‘WE have a problem here,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’ll be frank with you both. Charlie, this is off the record.’ He was talking so quietly they had to strain to hear. ‘Three days ago, the President of the United States, for whatever reason, announced he was going to visit this Godforsaken country. At which point, twenty years of American foreign policy was turned upside down. Now this guy Luther, in theory – if what you say is true – could turn it upside down again, all in the space of seventy-two hours.’
Charlie said: ‘Then at least it would end the week the right way up.’
‘That’s a cheap crack.’
He said this in English. March stared at him. ‘What are you saying, Mister Nightingale?’
‘I’m saying, Sturmbannführer, that I’m going to have to talk to Ambassador Lindbergh and Ambassador Lindbergh is going to have to talk to Washington. And my hunch is they’re both going to want a lot more proof than this –’ he tossed the photocopies on to the floor ‘– before they open the Embassy gates to a man you say is probably a common murderer.’
‘But Luther is offering you the proof.’
‘So you say. But I don’t think Washington will want to risk all the progress that’s been made on détente this week just because of your . . . theories.’
Now Charlie was on her feet. ‘This is insane. If Luther doesn’t go straight with you to the Embassy, he’ll be captured and killed.’
‘Sorry, Charlie. I can’t do that.’ He appealed to her. ‘Come on! I can’t take in every old Nazi who wants to defect. Not without authorisation. Especially not with things as they are.’
‘I don’t believe what I’m hearing.’ She had her hands on her hips and was staring at the floor, shaking her head.
‘Just think it through for a minute.’ He was almost pleading. ‘This Luther character seeks asylum. The Germans say: hand him over, he’s just killed a man. We say: no, because he’s going to tell us what you bastards did to the Jews in the war. What will that do for the summit? No – Charlie – don’t just look away. Think. Kennedy put on ten points in the polls overnight on Wednesday. How’s the White House going to react if we drop this on them?’ For a second time, Nightingale glimpsed the implications; for a second time he shuddered. ‘Jesus Christ, Charlie, what have you got yourself mixed up in here?’
THE Americans argued back and forth for another ten minutes, then March said quietly: ‘Aren’t you overlooking something, Mister Nightingale?’
Nightingale switched his attention reluctantly from Charlie. ‘Probably. You’re the policeman. You tell me.’
‘It seems to me that all of us – you, me, the Gestapo – we all keep underestimating good Party Comrade Luther. Remember what he said to Charlie about the nine o’clock meeting: “you must be there as well”.’
‘So what?’
‘He knew this would be your reaction. Don’t forget he had worked at the Foreign Ministry. With a summit coming, he guessed the Americans might want to throw him straight back to the Gestapo. Otherwise, why did he not simply take a taxi from the airport to the Embassy on Monday night? That’s why he wanted to involve a journalist. As a witness.’ March stooped and picked up the documents. ‘Forgive me, as a mere policeman I do not understand the workings of the American press. But Charlie has her story now, does she not? She has Stuckart’s death, the Swiss bank account, these papers, her tape-recording of Luther . . .’ He turned to her. ‘The fact that the American government chooses not to give Luther asylum, but abandons him to the Gestapo – won’t that just make it even more attractive to the degenerate US media?’
Charlie said: ‘You bet.’
Nightingale had started to look desperate again. ‘Hey. Come on, Charlie. All that was off the record. I never said I agreed with any of it. There are plenty of us at the Embassy who don’t think Kennedy should come here. At all. Period.’ He fiddled with his bow-tie. ‘But this situation – it’s as tricky as hell.’
EVENTUALLY they reached an agreement. Nightingale would meet Charlie on the steps of the Great Hall at five minutes to nine. Assuming Luther turned up, they would hustle him quickly into a car which March would drive. Nightingale would listen to Luther’s story and decide on the basis of what he heard whether to take him to the Embassy. He would not tell the Ambassador, Washington, or anyone else what he was planning to do. Once they were inside the Embassy compound, it would be up to what he called ‘higher authorities’ to decide Luther’s fate – but they would have to act in the knowledge that Charlie had the whole story, and would print it. Charlie was confident the State Department would not dare turn Luther away.
Exactly how they would smuggle him out of Germany was another matter.
‘We have methods,’ said Nightingale. ‘We have handled defectors before. But I’m not discussing it. Not in front of an SS officer. However trustworthy.’ It was Charlie, he said, whom he was most worried about. ‘You’re going to come under a lot of pressure to keep your mouth shut.’
‘I can handle it.’
‘Don’t be so sure. Kennedy’s people – they fight dirty. All right. Let’s suppose Luther has got something. Let’s say it stirs everybody up – speeches in Congress, demonstrations, editorials – this is election year, remember? So suddenly the White House is in trouble over the summit. What do you think they’re going to do?’
‘I can handle it.’
‘They’re going to tip a truckful of shit over your head, Charlie, and over this old Nazi of yours. They’ll say: what’s he got that’s new? The same old story we’ve heard for twenty years, plus a few documents, probably forged by the communists. Kennedy’ll go on TV and he’ll say: “My fellow Americans, ask yourselves: why has all this come up now? In whose interest is it to disrupt the summit?”’ Nightingale leaned close to her, his face a few centimetres from hers. ‘First off, they’ll put Hoover and the FBI on to it. Know any left-wingers, Charlie? Any Jewish militants? Slept with any? Because, sure as hell, they’ll find a few who say you have, whether you’ve ever met them or not.’
‘Screw you, Nightingale.’ She shoved him away with her fist. ‘Screw you.’
NIGHTINGALE really was in love with her, thought March. Lost in love, hopeless in love. And she knew it, and she played on it. He remembered that first night he saw them together in the bar: how she had shrugged off his restraining hand. Tonight: how he had looked at March when he saw him kissing her; how he had absorbed her temper, watching her with his moony eyes. In Zürich, her whisper: ‘You asked if he was my lover . . . He’d like to be . . .’
And now, on her doorstep, in his raincoat: hovering, uncertain, reluctant to leave them behind together, then finally disappearing into the night.
He would be there to meet Luther tomorrow, thought March, if only to make sure she was safe.
AFTER the American had gone they lay side by side on her narrow bed. For a long time neither spoke. The street lights cast long shadows, the window frame slanted across the ceiling like cell bars. In the slight breeze the curtains trembled. Once, there were the sounds of shouts and car doors slamming – revellers returning from watching the fireworks.
They listened to the voices fade along the street, then March whispered: ‘Last night on the telephone – you said you had found something.’
She touched his hand, climbed off the bed. In the sitting room he could hear her rummaging among the heaps of paper. She returned half a minute later carrying a large coffee-table book. ‘I bought this on the way back from the airport.’ She sat on the edge of the bed, switched on the lamp, turned the pages. ‘There.’ She handed March the open book.
It was a reproduction, in black and white, of the painting in the Swiss bank vault. The monochrome did not do it justice. He marked the page with his finger and closed the book to read its title. The Art of Leonardo da Vinci, by Professor Arno Braun of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin.
‘My God.’
‘I know. I thought I recognised it. Read it.’
The Lady with the Ermine,
the scholars called it. ‘One of the most mysterious of all Leonardo’s works.’ It was believed to have been painted circa 1483–6, and ‘believed to show Cecilia Gallerani, the young mistress of Lodovico Sforza, ruler of Milan’. There were two published references to it: one in a poem by Bernardino Bellincioni (died 1492); the other, an ambiguous remark about an ‘immature’ portrait, written by Cecilia Gallerani herself in a letter dated 1498. ‘But sadly for the student of Leonardo, the real mystery today is the painting’s whereabouts. It is known to have entered the collection of the Polish Prince Adam Czartoryski in the late eighteenth century, and was photographed in Krakau in 1932. Since then it has disappeared into what Karl von Clausewitz so eloquently called “the fog of war”. All efforts by the Reich authorities to locate it have so far failed, and it must now be feared that this priceless flowering of the Italian Renaissance is lost to mankind forever.’
He closed the book. ‘I think, another story for you.’
‘And a good one. There are only nine undisputed Leonardos in the world.’ She smiled. ‘If I ever get out of here to write it.’
‘Don’t worry. We’ll get you out.’ He lay back and closed his eyes. After a few moments he heard her put down the book, then she joined him on the bed, wriggling close to him.
‘And you?’ she breathed in his ear. ‘Will you come out with me?’
‘We can’t talk now. Not here.’
‘Sorry. I forgot.’ Her tongue tip touched his ear.
A jolt, like electricity.
Her hand rested lightly on his leg. With her fingers, she traced the inside of his thigh. He started to murmur something, but again, as in Zürich, she placed a finger to his lips.
‘The object of the game is: not to make a sound.’
LATER, unable to sleep himself, he listened to her: the sigh of her breath, the occasional mutter – far away and indistinct. In her dreams, she turned towards him, groaning. Her arm was flung across the pillow, shielding her face. She seemed to be fighting some private battle. He stroked the tangle of her hair, waiting until whatever demon it was had released her, then he slipped out from beneath the sheets.
The kitchen floor was cold to his naked feet. He opened a couple of cupboards. Dusty crockery and a few half-empty packets of food. The refrigerator was ancient, might have been borrowed from some institute of biology, its contents blue-furred and mottled with exotic moulds. Self-catering, it was clear, was not a priority around here. He boiled a kettle, rinsed a mug and heaped in three spoonfuls of instant coffee.
He wandered through the apartment sipping the bitter drink. In the sitting room he stood beside the window and pulled back the curtain a fraction. Bülow Strasse was deserted. He could see the telephone box, dimly illuminated, and the shadows of the station entrance behind it. He let the curtain fall back.
America. The prospect had never occurred to him before. When he thought of it, his brain reached automatically for the images Doctor Goebbels had thoughtfully planted there. Jews and Negroes. Top-hatted capitalists and smokestack factories. Beggars on the streets. Striptease bars. Gangsters shooting at one another from vast automobiles. Smouldering tenements and modern jazz bands, wailing across the ghettos like police sirens. Kennedy’s toothy smile. Charlie’s dark eyes and white limbs. America.
He went into the bathroom. The walls were stained by steam clouds and splashes of soap. Bottles everywhere, and tubes, and small pots. Mysterious feminine objects of glass and plastic. It was a long time since he had seen a woman’s bathroom. It made him feel clumsy and foreign – the heavy-footed ambassador of some other species. He picked up a few things and sniffed at them, squeezed a drop of white cream on to his finger and rubbed at it with his thumb. This smell of her mingled with the others already on his hands.
He wrapped himself in a large towel and sat down on the floor to think. Three or four times before dawn he heard her shout out in her sleep – cries of real fear. Memory or prophecy? He wished he knew.
TWO
ust before seven he went down into Bülow Strasse. His Volkswagen was parked a hundred metres up the street, on the left, outside a butcher’s shop. The owner was hanging plump carcasses in the window. A heaped tray of blood-red sausages at his feet reminded March of something.
Globus’s fingers, that’s what it was – those immense raw fists.
He bent over the back seat of the Volkswagen, tugging his suitcase towards him. As he straightened, he glanced quickly in either direction. There was nothing special to see – just the usual signs of an early Saturday morning. Most shops would open as normal but then close at lunchtime in honour of the holiday.
Back in the apartment he made more coffee, set a mug on the bedside table beside Charlie, and went into the bathroom to shave. After a couple of minutes he heard her come in behind him. She clasped her arms around his chest and squeezed, her breasts pressing into his bare back. Without turning round he kissed her hand and wrote in the steam on the mirror: PACK. NO RETURN. As he wiped away the message, he saw her clearly for the first time – hair tangled, eyes half-closed, the lines of her face still soft with sleep. She nodded and ambled back into the bedroom.
He dressed in his civilian clothes as he had for Zürich, but with one difference. He slipped his Luger into the right-hand pocket of his trench coat. The coat – old surplus Wehrmacht-issue, picked up cheaply long ago – was baggy enough for the weapon not to show. He could even hold the pistol and aim it surreptitiously through the material of the pocket, gangster-style: ‘Okay, buddy, let’s go.’ He smiled to himself. America, again.
The possible presence of a microphone cast a shadow over their preparations. They moved quietly around the apartment without speaking. At ten past eight she was ready. March collected the radio from the bathroom, placed it on the table in the sitting room, and turned up the volume. ‘From the pictures sent in for exhibition it is clear that the eye of some men shows them things other than as they are – that there really are men who on principle feel meadows to be blue, the heavens green, the clouds sulphur-yellow . . .’ It was the custom at this time to rebroadcast the Führer’s most historic speeches. They replayed this one every year – the attack on modern painters, delivered at the inauguration of the House of German Art in 1937.
Ignoring her silent protests, March picked up her suitcase as well as his own. She donned her blue coat. From one shoulder she hung a leather bag. Her camera dangled from the other. On the threshold, she turned for a final look.
‘Either these “artists” do really see things in this way and believe in that which they represent – then one has but to ask how the defect in vision arose, and if it is hereditary the Minister of the Interior will have to see to it that so ghastly a defect shall not be allowed to perpetuate itself – or, if they do not believe in the reality of such impressions but seek on other grounds to impose them upon the nation, then it is a matter for a criminal court.’
They closed the door on a storm of laughter and applause.
As they went downstairs, Charlie whispered: ‘How long does this go on?’
‘All weekend.’
‘That will please the neighbours.’
‘Ah, but will anyone dare ask you to turn it down?’
At the foot of the stairs, as still as a sentry, stood the concierge – a bottle of milk in one hand, a copy of the Völkischer Beobachter tucked under her arm. She spoke to Charlie but stared at March: ‘Good morning, Fräulein.’
‘Good morning, Frau Schustermann. This is my cousin, from Aachen. We are going to record the images of spontaneous celebration on the streets.’ She patted her camera. ‘Come on, Harald, or we’ll miss the start.’
The old woman continued to scowl at March and he wondered if she recognised him from the other night. He doubted it: she would only remember the uniform. After a few moments she grunted and waddled back into her apartment.
‘You lie very plausibly,’ said March, when they were out on the street.
‘A journalist’s training.’ T
hey walked quickly towards the Volkswagen. ‘It was lucky you weren’t wearing your uniform. Then she really would have had some questions.’
‘There is no possibility of Luther getting into a car driven by a man in the uniform of an SS-Sturmbannführer. Tell me: do I look like an Embassy chauffeur?’
‘Only a very distinguished one.’
He stowed the suitcases in the trunk of the car. When he was settled in the front seat, before he switched on the engine, he said: ‘You can never go back, you realise that? Whether this works or not. Assisting a defector – they’ll think you’re a spy. It won’t be a question of deporting you. It’s much more serious than that.’
She waved her hand dismissively. ‘I never cared for that place anyway.’
He turned the key in the ignition and they pulled out into the morning traffic.
DRIVING carefully, checking every thirty seconds to make sure they were not being followed, they reached Adolf Hitler Platz at twenty to nine. March executed one circuit of the square. Reich Chancellery, Great Hall, Wehrmacht High Command building – all seemed as it should be: masonry gleamed, guards marched; everything was as crazily out of scale as ever.
A dozen tour buses were already disgorging their awed cargoes. A crocodile file of children made its way up the snowy steps of the Great Hall, towards the red granite pillars, like a line of ants. In the centre of the Platz, beneath the great fountains, were piles of crush barriers, ready to be put into position on Monday morning, when the Führer was due to drive from the Chancellery to the Hall for the annual ceremony of thanksgiving. Afterwards he would return to his residence to appear on the balcony. German television had erected a scaffolding tower directly opposite. Live broadcast vans clustered around its base.
March pulled into a parking space close to the tourist coaches. From here he had a clear view across the lanes of traffic to the centre of the Hall.
‘Walk up the steps,’ he said, ‘go inside, buy a guide book, look as natural as you can. When Nightingale appears, bump into him: you’re old friends, isn’t it marvellous, you stop and talk for a while.’
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