by Philip Kerr
Brahms was playing on the radio in his office, which suggested we were going to have a very private conversation.
‘I assume you mean the two soldiers from the signals regiment and not the six civilians the Gestapo hanged in the street.’
‘I wish they wouldn’t overreact like that,’ said Goldsche. ‘Killing innocent people in retaliation. It really compromises what we’re about in this department. You can dress that kind of thing up any way you like, but it’s still a crime.’
‘Will you tell them or shall I?’
‘Oh, I think it’s best coming from you, don’t you think? After all, you used to work for Heydrich, Bernie. I’m sure Müller will listen to you.’
‘I’ll get right on it, Judge.’
Goldsche chuckled and sucked on his pipe. The chimney in his office must have been bomb-damaged – which was common enough in Berlin – because it was hard to distinguish the smoke off the coal fire from the smoke off his pipe.
‘I’m certain it was a German who killed them both,’ I said. My eyes were starting to water, although that could just as easily have been the syrupy Brahms. ‘It was probably an argument about a whore. That’s one case we can leave to the local field police.’
‘What’s he like, this Lieutenant Ludwig Voss?’
‘He’s a good man, I think. Anyway, I told Judge Conrad he could rely on him. Not so sure about Colonel Ahrens. The man is a little too protective of his men to be really helpful to us. His men and his bees.’
‘Bees?’
‘He keeps an apiary at the castle where the 537th are quartered, which is right in the middle of Katyn Wood. For the honey.’
‘I don’t suppose he gave you any?’
‘Honey? No. In fact by the time I left I got the distinct impression he didn’t like me at all.’
‘Well, there are going to be plenty of bees buzzing around his ears before this particular investigation’s over,’ observed Goldsche. ‘And I expect that’s why, don’t you?’
‘I’ll bet August Nöthling could have sold you some honey.’
‘He’s a butcher.’
‘Maybe so. But he still managed to supply twenty kilos of chocolate to the minister of the interior and the field marshal.’
‘That’s exactly what one would expect of a man like Frick. But I certainly didn’t expect it of Field Marshal von Brauchitsch.’
‘When you’ve been retired by the leader, what else can an old soldier do but eat if he’s not to fade away?’
The judge smiled.
‘So what now?’ I asked. ‘For me, I mean? Why don’t you let me depose those wounded soldiers in the Charité? The ones from Grischino.’
‘Actually, I’m going to depose them myself. Just to keep my hand in. Anyway, I was hoping to catch two birds with one trap. I suffer from fearful indigestion, and it occurred to me I might persuade one of the doctors or the nurses to let me have a bottle of liver salts. There’s none to be had in any of the shops.’
‘As you wish. I’m certainly not going to stand between you and your liver. Look, I’m not anxious to head back to Russia, but it strikes me there’s a lot of work to do in Stalino, right now. That’s near Kharkov, isn’t it?’
‘That depends on what you mean by near. It’s three hundred kilometres south of Kharkov. That’s much too far to send you, Bernie. I need you here in Berlin. Especially now and this weekend.’
‘Would you mind telling me why?’
‘I’ve been warned by the ministry of propaganda that we can expect a summons to the Prince Carl Palace at any time. So that we might brief the minister himself on what you discovered in Katyn Wood.’
I let out a groan.
‘No, listen Bernie, I want you to make sure that there is nothing in your report he can find fault with. I don’t think the bureau can afford to disappoint him again so soon after the disappointment he felt after we lost our witness to the sinking of the SS Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim.’
‘I should have thought that overcoming disappointment is what propaganda is all about.’
‘Besides, it’s Heroes Memorial Day this Sunday. Hitler’s inspecting an exhibition of captured Soviet military material and making a speech, and I need someone with a uniform to accompany me to the Armoury Building and help represent this department. All of the general staff will be there, as usual.’
‘Find someone else, Judge. Please. I’m no Nazi. You know that.’
‘That’s what everyone in this department says. And there is no one else. It seems that this weekend there is only you and me.’
‘It will be just another rant by the great necromancer about Bolshevik poison. But now I begin to understand. That’s why there are so many judges from the bureau out of town, isn’t it? They’re avoiding this duty.’
‘That’s very true. None of them want to be anywhere near Berlin this weekend.’ He puffed his pipe for a moment and then added: ‘Perhaps they’re afraid of failing to show the proper amount of respect and enthusiasm for the leader’s ability to lead our nation in such a solemn moment of national commemoration.’ He shrugged. ‘On the other hand, they might just be afraid.’
I lit a cigarette – if you can’t beat them, join them – and took a long drag before speaking again.
‘Wait a minute. Is something going to happen, Judge? At the Armoury? To the general staff?’
‘I think something is going to happen, yes,’ said the judge. ‘But not to the general staff. At least not right away. Afterwards it’s quite possible there may be some kind of overreaction on the part of the Gestapo and the SS. Of the kind we were discussing earlier. So I wouldn’t forget your firearm if I were you. In fact, I’d be very grateful if you made sure you brought it with you. I’ve never been much of a shot with a pistol.’
Even as the judge was speaking I remembered a remark made by Colonel Ahrens during one of our more frank conversations – something about the amount of treason talked in Smolensk – and suddenly a lot of what I’d seen seemed to make sense: the package addressed to Colonel Stieff in Rastenburg that Von Dohnanyi had carried all the way from Berlin and which – strangely – Lieutenant von Schlabrendorff had asked Colonel Brandt to carry on Hitler’s plane back to Rastenburg must surely have been a bomb, albeit a bomb that hadn’t exploded.
And what better motive could there be for someone to have killed a couple of telephonists than the possibility that they had overheard the details of a plan to kill Hitler? But when that plan had failed, another plan must have been put into action. That made sense, too: Hitler was increasingly a recluse and the opportunities to kill him were few and far between. All the same, if this was indeed why the two telephonists had been murdered, I found the act repugnant. Hitler certainly deserved to die, and secrecy was undoubtedly important if his assassination was ever to be carried out, but not if that meant the cold-blooded murder of two innocent men. Or was I just being naïve?
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘The mist clears. I begin to see the elf-king, father. He’s near.’
The judge frowned, trying to recognize my allusion. ‘Goethe?’
I nodded. ‘Tell me something, Judge,’ I said. ‘I suppose Von Dohnanyi’s involved.’
‘Christ, is it that obvious?’
‘Not to everyone,’ I said. ‘But I’m a detective, remember? It’s my job to smell when the fuse is burning. However, if I’ve guessed, it’s possible others might guess too.’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe that’s why the bomb didn’t go off on Hitler’s plane. Because someone else figured it out.’
‘Christ,’ muttered the judge. ‘How did you know about that?’
‘You know, for an intelligence officer with the Abwehr your friend isn’t very clever,’ I said. ‘Brave, but not smart. He and I were on the same plane down to Smolensk. If you’re going to carry a parcel that’s addressed to someone in Rastenburg it looks a lot less suspicious if you deliver it the first time you’re there.’
‘That parcel you saw was only ever the back-up plan to Plan A.’
&
nbsp; ‘And what was that? Fix the brakes on Hitler’s car? Nobble the vegetarian option in the officer’s mess? Push him over in the snow? The trouble with these damned aristocrats is that they know everything about good manners and being a gentleman and absolutely nothing about cold-blooded murder. If you’re going to do this kind of thing you need a professional. Like the person who murdered those two telephonists. Now he knew what he was doing.’
‘I don’t know for sure what the plan was then.’
‘So what do you know? I mean how are they going to try it this time?’
‘Another bomb, I believe.’
I smiled. ‘You know your salesmanship stinks, Judge. You invite me along to a party and then tell me that a bomb is going to explode while we’re there. My enthusiasm for Sunday morning is diminishing all the time.’
‘A very brave officer from Army Group Centre in Smolensk, who has the duty of taking Hitler round an exhibition of captured Soviet weaponry, has agreed to carry a bomb in his jacket pocket. I believe it’s his plan to be as close to the leader as possible when it goes off.’
I wondered if this officer was the Abwehr colonel I’d seen on the plane back from Smolensk. I would have asked the judge, but I thought I’d probably unnerved him quite enough with my remarks about Von Dohnanyi. I certainly didn’t want Goldsche calling this officer and telling him to call off the assassination just because of what I’d guessed.
‘Then we’d better just hope for the best,’ I said. ‘Usually that’s the only option available in Nazi Germany.’
CHAPTER 11
Sunday, March 21st 1943
The Zeughaus or Arsenal was a baroque building of pinkish stone on Unter den Linden that housed a military museum. In the centre of the façade was a classical open pediment, and surrounding the roof was a spindle balustrade along which were arranged a series of twelve or fourteen suits of classical armour, made of stone and empty, as if ready to be claimed by a busload of Greek heroes. But I was inclined to think of these empty suits of armour as belonging to men who were already dead, and therefore more typical of Nazi Germany and the disastrous war we were now waging in Russia. This seemed especially true on the first Heroes Memorial Day that Berlin had witnessed since the surrender at Stalingrad, and there would have been many of the several hundred officers who paraded in front of the huge staircase on the north side of the inner courtyard to hear the leader’s ten-minute speech who had the same unpalatable thought as me: our true heroes were lying under several feet of Russian snow, and all the memorials in the world wouldn’t alter the fact that Hitler’s retreat from Moscow would not be long in following Napoleon’s, and with equally terminal effect upon his leadership.
It was however a more imminent termination to Hitler’s leadership that many of us were praying for on that particular Sunday morning. We stood there to attention, under the barrels of the 10-centimetre field guns Army Group Centre had taken from the Reds, and I for one could cheerfully have wished that someone would fire a fragmentation shell at our beloved leader: the 10-centimetre K353 delivered a 17-kilogram shell containing about six hundred bullets and was devastating to 50 per cent of targets in a 20- to 40-metre area. Which sounded just fine to me. I would probably have been killed as well, but that was all right just so long as the leader didn’t walk away from an explosion.
We listened to a sombre piece of Bruckner that did little to make anyone feel optimistic about anything; then, bare-headed and wearing a grey leather greatcoat, the leader walked to the lectern, and like a malevolent fisherman casting a long line into an infernal black lake, he sought to hook our lowered spirits with an announcement of a lifting of the ban on furlough for serving men because the front had been ‘stabilized’. Then he got to more standard fare about the Jews and the Bolsheviks, the warmonger Churchill, and how the enemies of the Reich meant to abduct and then to sterilize our male youth before eventually slaughtering us in our beds.
In that place of war and destruction, Hitler’s cold, hard voice seemed darker and more subdued than normal, which did nothing to encourage any feeling at all, let alone soldierly sentiment for fallen comrades. It was like listening to the sepulchral tones of Mephistopheles as, in some cavernous mountain hall, he threatened us all with hell. Only the threats were no good; hell was waiting just down the road and we all knew it. You could smell it in the air like hops from a local brewery.
In spite of all Judge Goldsche had told me, I didn’t really believe anything was going to happen to Hitler, but it certainly didn’t stop me hoping that Colonel von Gersdorff – for that was the Abwehr assassin’s name, and as I’d suspected he was indeed the officer who had been on the plane back from Smolensk – would prove me wrong.
As the leader finished speaking, everyone – myself included – applauded enthusiastically. I glanced at my watch and told myself that I was applauding because Hitler’s speech had lasted a comparatively short ten minutes, but this was a lie and I knew it: applauding a speech by the leader was a simple condition of self-preservation – the hall was full of Gestapo. Acknowledging the applause with a perfunctory Hitler salute, the leader walked to the entrance of the exhibition, where he was greeted by the colonel, and at a distance – a safe one, I hoped – the rest of us followed.
According to the judge, Von Gersdorff’s tour of the exhibition was due to last thirty minutes; in the event, it lasted less than five. As I entered the exhibition hall where a number of Napoleonic standards were on display I saw the leader turn on his heel and then move quickly through a side door and out of the Arsenal onto the riverbank, leaving his would-be assassin bewildered by this unexpected turn of events. Short of chasing after Hitler and throwing himself into the back of his Mercedes, Von Gersdorff’s attempt to kill the leader looked very much as if it was over before it had even begun.
‘That wasn’t supposed to happen,’ muttered the judge. ‘Something’s gone wrong. Hitler must have been tipped off.’
I glanced around the exhibition hall. Those members of Hitler’s SS bodyguard who still remained behind seemed quite relaxed. Others – officers with red stripes on their trouser legs, who were presumably in on the plot – rather less so.
‘I don’t think that’s the case,’ I said. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any sign of alarm on the part of the SS.’
‘Yes, you’re right.’ The judge shook his head. ‘Christ, the man’s luck is uncanny. Damn him, he seems to have an instinct for self-preservation.’
Von Gersdorff continued standing where he was, seemingly at a loss about what to do next, mouth wide open like the Engelberg Tunnel. Around him were several officers who clearly had no idea the colonel was carrying explosives that might go off at any moment.
‘I’m not so sure about your friend’s instinct for self-preservation,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Colonel von Gersdorff. He’s still carrying a bomb, isn’t he?’
‘Oh God, yes. What’s he going to do?’
For another minute or so we watched, and gradually it became quite clear to us that Von Gersdorff wasn’t going to do anything. He kept looking around as if wondering why he was still there and had not yet been blown to smithereens. Suddenly it seemed I had to get him out of there: brave men of conscience were rather thin on the ground in Germany in 1943. I had the evidence of my own shaving mirror to remind me of that.
‘Wait here,’ I told the judge.
I walked quickly through the exhibition, pushing my way past the other officers toward the colonel. I stopped in front of him and bowed politely. He was about forty, dark and balding, and if I had doubted his courage, there was always the Iron Cross first class around his neck – not to mention what he had hidden in his greatcoat pocket – to remind me. I figured I had a less than even chance of being blown up. My heart was in my mouth and my knees were shaking so much it was only my boots that were holding me up. It might have been Heroes Memorial Day but I wasn’t feeling in the least bit heroic.
‘You must come with me, colone
l,’ I said, quietly. ‘Now, sir, if you don’t mind.’
Seeing me, and more importantly the little silver death’s head on my cap and the witchcraft badge on my sleeve, Von Gersdorff smiled a sad smile, as though he was being arrested, which was my intention – or at least to leave him with the impression that he was being arrested. His hands were shaking and he was as pale as a Prussian winter’s day, but still he remained rooted to the spot.
‘It would be best for everyone if you didn’t wait any longer, sir,’ I said firmly.
‘Yes,’ he said, with a quiet air of resignation. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘This way, please.’
I turned on my heel and walked out of the exhibition hall. I didn’t look around. I didn’t need to. I could hear Von Gersdorff’s boots on the wooden floor immediately behind me. But on our way out of the exhibition hall, an SD captain called Wetzel whom I knew from the Gestapo took my arm.
‘Is everything all right?’ he asked. ‘Why did the leader leave so abruptly?’
‘I don’t know why,’ I said, pulling my arm away from his grip. ‘But it seems something he said has left the colonel feeling a little upset, that’s all. So if you’ll excuse us.’
I looked around. By now I could see the fear in Von Gersdorff’s eyes, but was he afraid of me or – more likely – the bomb in his pocket?
‘This way, sir,’ I said and led him to a lavatory, where the colonel hesitated, so I was obliged to take him by the elbow and thrust him urgently inside. I checked the six cubicles to see that there was no one else in there. We were in luck; we were alone.
‘I’ll keep watch,’ I said, ‘while you defuse the device. Quickly, please.’
‘You mean, you’re not arresting me?’
‘No,’ I said, positioning myself immediately behind the door. ‘Now disarm that fucking bomb before we both find out the true meaning of Heroes Memorial Day.’
Von Gersdorff nodded and walked over to a row of washhandbasins. ‘Actually, there are two bombs,’ he said, and from the pockets of his greatcoat he carefully withdrew two flat objects that were each about the size of a rifle magazine. ‘The explosives are British. Clam mines used for sabotage. Odd that the Tommy ordnance for this kind of work should be better than ours. But the fuses are German. Ten-minute mercury sticks.’