by Michael Dean
Elsperger furiously yelled at the driver to stop. At the side of the road, he pulled the man from his seat, slapped him round the face, then landed three heavy punches into his stomach. He couldn’t mention this debacle to anybody now, and he would make damn sure the driver didn’t either.
And as to von Hessert ... Elsperger stopped hitting the driver and licked his fleshy lips. Little Rudi was going to suffer.
Chapter Five
As Sepp Kunde was leaving the house to meet up with Ello at the Linde, he was stopped by Frau Weitig.
‘My husband would like a word with you, Herr Engel.’
‘I’m just on the way out. Can’t it wait?’
‘No, it cannot.’ Frau Weitig looked ready to bar Kunde’s exit, if necessary. Her full-bosomed body was rigid with anger.
Kunde went into the Weitig livingroom. Herr Weitig, pale and formally dressed, was sitting up on his sickbed, in semi-darkness.
‘Please take a seat, Herr Engel.’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Very well. Herr Engel, as you must know, we are tenants here, ourselves. We are subletting to you. Damenbesuch – visits by ladies – is not permitted. We, too, could be asked to leave, as well as you.’
Kunde shrugged. ‘My friend was just visiting.’
Weitig’s face twitched in spasm. He had a coughing fit, but mastered it. ‘Herr Engel, do you take me for a fool? You have made a pigsty of our bed. We intend to inform your employer. You must leave immediately.’
Kunde did not react. They might well sack him from the mine, though that hardly mattered now, with the bomb plot called off. The priority was getting the dynamite out of the bedroom and disposing of it. He thought of calling off his day in Ludwigsburg with Ello, but realised he was looking forward to it.
‘Herr Weitig, I am surely entitled to a day’s grace, to put my affairs in order and find somewhere to lay my head. I will leave tomorrow.’
‘Very well. Tomorrow it is, then. Goodbye, Herr Engel.’
Herr Weitig lay down again on his sickbed. Kunde looked for Frau Weitig as he left the house, but there was no sign of her.
*
On the train to Stuttgart, where they would change for Ludwigsburg, Ello was concerned that she had been the cause of Sepp’s eviction. Kunde, however, was unruffled, and amusingly spiky at the petit-bourgeois morality of the Weitigs: ‘Must have been the first time anybody’s fucked in that house since the war.’
Ello’s laughter pealed round the train compartment. It was cut short by the appearance of two Gestapo, bracing themselves with difficulty against the swaying of the train as they made their way down the aisle. She tried to look relaxed, but decided against smiling at them.
‘Identity cards, please.’
The one who took their identity cards was a short man with a huge belly and receding hair. He was sweating profusely in the stuffy train. He opened the cards, looked at the photographs, gave Ello a quick glance and stared at Kunde. He moved Kunde’s photograph with his thumb. The eyelet at the top-left corner was coming loose.
‘That needs to be fixed on properly,’ he said. The podgy Gestapo man pressed it down more firmly, with thumb and forefinger.
Kunde nodded. ‘I know.’
‘Get it done, then. Otherwise you’ll lose your photograph.’
‘I will.’
The Gestapo man handed both cards back. He gave Kunde a lascivious look, then continued down the aisle.
*
The sun broke through the clouds in the afternoon. Ello was pleased with her choice of a sleeveless, yellow dress. Her lover was in shirtsleeves and plus-fours, with his tweed jacket slung over his shoulder. They strolled together in Marktplatz, a lovely colonnaded eighteenth-century square. It reminded her of girlhood holidays in France and Belgium. They stopped at Carlo Ferretti’s statue of Ludwigsburg’s founder, Count Eberhard Ludwig, in the middle of the square.
‘Small, wasn’t he?’ Kunde said.
‘Look who’s talking. Oy!’ She squealed as he seized her wrist, bending her arm behind her back and kissing her. Passers-by crossing the square stopped to look at them, some smiling, some – war widows armoured in black bombazine – scowling ferociously.
‘Let’s go in there,’ she said, waving at the towered church which forms one flank of the square.
‘Where?’ Kunde blinked in the sunshine.
‘Over there! Look, it’s a church, isn’t it?
‘No idea.’
‘No idea? You’re supposed to be my tour guide. Don’t you have childhood memories of this place?’
‘Not of the bloody church, no. The brothel’s down there, Seestrasse.’
‘You’re disgusting!’ She took his arm. ‘We’re going in the church.’
Frisoni’s neo-baroque interior drew a coo of admiration from Ello. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘It’s beautiful for the few,’ Kunde said.
‘Rubbish. It’s beautiful for whoever looks at it.’
‘It’s part of the same con trick as that aristo outside in the square. Noblemen and God, artificial hierarchy. It must all be swept away. One day we shall create an equal society, instead of all this.’ He waved an arm round the church. ‘I’d tear it all down, if I could. I’d tear it down tomorrow.’
‘Are all communists as miserable as you?’
‘Yes. I’m normally the life and soul of the party.’ He tried to kiss her again, but she insisted on admiring the font.
The sun was even brighter when they emerged from the church. ‘What do you want to do now?’ she asked.
‘Undress you and fuck your beautiful arse.’
‘Yes, but apart from that.’
He flatly refused to take her round the palace, Ludwigsburg’s main tourist attraction. It occurred to her, as they stood there in the brilliant sunshine in Marktplatz, that this was Life in a Day, all the time they may ever have together. It was as if the war Hitler needed so badly had already started.
Sepp was a warrior, Sepp was a soldier; he was going away soon. He would fight against evil, she knew he would, but he might be killed. She felt melancholy, a wave of sadness she knew could turn to depression any minute. She took his arm.
A brigade of uniformed SA marched into the square, then diagonally across it. There were about thirty of them in rows of three. The lead man in the middle carried the standard with Germany Awaken emblazoned on it, topped by a circled swastika and a gold eagle. The next three had rifles over their shoulders, the three after that carried huge Blood Flags, aloft. Their boots stamped on the cobbles of the beautiful square.
‘SA Brigade 123,’ Kunde said laconically. ‘Or part of it. I know some of them. This isn’t safe. Oh, what the hell.’
‘Should we go?’ Ello said. She was frightened – as frightened as she had ever been.
‘No, I’m damned if we will. Come on, I’ll show you where I went to school.’
‘I’d like that.’
The Mörike Gymnasium was just off the centre of town. Its heavy, lichen-encrusted stone exuded Wilhelmine confidence and stolidity, a promise to the future that nothing would change – a promise about to be broken. They looked through the paling-fence at the school building.
‘Which subjects did you like best?’
‘Everything. Until I started to think for myself. Then they cut up rough. I wrote an essay on Internationalism. It wasn’t the title I’d been given; I just did it. The German teacher, Herr Knaus his name was, threw it at my feet in front of the whole class. I refused to pick it up. So he went to visit my parents, to complain about me. My father gave him a beer in the kitchen. He said he was proud of me. My grades plummeted after that.’
She touched his face. ‘How old were you? Then?’
‘Fourteen. I left soon after.’ He looked into her eyes. ‘I remember this though:
This was the last time
I went with you, O Klara.
Yes, the last time
that we were happy, like children.
When
one day we hurried
through the wide sun-bright rainy streets,
hidden under one umbrella, running.
Both secretly wrapped
like in a fairy mushroom,
finally arm in arm.’
‘That was lovely.’ She paused. ‘Who wrote it?’
‘Mörike.’ He waved at the building. ‘The one my school is named for. Swabia’s great poet – a Ludwigsburg man. He was at school with Klara, the one he wrote the poem to. She was his first girlfriend.’
‘That is really sweet. You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?’
‘You mean, how come a low-born peasant knows poetry?’
‘Precisely. Hold me. Just put your arms round me. Please.’ She thought if he put his arms around her, and did not try to kiss her, she would marry him, if he asked.
He put his arms round her. He did not try to kiss her. She stayed there for a long time, with him, but it still wasn’t long enough. Eventually they meandered back, their arms round each other’s waists, to the town centre. They had no idea where they were heading for. The first shades of dusk were creeping over the pretty town, outlining the towers of the church as fingers over Marktplatz. A carillon pealed out a quarter-hour.
‘Do you need food?’ he said.
She smiled because he made it sound so functional, not a matter for pleasure. ‘Yes. But I’m not leaving it to you. We’ll end up with a boiled sausage with mustard, eaten on the pavement.’
‘I’m not going into a fancy restaurant. I’ll tell you that for nothing.’
They compromised. The Post-Canz served Swabian specialties, but it was not intimidatingly formal. It was understood that Ello would pay the bill. As they sat at a wooden booth, the owner, Herr Buhl, greeted Sepp in a delighted roar: ‘Grüss Gott, Herr Kunde.’ It echoed round the restaurant; all the diners looked up.
For a moment, Ello was alarmed, peering round the wood-panelled, cheery place, fearing the consequences of the blowing of Sepp’s cover. Would he always be a wanted man? But as the bubbly Swabian conversation went on – Ello thought Swabian dialect sounded like water gurgling out of a bath – she relaxed, smiled, and finally joined in. She interrupted their reminiscences of mutual friends to ask Herr Buhl what Sepp had been like as a boy.
The innkeeper made a lugubrious face, pretending to think. ‘As a boy? Much the same as now, except perhaps a little bigger.’
Sepp grinned. He ordered a plate of lentils, with a slab of belly-pork and two red boiled sausages. Conscious that Ello was paying, he demanded a Halbe of the higher-price Pils beer to wash it down. At Herr Buhl’s recommendation, Ello had Swabian Maultaschen – minced pork and spinach in pastry envelopes – served in a bowl of bouillon. Herr Buhl personally selected her a Viertle of 1932 Obertürkheimer Spätlese from a local vineyard, served in a white-stemmed Römer glass.
They were silent as they ate. Sepp could be silent and at ease. She liked that.
Chapter Six
Stiff from all that rally-style driving, but proud to have outsmarted Anton and shaken him off, Rudi drove into Königsbronn. He found the Linde by asking passers-by. The innkeeper told him his sister had indeed taken a room, but she was out at the moment. Rudi asked directions to the Weitig address, assuming Ello would be there, with Sepp.
A well-preserved older woman, presumably Frau Weitig, looked angry when she opened the door, in response to his overlong pull at the doorbell. It was late in the evening, after all. But her expression softened when she looked at him.
‘Yes?’ She leaned against the door jamb coquettishly.
‘Excuse the disturbance, gnädige Frau. My name is von Hessert,’ Rudi said. ‘My sister should be here, somewhere. She is visiting a friend of ours who lodges at this address.’
‘You mean Herr Engel?’
‘No, his name is Sepp Kunde.’
‘There’s nobody here of that name.’
‘No? Little chap? Not much hair?’
But Frau Weitig had already closed the door. Rudi blinked a couple of times. He made his way back to the Linde, but Ello still had not returned. Washed up by fate at an inn, he let himself be carried by the current of events, and went to the bar. He ordered a Viertle of the famous Swabian wine and started chatting to the locals. They were welcoming to the stranger, plying him with more wine, until pretty soon he was pleasantly sozzled.
*
After the meal, Sepp and Ello made their way back to Stuttgart, and then Königsbronn, by train. Ello fell into a deep sleep on Sepp’s shoulder. Sepp saw her back to the Linde, then strolled to the Weitig house. Up in his room, he got the ewer with the dynamite out of its hiding place, put the dynamite in a canvas bag, and left with it, intending to bury it in the woods.
Ello walked into the Linde and saw her younger brother at the bar. He was standing, obviously drunk, holding a furled umbrella in the ‘On Guard’ position. She listened as he gave a comprehensive explanation of the etiquette of duelling, as practised at the universities of Tübingen and Heidelberg. The fascinated Swabian farmers were hanging on his every word.
‘Rudi!’
As soon as he saw Ello, Rudi dropped the umbrella, staggered over to her, hugged her, and managed to convey, very loudly, that their plan, which fortunately he did not describe in detail, could go ahead after all.
‘There’s goin’ be a stone foundation-stone,’ he blubbered. ‘Granite! Waist high. Bloody great big thing. You can stick it in there!’
Knowing she could hardly knock on the Weitigs’ door herself, having just been the cause of Sepp’s eviction, Ello told Rudi he must come with her, to tell Sepp the news. Getting Rudi out of the bar, however, was unexpectedly problematic: Rudi did not want to go, and the Swabian farmers were reluctant to see their evening’s entertainment disappear into the night, at least before the finer points of the honour duel were completely clear to them.
But eventually Ello managed to half-walk, half-drag Rudi as far as the Weitig house.
She got him to ring the doorbell, while she hid. At the last moment, she remembered Sepp’s false identity and called out to Rudi that Sepp was known as Herr Engel here. Herr Engel, Rudi was told by a now-seething Frau Weitig, had just left. Ello hauled Rudi back to the Linde, where the Horch was parked. Not for the first time, she cursed her father for not letting her learn to drive – Cajetan von Hessert regarded driving as an unsuitable activity for a female of rank.
The drunken Rudi installed himself at the wheel of the Horch, sending it skidding into the middle of the dark street, before pointing it forward and on its way in a series of jerks. Ello tried to imagine where Sepp would go. He would surely try to bury the dynamite.
She concentrated hard and conjured up a patch of woods in her mind. She had seen it on the way in to Königsbronn, in the taxi, when she first arrived. But where, exactly? She got Rudi to stop the car, ran back to the Linde, and asked if anybody had a map of the town.
The innkeeper went up to his room, at the top of the inn, and reappeared with a battered and much-folded map, which looked as if it might be pre-war. She unfolded it with difficulty and, with the help of Rudi’s new friends, the Swabian farmers, found the nearest woodland. Then she ran back to the car.
Rudi had fallen asleep at the wheel. Ello half-steered, while at the same time trying to give Rudi directions. As they found the woods, they came across Sepp, walking along, carrying a canvas bag. Ello gave him the good news in a rapid whisper.
Sepp, it transpired, could not drive either, so he sat in the back of the Horch while a sobering Rudi got them back to the Weitig place. Ello handed Sepp enough money to pay the rent for his room, until the end of the month. She told him to mollify the Weitigs, if at all possible. Sepp left the dynamite in the car and went back in, on his diplomatic mission.
Sitting in the car, the von Hesserts could see the light come on in his room, as he cleared the rest of his belongings. Sepp reappeared. Frau Weitig’s parting shot, he told the von Hesserts, was to ask whether Engel was his real name
.
Sepp had told them, as convincingly as he could, that it was. He had showed them his identity card. He told them the young man who visited them, earlier this evening, was an unreliable drunk, who always got names wrong. They would just have to hope the Weitigs’ suspicions were allayed, and they would not go to the police.
Back at the Linde, the von Hesserts financed a room and living expenses for Sepp, until the granite foundation-stone was placed at the site of the future House of German Art. Ello was to telephone him at the inn as soon as the stone was in place. Rudi went off to Ello’s room, and fell fast asleep, fully clothed, on her bed.
As Ello fell asleep in Sepp’s arms, in the room they had just taken for him, she felt sure the bomb plot would succeed. Evil would not prevail – they would kill Hitler soon.
Chapter Seven
At one of his infrequent visits to the Ministry of Justice, Glaser asked for Rudi to assist him with a prosecution. He was told the probationer had resigned.
The Opel Frosch was outside the Prielmayerstrasse entrance, watched by two Political Police. They had followed him there in a sporty, open-topped DKW, presumably the personal property of one of the policemen. They had then parked behind Glaser’s car, and waited for him to return. Glaser left the building by the Elisenstrasse entrance. He caught a tram to the university.
Ello was in her room, sitting on the ottoman. She looked tense and hollow-eyed, and had lost a lot of weight. The door through to her bedroom was open. Glaser could see Rudi in her bed. He appeared to be asleep, or unconscious. His face was badly bruised and swollen. What Glaser could see of his upper body was a mass of livid contusions, and what looked like whip or lash marks.
‘My dear Ello ...’