The Eye of the Abyss

by Marshall Browne

  ‘This box?’

  The Gestapo man leapt forward, as did his colleague. But they were in flight, falling. Explosions. Two. Horrific. Bursting his eardrums, blowing his head off, blasting apart the rickety wooden balustrade of the stairs. All in a micro-second. He reeled back against the stairs, his ears ringing, a strange smell in the air. At his feet the two men had thudded down, converted to inanimate bundles.

  Von Streck’s blond colleague stepped in from the doorway, the large revolver hanging loosely from his hand, a wisp of smoke detaching from it. ‘Two less,’ he said calmly. He nodded to the door behind him. ‘Please leave, mein herr. Quickly! I will take care of the box.’

  Schmidt stepped over the corpses and went out to the street, where the breeze sang in telephone wires. No lights had come on in the windows; no curtain was lifted. This was Germany. He was two streets away, and calming down, when the thoughts began to roll in his brain: the blond man must have followed him; von Streck was as thorough at tidying up loose ends as he was ruthless. He stopped and stared at his blacked-out city. He, Franz Schmidt, was now irreversibly in orbit around the special plenipotentiary’s star. Wherever it was going.

  EPILOGUE

  SCHMIDT WAITED IN an anteroom. The atmosphere was reminiscent of being at his dentist, though Doctor Bernstein’s waiting room couldn’t be compared to this opulence. The French settees looked uncomfortable to his eye, but this wasn’t an occasion to sit down. So he paced up and down the honey-coloured parquet floor, spruce from his barbering that afternoon, handsome in his new, well-cut suit — in its lapel the Party badge exhibiting his empathy with the times.

  Von Streck had made him a special offer. He’d understood it was one he couldn’t refuse. But then, he hadn’t wanted to. Also, von Streck had returned to him his famous ancestor’s Salzburg cantatas. Poor Wagner couldn’t risk not bringing them back into Germany.

  So here he was. He considered recent events in the banking world. Herr Wertheim had been diagnosed with a brain tumour, and had retired from the bank and gone into seclusion at his country estate, taking Fräulein Blum with him as an assistant for the last months of his life. Wagner had been the first to detect the symptoms of the disease, though he’d never known their cause.

  While Schmidt was pacing the corridor with von Streck at 11.00 pm that terrible night, the deputy foreign manager had died of his injuries.

  Herr Schloss had been appointed general-director and had taken control to the relief of many; Schmidt had admired the rigorous efficiency with which he’d returned the Wertheim to port, and dry-dock – if not to safety. The Party had recovered the bonds from the Swiss bank and now the lawyers were arguing over the mysteriously missing amount of 500,000.

  His footsteps were setting up echoes in the salon. The NSDAP investment business had returned to the Berlin bank. In retrospect, he identified an inevitability about this, even as he recalled Herr Wertheim’s euphoria at the time of its acquisition. Certainly, the Berlin bankers had always thought so. They’d travelled to Wertheim & Co for the settlement, patronising triumph in their eyes.

  Von Streck. Schmidt stopped pacing and turned his eye to the gleaming floor. Clearly the Nazi ranks were rotten with power-plays, ambition and greed. The slippery politics of it were always in sinuous motion. In moving the Party’s investment funds to Wertheims the special plenipotentiary had been building his power-base. Subsequently surveying the Wertheim scene, he’d discovered Schmidt: a man who’d lost an eye to the SA in a quixotic act; a man with a deep family involvement with the Teutonic Knights; a man who’d attempted to save a Jewess in another hopeless, quixotic act. A man who could be a great asset to a cause. And, he supposed, it could be said: Ultimately, a man with a machiavellian mind. Schmidt couldn’t be positive about all of this, but, it must be close to the mark.

  He’d thought further about the incident in Dr Bernstein’s old building and decided that von Streck’s blond assassin had not been following him. He’d been on the tail of Wagner’s Gestapo interrogators to clean up that loose end. Von Streck couldn’t risk the Gestapo team, after interrogating Wagner, looking too closely into the antecedents of the Swiss affair. Despite the foreign manager’s confession …

  He paused to better appreciate the gilded room. Had the Party paid for all of this? He’d been dwelling in a claustrophobic existence – it seemed that his horizons were about to widen to embrace this pomp and circumstance, a new life.

  As if this were a cue, double doors at the end of the room sprang open. Von Streck stood there, beaming, his hand grandly extended. Behind him hovered a restless galaxy of colourful uniforms and superior civilian suiting. It immediately struck Schmidt that the key motif to this striking scene – on the walls, on sleeves – was the swastika. As the guests circulated, the sinister emblem seemed to flutter and dance. ‘Without finesse,’ Wagner would’ve sneered. So here I am, he thought, entering ‘a corrupt and bogus world’. Who’d said that? Not Wagner.

  ‘Come in, my dear fellow, I want to introduce you around.’

  Schmidt marched down the anteroom to take von Streck’s hand. Surely, that was the knight’s trumpet in the far distance? Inside his head? Did von Streck hear it? Forty or so faces, pink and approving, reminding him of plump hams, had turned to regard him, the general conversation had died, as though someone had tapped a wine glass with a knife in the time-honored way.

  Von Streck stood inside this inner sanctum, and raised his soft, strangler’s hands. Throttling the conversation, one might say. Schmidt asked himself if he could still risk this kind of thought any more.

  ‘Gentlemen, I wish to introduce to you Herr Franz Schmidt, banker and auditor, who’s rendered the Party a great service – uncovering a traitorous fraud against Party funds – and who I’m certain will render it many more. I present Herr Schmidt!’ Schmidt watched those hands drop to the functionary’s sides.

  Applause rippled throughout the room. Von Streck led him forward to introduce him to individuals. ‘Congratulations,’ they said one by one.

  A brown-uniformed official said, ‘We’ll expect great things from you now at the Ministry of Economics.’

  Schmidt bowed, and glanced at his mentor. Von Streck replied with weighty yet exuberant authority. ‘As the director of audit he’ll have great scope for engaging in the nation’s financial affairs. Great scope. He’ll bring his superior intelligence to the task, you’ll see!’

  Schmidt could tell von Streck was in the highest spirits. Recently, the functionary had remarked, ‘You and I, Schmidt, have a kind of telepathy going. There are things between us which don’t need to be spoken of – bear that in mind.’

  Now, in a confidential aside he said, ‘One door closes, another opens. Exciting times my dear fellow – for those of us of the right calibre. Special opportunities, to make the difference! I could tell from the beginning you’d a rare talent. One might say that the Wertheim imbroglio was a trial run. Much more important game’s afoot. The fulcrum of the Reich is money and the economy. Together, we can be a lever! Ah! … we must pay our respects to Admiral Canaris, and Colonel Oster. This is the circle you’ll be moving in, Schmidt. One of rare and splendid birds indeed. Come.’

  He followed the formidable passage of von Streck through the assembly. There appeared to be a sympathetic undercurrent between von Streck and Canaris. Yes, exciting, dangerous – but fertile – times to further investigate knightly precepts, though he’d never seen so many steely, calculating, and just plain wary eyes at one time. In quick succession he was passing from hand to hand — like being on the floor at an old-fashioned country dance. One man was introduced without show. ‘Von Hase, from Hamburg,’ von Streck said softly with an enigmatic smile, ‘he’s just taken up a key post in the chemical industry.’ He added, ‘The three of us share a particular interest.’

  Momentarily, von Streck left him alone in an enclave. Schmidt stood transfixed, enthralled at a thought. Von Streck was lighting many small fires in key strategic locations across the Rei
ch. Suddenly that seemed as certain as the shining glass prothesis in his left eye-socket. A nervous smile fluttered on his lips.

  The faces of the Dresslers flashed in his mind’s eye. Lilli’s face. It seemed an age since he’d been drawn into her doomed orbit. Now he had to put it behind him. No more slipping of notches! He had to pull himself up and out of that.

  He turned, surveying the room. He’d entered the citadel! Gone into its iron heart. Had a convoluted journey begun the evening three years ago when they’d put out his eye? Or, had all of his life been an overture to this crusade? He felt he could quite properly use ‘crusade’. Or was it all absolutely due to chance? One thing he felt surely within himself: Dürer’s knight had ridden back into the mist, and his ruthless Teutonic ancestor, he of the treachery on the Vistula, had ridden out of it to his side.

  ‘I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.’ – the immortal Goethe. Time for reflection was needed but wouldn’t be granted. It was on to the next thing. And clearly, the Fuehrer had much in store for the Third Reich.

  Outside, Berlin brooded in the winter night. Beyond the voices in the room, the walls, he felt that. He told himself that Helga and Trudi would be safe in Dresden while he undertook the valuable work for which he had the ‘rare talent’.Their safety depended on a sharp and complete separation from him. The danger he’d been in at Wertheims was a pale shadow to that which he could now expect, deep in the heart of the anti-Nazi movement.

  He felt a pang of sadness (time flees and he would miss his daughter’s childhood), but also a rare exhilaration. Of course, as one historian had recorded: ‘To be useful, to earn rewards, the trick is to survive.’That was something Dietrich, and Otto, already mouldering in their unmarked graves, had failed to achieve.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  IN THE EARLY 1930s, based on certain precepts of the Order of Teutonic Knights, the Nazis established so-called Order Castles as one of three types of school for the training of their elite. Only the most fanatical young National Socialists were selected for the Order Castles, one of which was established within the medieval walls of the Teutonic Knights’ castle at Marienburg in East Prussia.

  In 1938 Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was head of the Intelligence Bureau of the German High Command. Colonel Hans Oster was his chief assistant. From the early days of the regime, both men were strong anti-Nazis and two of the key conspirators in a plot to get rid of Hitler in the prelude to the conquest of Czechoslovakia, and in other plots during the war.

  THE EYE OF THE ABYSS. Copyright © 2002 by Marshall Browne. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For informtion, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  First published in Australia by Duffy & Snellgrove

  eISBN 9781429992756

  First eBook Edition : April 2011

  First U.S. Edition: October 2003