Traitor's Gate

by Michael Ridpath

  The service was presided over by a chubby-faced pastor of about thirty named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who gave a short but moving address about goodness and love surrounded by evil. Conrad had heard of him: he had been in trouble with the Nazis for his opposition to the government’s attempts to Nazify the Protestant church in Germany. Afterwards there was a bridal procession through the park from the church to the manor house where the wedding feast was to take place, headed by the bride and groom. Conrad escorted Kätchen, and Theo one of the bride’s sisters.

  Here in the countryside there were none of the shortages of the town. The feast included an orgy of cream and cakes, and somehow the bride’s family had managed to acquire an unending supply of champagne. After the dinner, with its silent toast to Wilhelm, King of Prussia and former Kaiser, there was music and dancing in an avenue in the park shaded by ancient chestnuts that joined overhead, forming a canopy. Father and daughter opened the dancing with a waltz, with all the guests clapping in time. There was a brief hiatus as the shy groom refused to take the floor with his wife for the second dance, a break in tradition which threatened to bring eternal shame on the whole proceedings, but fortunately Theo stepped in and whirled her around the makeshift floor

  All the important families of the region were there: Hertenbergs, Bismarcks, including the former Prussian Minister of the Interior, Herbert von Bismarck, Kleists, of which Uncle Ewald was one, Wedemeyers and Schulenburgs. The older men wore lines of miniature medals across the chests of their morning suits. These Prussian families were large, and there were children everywhere. One imperious old lady seemed to preside over it all: Ruth von Kleist, Theo’s other grandmother. Everyone showed her the utmost respect and even Conrad was introduced to her. It was a beautiful evening, and Conrad danced and drank and enjoyed himself among these strangers.

  ‘Young man!’

  Conrad, surprised to hear English spoken, turned to see Theo’s American grandmother summoning him, a gleam in her eye.

  ‘Yes, Frau von Hertenberg?’ he replied.

  ‘Call me Betty. And get me a glass of whisky, will you? Theo promised he would hide a bottle for me behind the elm tree.’

  ‘Certainly, Betty.’ Conrad found the bottle of Johnnie Walker in question, and two glasses. He poured one for himself and one for the old lady.

  ‘Thank you, young man,’ said the old lady with a wicked grin. ‘Theo told me you were reliable. Bottoms up.’ She downed the drink in one, and the grin became even more wicked. ‘At times like this I wish my father was still alive. He loved a good party.’ She blinked. ‘Ooh. I think I need to sit down.’

  Conrad escorted her to a chair. ‘Now, do you see those two girls over there gossiping away?’ She pointed to two girls, barely out of their teens, fresh-faced and glowing.

  Conrad nodded.

  ‘They are the Schulenburg sisters. Pretty as peaches, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, Betty, I would say they are.’

  ‘Well, go and ask one of them to dance. I would recommend the little one. The tall one doesn’t stop talking.’

  Conrad did as he was bid. He ended up dancing with both of them, and then Kätchen, and then one of her cousins and then Kätchen again. Conrad was a good dancer and he had no shortage of willing partners. The movement, the music, the girls, the champagne put him in a really good mood. He was enjoying himself for the first time in a long time.

  But the fact that, with the exception of Theo’s grandmother, he was the only foreigner present, and also the only person whose family was not one of the close-knit circle of neighbours, struck Conrad as odd. He had noticed Sophie wasn’t there, for instance.

  ‘Tell me again why I’m here,’ he asked Theo.

  ‘It was Uncle Ewald’s idea,’ Theo said. ‘But I’m glad you came.’

  Conrad looked for Uncle Ewald, and saw him in earnest conversation with the matriarch, Ruth von Kleist, and the pastor. ‘So am I.’

  Theo raised his glass of champagne. ‘To Algy.’

  Conrad smiled as he remembered the little wooden plaque in his rooms at Oxford commemorating the undergraduate who had died at Ypres. ‘To Algy.’

  As Conrad sat on the small, slow train puffing its way through the Pomeranian countryside towards Stettin, he was still smiling. He had forgotten the bitterness of the last couple of weeks, if only temporarily. Of course, he knew why Theo had invited him. Had they met in a quiet Berlin bar there was no chance that Theo would have been able to persuade him of his sincerity. Even if Theo had introduced him to his superiors in the Abwehr, whoever they were, there would be nothing they could have said that would have dispelled the doubts in Conrad’s mind. Theo did after all work for the secret service, and one thing all secret-service personnel must be experts in is deception.

  But there was nothing deceptive about Uncle Ewald, about Kätchen von Hertenberg, about her father the bluff general, about the matriarch Ruth von Kleist, about the pastor Bonhoeffer, about the elderly grandfather of the groom who had proposed a gruff toast to the King of Prussia. When Theo said he wanted to stop Hitler, he meant it.

  Conrad had no illusions about the Junkers he had spent the weekend among. As a historian he knew that they were about the most reactionary, conservative group of people in Europe. Whichever theory you subscribed to about the causes of the Great War, you couldn’t hide from the fact that it was planned with enthusiasm by Prussian generals. He knew many of them had supported Hitler when he first came to power, seeing in him a bulwark against the much-feared Bolsheviks, and he was sure that many of them still supported their führer.

  He thought of the mysterious clearing in the woods and those two standing stones, the ‘Traitor’s Gate’. Theo could agonize over whether that knight Otto had been a traitor or not to the Teutonic Order, or to the local knights, but to Conrad, the salient point was that he had died a horrible death as punishment for his scheming.

  Conrad knew he was being manipulated again, and not just by Theo. The Abwehr, whoever they were, almost certainly knew what Theo was doing. As did Uncle Ewald, clearly. And what he was doing was trying to get Conrad to pass a message to the British government. He had no idea yet what the message would be, but he was sure that since Theo had gone to all this trouble, it must be an important one.

  Conrad had had enough of being manipulated. He still didn’t feel any sense of patriotic duty to spy for his country. Nor was he convinced that Theo had told him the whole story. The Abwehr would have to find another messenger.

  18

  Conrad’s mind was still full of thoughts of his weekend as he took a taxi from the station back to his flat. As the cab turned off Kurfürstenstrasse into the little square where he lived, he saw a woman’s figure beneath the old chestnut tree by the back of the church.

  Anneliese.

  The taxi pulled up in front of his building. As he climbed out she took two tentative steps towards him. He paid the driver, but when he turned back towards her she was walking rapidly away towards Nollendorfplatz. He thought of calling after her, but then he didn’t.

  He didn’t sleep well that night, thinking about her. One moment he would be imagining her wicked smile, her laugh, her eyes. Then he would drift off to sleep and awake with another image of a half-undressed Klaus in his mind, so vivid that it took him a few moments to remember where he was, his heart beating rapidly in a mixture of shock and anger.

  The following morning, as he stood waiting to cross Unter den Linden on his way to the Stabi, he saw her again. This time she walked purposefully towards him.

  ‘Heil Hitler, Anneliese,’ he said with a touch of cruelty.

  ‘Grüss Gott,’ she replied, using the old, banned, pre-Nazi greeting.

  A gap appeared in the traffic, and Conrad stepped off the pavement to cross the road.

  ‘Wait!’ said Anneliese, and touched his arm.

  Conrad waited. ‘Yes?’ She looked thinner than when he had last seen her, and paler, and her eyes were dark smudges. Food was harder to come by in thos
e days of ‘guns before butter’. Perhaps that was the reason.

  ‘Please let me talk to you, just for a few minutes. You don’t have to say anything, you can walk off to the library afterwards, but please listen to me.’

  Conrad sighed. ‘All right.’ In truth he didn’t feel the anger he had expected on seeing her in front of him. He just felt numb.

  They were right outside the Café Kranzler, and they got a table on the flower-bedecked first-floor terrace overlooking the street. They ordered coffee. Kranzler’s still served real coffee, not the ersatz stuff that was on offer almost everywhere else, but in small quantities, barely half a cup each.

  Suddenly the numbness left him and the heat of his old anger returned. Anneliese was just beginning to speak when Conrad interrupted her. ‘You slept with that Gestapo bastard, didn’t you?’

  Anneliese held his gaze and blinked. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Just so he could get your father out of the country?’

  She swallowed and nodded.

  ‘And that’s why you saw so much of me, wasn’t it? Right from when we met at Theo’s dinner party you thought I could be useful to you. Well, you were right, I was.’

  Anneliese mumbled something that Conrad couldn’t hear.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I said, I liked you. I still do like you. That’s why I’m here.’

  Conrad snorted and looked away at a tram swishing along the street below.

  ‘Can I tell you about Klaus?’

  ‘Why should I want to know about Klaus?’

  ‘Please listen. Please.’

  Anneliese was on the verge of tears. But beneath the misery, there was determination.

  ‘All right,’ said Conrad, reluctantly, reining in his anger.

  ‘I first met him when I was a medical student at university. At Halle. He was studying law. He was one of Paul’s most enthusiastic supporters. He came on all the anti-Nazi demonstrations with us; he helped distribute leaflets. I knew he liked me then, I could tell, but he worshipped Paul and he knew I was unattainable. He was already in Berlin as a junior lawyer when Hitler came to power, so he avoided being picked up with Paul and me and the others.

  ‘I saw him in Berlin later, when I was training to become a nurse. When Paul was killed Klaus was nice to me. Kind, gentle, genuinely considerate.’

  ‘He was a Gestapo officer, for God’s sake!’ Conrad said.

  ‘Not then, he wasn’t,’ Anneliese said. ‘He had joined the Nazi Party, but you had to to pass the law exams. You remember, Theo told us that. Anyway...’ She fiddled with the saucer of her coffee cup. ‘Anyway, I needed someone like him to comfort me. We became engaged.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘He was a good man. Or I thought he was a good man. I didn’t love him, of course I didn’t love him, I still loved Paul, but that didn’t matter because I knew I would never love another man anyway, and I wanted so desperately to be looked after, and Klaus wanted so desperately to look after me.’

  ‘How romantic,’ said Conrad, but even to him the bite of cynicism in his voice jarred.

  ‘Then he was asked to join the Gestapo. And he said yes.’

  ‘I’m surprised they took him: a former communist agitator.’

  ‘You would be amazed at the number of good socialists who have become good National Socialists in this country,’ said Anneliese bitterly. ‘They just don’t ask each other too many difficult questions.’

  ‘But wasn’t it a clue that perhaps he wasn’t a very nice man?’

  ‘We argued about it. I am half-Jewish after all, and at that stage it was clear that would be a problem for him as much as for me. But Heydrich had asked him personally, so it was impossible to refuse. And...’ She fiddled with the saucer again.

  ‘And?

  ‘And he said he would get my father out of prison,’ Anneliese said with a note of defiance. ‘And he would have done too, if only Himmler hadn’t taken a personal interest in the case.’

  Conrad raised his eyebrows.

  ‘In the end I broke off the engagement. I didn’t love him and I never would love him, and that mattered. And I couldn’t live with someone who was in the Gestapo, however kind he was to me personally.’

  ‘What you mean is he couldn’t get your father out of jail and so he was no more use to you. Until this year, that is.’

  Anneliese shook her head.

  ‘Did you tell him about Joachim?’ Conrad asked.

  Anneliese frowned. ‘No! Of course not.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a coincidence that it was Klaus Schalke who interrogated him, isn’t it? A couple of days after you had overheard him telling Theo about a plot to get rid of Hitler. You told me you didn’t understand what Joachim was saying, but I know you speak English.’

  ‘You’re right, I did understand Joachim, but I didn’t know Theo that well, and I didn’t know Joachim at all, so it seemed safer to claim ignorance. That’s just the kind of talk you don’t want to overhear in Germany. But I absolutely did not speak to Klaus about it. At that stage I hadn’t spoken to Klaus for months.’

  ‘So it wasn’t just another dodge to get your father out?’

  A tear fell down Anneliese’s cheek. ‘I know what you think of me, and the awful thing is mostly you are right. I think I’m contemptible too. I know you don’t want to see me again, of course you don’t. At the time I thought it was worth doing anything, anything to get my father out of the concentration camp. I did a lot of things I bitterly regret now and I hate myself for them. Believe me, I hate myself so much more than you hate me.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Conrad.

  Anneliese took a deep breath. ‘One of the things I most regret – no, the thing I most regret, is losing you. You saw what was happening to my father and did your best to help him. You risked your life for a man you didn’t know because the way he was treated was unjust. When I was with you the world seemed normal; I felt like a normal human being. And now you’ve gone... Now I’ve treated you so badly...’ She stumbled, and bit her lip.

  Conrad was about to say something cutting, but the words never left his lips. He looked straight into her eyes. He saw pain and misery but also defiance. His cynicism suddenly seemed ugly when faced with Anneliese’s honesty.

  She got to her feet. ‘There it is then. I’ve said it. What I came here to say. Goodbye, Conrad.’

  And she was gone.

  Conrad spent the whole morning in the Stabi staring at a blank sheet of paper. He just couldn’t get Anneliese out of his mind. He felt an almost overwhelming urge to rush around to her room, take her in his arms and tell her that he forgave her. But it was an urge that he fought against, fought against and conquered. The bitterness and resentment that he felt about the way she had treated him still burned, and he had no intention of casting off that protective shell in a moment of weakness. These days you could trust nobody. He had relented with Theo, and he would probably suffer the consequences. He wasn’t going to give in to Anneliese. There was bound to be something she wanted from him, maybe a visa for herself. Yes, that was it: she wanted to go to England to join her father. Well, he wasn’t going to be made a fool of again. He wasn’t going to be hurt again.

  Later on, back at his flat, he was listening to Bruch’s violin concerto on his gramophone – the piece that Theo’s grandmother had played – when he had a visitor. It was Sophie. He was struck by how pretty she was, with her short blonde hair, delicate mouth and big baby-blue eyes.

  ‘What a surprise!’ Conrad said. ‘Come in. Can I get you a drink?’

  She asked for a sherry, and he mixed himself a whisky and soda.

  ‘Nice music,’ she said, taking the drink.

  ‘Theo’s grandmother played it over the weekend. Have you met her?’

  ‘I haven’t met any of Theo’s family,’ Sophie said, a touch of bitterness in her voice.

  ‘Really?’ said Conrad, realizing he had put his foot in it.

  ‘He knows they would think I wasn
’t good enough for him. A nurse and the daughter of a fishmonger from Friedrichshain.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Conrad.

  ‘Oh, come on, you know it’s not nonsense. You have a class system in your country, don’t you? You are the son of a lord, it’s easy enough for you to ignore it. Not so easy for me.’ She sighed. ‘And not so easy for Theo either.’

  Conrad couldn’t argue with that. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t be like that. Theo shouldn’t be like that.’

  Sophie smiled at him. ‘You wouldn’t care, would you?’

  Conrad smiled. ‘I’d like to think not. Actually my parents thought my wife was totally unsuitable and I married her anyway. Sadly they were right.’

  ‘So you’d marry Anneliese even though she’s half-Jewish?’ Sophie asked.

  Conrad laughed. ‘There are very many reasons why I wouldn’t marry Anneliese, but the fact that she is half-Jewish is not one of them. What about you and Theo?’

  It was strange to be asking his friend’s girlfriend about marriage, but there was a pleasingly intimate honesty about Sophie that encouraged him.

  ‘That will never happen,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Yet you stay with him?’

  ‘I love him,’ she said. ‘I know that the best I can hope for is to be his girlfriend. Or, more accurately, his mistress. But I can’t imagine life without him.’

  ‘He’s very lucky,’ Conrad said.

  They sipped their drinks, listening to the Bruch.

  ‘I’ve come to speak to you about Anneliese,’ Sophie said.

  ‘I guessed as much.’

  ‘She has been miserable since you saw her with Klaus.’

  ‘And so have I.’

  ‘I’m sure you have,’ said Sophie. ‘A few days ago I thought she was going to kill herself. I caught her taking a batch of tranquillizers from the hospital. Stealing them. She said she couldn’t sleep, but I could see she was lying. Anneliese wouldn’t steal for something like that. It was something more... final. And she did try once before, several years ago.’