek, who had chosen the name Juan to avoid awkward questions about his Polish heritage, smiled at the woman he’d been having sex with for the last two weeks. He’d met her on the day he’d arrived in the neighbourhood. She, like many of the women living in the complex, was a widow of the recent civil war and had gone to great pains to show him her husband’s death certificate issued by the defeated Republican government almost two years earlier.

  He couldn’t speak more than a few words of Spanish, but sign language came in handy. She’d been left with a fatherless baby and he’d chuckled inwardly at the lie. The baby, no more than a year old, was evidently not the child of the woman’s dead husband who had died two and a half years earlier, according to the death certificate. Or he, Romek Gabula, was terrible at arithmetic. It was more likely that the baby had been fathered by a conquering Nationalist soldier, who had probably disappeared as soon as he’d found out she was pregnant.

  Romek freely admitted that he’d taken advantage of the woman’s desperate situation. She saw him as her last hope for a respectable future, going to extraordinary lengths to please him in every conceivable way, despite his often rough and verbally abusive behaviour towards her – he negated the verbal abuse because she couldn’t understand a word of Polish – and he had recently deduced that he wasn’t over Klara’s betrayal with Max after all, and needed to punish someone of the fairer sex to make himself feel better. He wasn’t proud of this side of his character but lashing out from time to time tamed the beast inside.

  After he left the woman and her baby, he covered his mouth with his handkerchief and strode at a brisk pace along the street. The downside to staying in this area and having as much sex as his body could physically take, was his flat’s proximity to the city’s main slaughterhouse. The robust stench l
ingered far beyond its high stone walls and deep into the neighbourhood. The widow had probably fucked the abattoir’s butcher for the fatty chops, but the thought of that didn’t bother him in the slightest.

  Romek was not enamoured with Madrid, or with the Spanish people. In the ruined streets of a war not long ended, he witnessed the Republican defeated being intimidated by General Franco’s victorious soldiers. The bullying tactics reminded him of the German power-crazed officers in France who’d picked random hostages to be shot without laying charges of any misdoing at their doors. That he was now working for the German demigods who destroyed people’s lives never ceased to amaze him, but then neither did the fact that he had made it out of France a free man but his Resistance fighters in Fresnes Prison had not.

  After he had passed the Hotel Tryp Gran Vía, Romek zigzagged through the streets around Puerta del Sol. He sidestepped a mule and cart as he crossed the narrow Calle Victoria, and after another couple of twists and turns reached Calle de Echegaray, its cobblestones sparkling from that morning’s rain.

  La Venencia, an old bar where men in flat caps and tweed jackets sipped sherry from tall, narrow glasses, and bartenders wrote their tabs in chalk on the bar top, was the regular meeting place between Romek and the head of the Abwehr in Madrid. Karsten Portner – probably not his real name – was already seated at a table near the back of the room, and he waved at Romek as he wound his way through the crowded tables and chairs.

  Portner pushed a glass of crisp Mistela towards Romek who nodded his thanks. He sipped it while the Abwehr officer lit a cigarette from a gold-plated lighter. He’d never trusted the slim, good-looking German whose movements were like those of a big cat. He was amiable enough, but Romek never forgot that he was a hostage of sorts, and he was constantly aware of not making false statements, lest they come back to haunt him in the future.

  “I was ordered to handle you with love and care, Romek, to do my utmost to help you. I hope you’ll agree I’ve done just that?”

  “You’ve been very kind, Karsten,” Romek said, raising his short-stemmed glass.

  “Did you know that La Venencia was, and in some ways still is, a haunt for Republican and Communist sympathizers?”

  Romek looked around him. “No, I didn’t know that. Seems strange you should like it here.”

  “Yes, strange indeed. On paper, I’d have no reason to mix with the likes of these Marxist scum, but we have a saying in the Abwehr: the best way to destroy a group is to become part of it.”

  “I suppose that makes sense,” said Romek, his bile rising as he thought back to Oscar’s betrayal in Paris. Not wanting to commit himself further to that conversation, Romek said, “Tell me more about this place.”

  “Ah, I have many stories. During the civil war, it is said that Ernest Hemingway came here to get news from the front. You know Hemmingway’s work?”

  “I can’t say I do – never heard of him.”

  Portner pointed to a sign on the wall and translated it. In the interest of hygiene, don’t spit on the floor. “The Venencia has a few old rules from its recent past. The second is no taking of photographs. I suppose because it prevented visitors from being incriminated by possible Fascist spies during the war. The third rule: absolutely no tipping, because the Republican loyalists considered all workers to be equal. They think they’re all the same, you see, and the barman deserves no more than the men who pay him for their drinks – they’re a strange lot.”

  Romek, now bored by the uninspiring conversation from a man who clearly loved the sound of his own voice, mumbled, “Fascinating.”

  Portner stood up abruptly, gesturing for Romek to follow, then zigzagged to the exit. For a while the two men strolled along the streets in silence. Romek, used to following blindly without asking questions, was surprised, however, when he was ushered into the German Consulate, a place he had not visited since first meeting Portner there shortly after his arrival in Spain.

  “In you go, Romek,” Portman said opening his office door. “Take a seat at the desk.”

  Romek felt a flutter of excitement as Portman took a cardboard box from his desk drawer and pulled a forged passport from it. He had learnt a great deal about what the Germans would want from him when he eventually got to Britain. The Abwehr had trained him in spy work, how to recognise, write, and decipher their codes, and their techniques in constructing and dismantling their radio transmitters.

  Portner smiled, the white teeth and thick lips that charmed the most pious of Spanish women aimed now at Romek. “I will miss you, Romek, but as with all good things, our direct association must come to an end.”

  Romek eyed the passport. “I’m leaving?”

  Portner smiled again; then, like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat, he went into his box, pulling out items one by one. First, he held two crystals in his palm. “You will use these to begin the construction of your radio transmitter.” He set them down on the desktop next to Romek’s false passport. “This is your invisible ink,” he said, shaking a small bottle. “This document is your questionnaire. In England, you will study the list of targets and answer each question before sending it back to us. This is the address where you will stay in England, and the name of your landlady, a loyal Nazi supporter.”

  Romek’s eyes widened at the pile of British pound notes and coins Portner deposited in front of him.

  “There is plenty more where that came from, Romek,” said Portner, going back into the box. “And finally, this is your cyanide capsule.”

  When he’d calmed himself after seeing the pill that would kill him should he be captured, Romek began to gather the items and put them back into the box. “When do I leave?”

  “This evening.”

  “That soon?” No pork chops for me tonight, he thought.

  Portner took a document out of a file and lay a pen on it. “Read this and sign. I know you were informed in France that should you betray us we would have the right to execute your family members in Warsaw. This takes that agreement a step further, Romek. It confirms your consent for such executions to take place.”

  “And here I thought we were getting along so famously,” Romek said.

  Portner walked around to the front of his desk and went to the door. “My code name is Matador, yours is Cicero. Don’t forget that. From now on, Matador and Cicero will be the only names that matter to us.” Portner extended his hand. “I wish you all the best. We will meet again, perhaps when you least expect it.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Max Vogel

  London, England.

  December 22nd, 1941

  Max sipped a cup of tea in a café near Oxford Circus, his head buzzing with apprehension. He smiled at the waitress then nodded to two soldiers who entered and saluted him. “At ease, gentlemen. Enjoy the scones. You won’t find the likes of these anywhere else in London.”

  A sense of elation had surged through him when he’d cleared the cobwebs from the gloomy basement he’d called home for more than a month. Stuck behind a desk compiling and filing personnel records was a mind-numbing job, one a trained monkey could do blindfolded. He’d been like a rat in a crypt, nibbling scraps of information that filtered down through the floorboards from upstairs. In his kingdom of one, he’d been ignored, deliberately left out of the intelligence loop, and forbidden to go anywhere near Blackthorn’s office, or to communicate with him by letter. But, as humiliated as a major in the king’s army could be under such circumstances, he had swallowed his pride and completed his sentence in resolute silence. He’d deserved the punishment; Blackthorn had called it a lesson in humility.

  His administrative job had been his penance for the debacle in France with Paul. News of his secret November mission to Duguay’s base had reached Blackthorn only one day after Max’s return to London from Scotland. A series of communications from Pasqual, Max’s ex-SOE sergeant in Saint Quentin, had informed Blackthorn that the Gestapo and SS had purged the Dieppe area to the south of Saint Quentin lookin
g for Paul’s captors. They’d gone door to door in every village and town, had snatched people from the streets and from their homes and used them as hostages for information, but they had not gone anywhere near the Parisian outskirts where Duguay’s base of operations was located.

  Max had learnt that Blackthorn and Heller had made a deal after they’d read Klara’s initial report. In it, Blackthorn had offered to supply an asset from SOE to track down Duguay and his Communists, and once again, offer them British collaboration if Heller would lend SOE the Westland Lysander aircraft for the mission. Blackthorn had been livid when he’d discovered that Heller had used Max in the covert operation they’d agreed upon. But despite his vitriolic threats to put Max on a charge and report Heller to the Foreign Office, Blackthorn had relented at the last minute, giving Max a mundane job in SOE’s basement along with a verbal warning to Heller, which had gone no further than the two men.

  Max, though he’d hidden his feelings well at the time, had been ecstatic to hear that Paul had made it back to his unit unscathed. He was, however, saddened and remorseful about the deaths of innocent French men and women, which had been caused by his and Paul’s actions.

  The news of Paul’s escape and return to the Wehrmacht had been confirmed by Heller’s agent. He’d been sent to France in the aftermath of Max’s failed mission to develop relations with Duguay, who had threatened to kill Max if he ever showed his face in France again.

  Max paid the waitress and left the café to face the bitter cold outside. It was only three days before Christmas and in the best British tradition, decorations were strung between lampposts and above shop doors. Selfridges had also gone all out this year, he noted, looking down the street. The English had stuck two fingers up at Göring and his Luftwaffe who had failed in their ambition to reduce London to ashes. Just about every building still standing in Central London was making a statement, and it was a simple one: “We’re still here, you Nazi bastards!”