‘Where did you learn to fight?’
He was in the tiny kitchen, bent over the sink. She was mopping blood from the cut on the back of his head.
‘Try growing up as the only girl in a family with three brothers. You learn to fight. Hold still.’
‘I pity the brothers. Ah.’ March’s head hurt the most. The bloody water dripping into the greasy plates a few centimetres from his face made him feel sick. ‘In Hollywood, I think, it is traditional for the man to rescue the girl.’
‘Hollywood is full of shit.’ She applied a fresh cloth. ‘This is quite deep. Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?’
‘No time.’
‘Will that man come back?’
‘No. At least, not for a while. Supposedly, this is still a clandestine operation. Thank you.’
He held the cloth to the back of his head and straightened. As he did so, he discovered a new pain, at the base of his spine.
‘ “A clandestine operation”?’ she repeated. ‘You don’t think he could have been an ordinary thief?’
‘No. He was a professional. An authentic, Gestapotrained professional.’
‘And I beat him!’ The adrenalin had given lustre to her skin; her eyes sparkled. Her only injury was a bruise on her shoulder. She was more attractive than he remembered. Delicate cheek bones, a strong nose, full lips, large brown eyes. She had brown hair, cut to the nape of her neck, which she wore swept back behind her ears.
‘If his orders had been to kill you, he would have done so.’
‘Really? Then why didn’t he?’ Suddenly she sounded angry.
‘You’re an American. A protected species, especially at the moment.’ He inspected the cloth. The flow of blood had stopped. ‘Don’t underrate the enemy, Fräulein.’
‘Don’t underrate me. If I hadn’t come home, he’d have killed you.’
He decided to say nothing. She clearly kept her temper on a hair-trigger.
The apartment had been thoroughly ransacked. Her clothes hung out of their drawers, papers had been spilled across the desk and on to the floor, suitcases had been upended. Not, he thought, that it could have been very neat before: the dirty dishes in the sink, the profusion of bottles (most of them empty) in the bathroom, the yellowing copies of the New York Times and Time, their pages sliced to ribbons by the German censors, stacked haphazardly around the walls. Searching it must have been a nightmare. Weak light filtered in through dirty net curtains. Every few minutes the walls shook as the trains passed.
‘This is yours, I take it?’ She pulled out the Luger from beneath a chair and held it up between finger and thumb.
‘Yes. Thank you.’ He took it. She had a gift for making him feel stupid. ‘Is anything missing?’
‘I doubt it.’ She glanced around. ‘I’m not sure I’d know if there was.’
‘The item I gave you last night . . . ?’
‘Oh that? It was here on the mantelpiece.’ She ran her hand along it, frowning. ‘It was here . . .’
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, she was grinning.
‘Don’t worry, Sturmbannführer. It’s stayed close to my heart. Like a love-letter.’
She turned her back on him, unbuttoning her shirt. When she turned round, she had the envelope in her hand. He took it over to the window. It was warm to his touch.
It was long and slim, made of thick paper – a rich creamy-blue with brown specks of age, like liver spots. It was luxurious, hand-made, redolent of another age. There was no name or address.
Inside the envelope was a small brass key and a letter, on matching blue paper, as thick as cardboard. Printed in the top right-hand corner, in flowery copperplate, was: Zaugg & Cie, Bankiers, Bahnhof Strasse 44, Zürich. A single sentence, typed beneath, identified the bearer as a joint holder of account number 2402. The letter was dated 8 July 1942. It was signed Hermann Zaugg, Director.
March read it through again. He was not surprised Stuckart had kept it locked in his safe: it was illegal for a German citizen to possess a foreign bank account without the permission of the Reichsbank. The penalty for non-compliance was death.
He said: ‘I was worried about you. I tried to call you a couple of hours ago, but there was no answer.’
‘I was out, doing research.’
‘Research?’
She grinned again.
AT March’s suggestion, they went for a walk in the Tiergarten, the traditional rendezvous for Berliners with secrets to discuss. Even the Gestapo had yet to devise a means of bugging a park. Daffodils poked through the rough grass at the foot of the trees. Children fed the ducks on the Neuer See.
Getting out of Stuckart’s apartment block had been easy, she said. The air shaft had emerged into the alley almost at ground level. There were no SS men. They were all round the front. So she had simply walked down the side of the building, to the street at the rear, and caught a taxi home. She had stayed up half the night waiting for him to call, re-reading the letter until she knew it off by heart. When, by nine o’clock, she had still heard nothing, she decided not to wait.
She wanted to know what had happened to him and Jaeger. He told her only that they had been taken to Gestapo headquarters and released that morning.
‘Are you in trouble?’
‘Yes. Now tell me what you discovered.’
She had gone first to the public library in Nollendorf Platz – she had nothing better to do now her press accreditation had been withdrawn. In the library was a directory of European banks. Zaugg & Cie still existed. The bank’s premises remained in Bahnhof Strasse. From the library she had gone to the US Embassy to see Henry Nightingale.
‘Nightingale?’
‘You met him last night.’
March remembered: the young man in the sports jacket and the button-down shirt, with his hand on her arm. ‘You didn’t tell him anything?’
‘Of course not. Anyway, he’s discreet. We can trust him.’
‘I prefer to make my own judgements about whom I can trust.’ He felt disappointed in her. ‘Is he your lover?’
She stopped in her tracks. ‘What kind of a question is that?’
‘I have more at stake in this than you have, Fräulein. Much more. I have a right to know.’
‘You have no right to know at all.’ She was furious.
‘All right.’ He held up his hands. The woman was impossible. ‘Your business.’
They resumed walking.
Nightingale, she explained, was an expert in Swiss commercial matters, having dealt with the affairs of several German refugees in the United States trying to extract their money from banks in Zürich and Geneva.
It was almost impossible.
In 1934, a Gestapo agent named Georg Hannes Thomae had been sent to Switzerland by Reinhard Heydrich to find out the names of as many German account-holders as possible. Thomae set up house in Zürich, began affairs with several lonely female cashiers, befriended minor bank officials. When the Gestapo had suspicions that a certain individual had an illegal account, Thomae would visit the bank posing as an intermediary and try to deposit money. The moment any cash was accepted, Heydrich knew an account existed. Its holder was arrested, tortured into revealing the details, and soon the bank would receive a detailed cable requesting, in proper form, the repatriation of all assets.
The Gestapo’s war against the Swiss banks became increasingly sophisticated and extensive. Telephone calls, cables and letters between Germany and Switzerland were intercepted as a matter of routine. Clients were executed or sent to concentration camps. In Switzerland, there was an outcry. Finally, the Swiss National Assembly rushed through a new Banking Code making it illegal for banks to disclose any details of their clients’ holdings, on pain of imprisonment. Georg Thomae was exposed and expelled.
Swiss banks came to regard doing business with German citizens as too dangerous and time-consuming to countenance. Communication with clients was virtually impossible. Hundreds of accounts had simply been aband
oned by their terrified owners. In any case, respectable bankers had no desire to become involved in these life-and-death transactions. The publicity was damaging. By 1939 the once-lucrative German numbered-account business had collapsed.
‘Then came the war,’ said Charlie. They had reached the end of the Neuer See and were walking back. From beyond the trees came the hum of the traffic on the East-West Axis. The dome of the Great Hall rose above the trees. Berliners joked that the only way to avoid seeing it was to live inside it.
‘After 1939, the demand for Swiss accounts increased dramatically, for obvious reasons. People were desperate to get their property out of Germany. So banks like Zaugg devised a new kind of deposit account. For a fee of 200 Francs, you received a box and a number, a key and a letter of authorisation.’
‘Exactly like Stuckart.’
‘Right. You simply needed to show up with the letter and the key, and it was all yours. No questions. Each account could have as many keys and letters of authorisation as the holder was prepared to pay for. The beauty of it was – the banks were no longer involved. One day, if she could get the travel permit, some little old lady might turn up with her life savings. Ten years later, her son could turn up with a letter and a key and walk off with his inheritance.’
‘Or the Gestapo might turn up . . .’
‘. . . and if they had the letter and the key, the bank could give them everything. No embarrassments. No publicity. No breaking the Banking Code.’
‘These accounts – they still exist?’
‘The Swiss Government banned them at the end of the war, under pressure from Berlin, and no new ones have been allowed since. But the old ones – they still exist, because the terms of the original agreement have to be honoured. They’ve become valuable in their own right. People sell them on to one another. According to Henry, Zaugg developed quite a speciality in them. God knows what he’s got locked in those boxes.’
‘Did you mention Stuckart’s name to this Nightingale?’
‘Of course not. I told him I was writing a piece for Fortune about “the lost legacies of the war”.’
‘Just as you told me you were going to interview Stuckart for an article about “the Führer’s early years”?’
She hesitated, and said quietly: ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
His head was throbbing, his ribs still ached. What did he mean? He lit a cigarette to give himself time to think.
‘People who encounter violent death – they try to forget it, run away. Not you. Last night: your eagerness to go back to Stuckart’s apartment, the way you opened his letters. This morning: turning up information about Swiss banks . . .’
He stopped speaking. An elderly couple passed on the footpath, staring at them. He realised they must look an odd pair: an SS Sturmbannführer, unshaven and slightly bashed around, and a woman who was clearly a foreigner. Her accent might be perfect, but there was something about her, in her expression, her clothes, her stance – something which betrayed that she was not German.
‘Let’s walk this way.’ He led her off the path, towards the trees.
‘Can I have one of those?’
In the shadows, as he lit her a cigarette, she cupped the flame. Reflections of the fire danced in her eyes.
‘All right.’ She took a pace back, hugging herself as if she were cold. ‘It’s true my parents knew Stuckart before the war. It’s true I went to see him before Christmas. But I didn’t call him. He called me.’
‘When?’
‘On Saturday. Late.’
‘What did he say?’
She laughed. ‘Oh no, Sturmbannführer. In my business information is a commodity, exchangeable on the open market. But I’m willing to trade.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Everything. Why you had to break into that apartment last night. Why you are keeping secrets from your own people. Why the Gestapo almost killed you an hour ago.’
‘Oh that . . .’ He smiled. He felt weary. He leaned his back against the rough bark of the tree and stared across the park. It seemed to him he had nothing to lose.
‘Two days ago,’ he began, ‘I fished a body out of the Havel.’
He told her everything. He told her about Buhler’s death and Luther’s disappearance. He told her what Jost had seen, and what had happened to him. He told her about Nebe and Globus, about the art treasures and the Gestapo file. He even told her about Pili’s statement. And – something he had noticed about criminals confessing, even those who knew that their confessions would one day hang them – when he finished, he felt better.
She was silent a long time. ‘That’s fair,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how this helps, but this is what happened to me.’
SHE had gone to bed early on Saturday night. The weather had been foul – the start of that great bank of rain that had washed over the city for three days. She was not feeling sociable, had not for weeks. You know how it is. Berlin can get to you like that. Make you feel small and hopeless in the shade of those vast grey buildings; the endless uniforms; the unsmiling bureaucrats.
The phone went about eleven-thirty, just as she was drifting off to sleep. A man’s voice. Taut. Precise. ‘There is a telephone booth opposite your apartment. Go to it. I shall call you there in five minutes. If the booth is occupied, please wait.’
She had not recognised who it was, but something in the man’s tone had told her it was not a joke. She had dressed, grabbed her coat, hobbled down the stairs, into the street, trying to pull on her shoes and walk at the same time. The rain had hit her like a slap across the face. Across the street, outside the station, was an old wooden telephone kiosk – empty, thank God.
It was while she was waiting for the call that she remembered where she had first heard the voice.
‘Go back a bit,’ said March. ‘Your first meeting with Stuckart. Describe it.’
That was before Christmas. She had called him cold. Explained who she was. He seemed reluctant, but she had persisted, so he had invited her over for tea. He had a shock of white curly hair and one of those orangey tans, as if he had spent a long time in the sun, or under an ultraviolet lamp. The woman, Maria, was also in the apartment, but behaved like a maid. She served some tea then left them to it. Usual chat: how is your mother? Very well, thank you.
Ha, that was a joke.
She flicked ash from the end of her cigarette.
‘My mother’s career died when she left Berlin. My arrival buried it. As you can imagine, there wasn’t a great demand for German actresses in Hollywood during the war.’
And then he had asked about her father, in a gritted-teeth kind of a way. And she had been able to take great pleasure in saying: very well, thank you. He had retired in ’sixty-one, when Kennedy took over. Deputy Under-Secretary of State Michael Maguire. God bless the United States of America. Stuckart had met him through Mom, had known him when he was at the Embassy here.
March interrupted: ‘When was that?’
‘’Thirty-seven to ’thirty-nine.’
‘Go on.’
Well, then he had wanted to know about the job and she had told him. World European Features: he had never heard of them. Not surprising, she said: nobody had. That sort of thing. Polite interest, you know. So when she left she gave him her card, and he had bent to kiss her hand, had lingered over it, made a meal of it, made her feel sick. He had patted her bottom on the way out. And that had been that, she was glad to say. Five months: nothing.
‘Until Saturday night?’
Until Saturday night. She had been in the telephone kiosk no more than thirty seconds when he rang. Now all the arrogance was gone from his voice.
‘Charlotte?’ He had placed heavy emphasis on the second syllable. Shar-lott-e. ‘Forgive this melodrama. Your telephone is tapped.’
‘They say every foreigner’s line is tapped.’
‘This is true. When I was in the Ministry, I used to see transcripts. But public boxes are safe. I am in a public box now.
I came on Thursday and took the number of the one you are in. It is serious, you see. I need to contact the authorities in your country.’
‘Why not talk to the Embassy?’
‘The Embassy is not safe.’
He had sounded terrified. And tight. Definitely, he had been drinking.
‘Are you saying you want to defect?’
A long silence. Then there had been a noise behind her. A sound of metal tapping on glass. She had turned to discover, in the rain and the dark, a man, with his hands cupped round his eyes, peering into the kiosk, looking like a deep-sea diver. She must have let out a cry or something because Stuckart had got very frightened.
‘What was that? What is it?’
‘Nothing. Just someone wanting to use the phone.’
‘We must be quick. I deal only with your father, not the Embassy.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Come to me tomorrow and I will tell you everything. Shar-lott-e, I will make you the most famous reporter in the world.’
‘Where? What time?’
‘My apartment. Noon.’
‘Is that safe?’
‘Nowhere is safe.’
And then he had rung off. Those were the last words she had heard Stuckart speak.
She finished her cigarette, ground it under her foot.
The rest he knew, more or less. She had found the bodies, called the police. They had taken her to the big city station in Alexander Platz, where she had sat in a blank-walled room for more than three hours, going crazy. Then she had been driven to another building, to give a statement to some creepy SS man in a cheap wig, whose office had been more like that of a pathologist than a detective.
March smiled at the description of Fiebes.
She had already made up her mind not to tell the Polizei about Stuckart’s call on Saturday night, for an obvious reason. If she had hinted that she had been preparing to help Stuckart defect, she would have been accused of ‘activities incompatible with her status as a journalist’, and arrested. As it was, they had decided to deport her anyway. So it goes.
THE authorities were planning a fireworks display in the Tiergarten, to commemorate the Führer’s birthday. An area of the park had been fenced off, and pyrotechnicians in blue overalls were laying their surprises, watched by a curious crowd. Mortar tubes, sandbagged emplacements, dug-outs, kilometres of cable: these looked more like the preparations for an artillery bombardment than for a celebration. Nobody paid any attention to the SS-Sturmbannführer and the woman in the blue plastic coat.
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