“It’s about Markgraf von Kresse,” Himmler said.
“What about him?”
“The Führer knows about his mission, apparently.”
“How did he find out?”
Himmler shrugged. “Count von Kresse is considered unreliable and dangerous. Many others are having him watched. Someone else’s people may have followed him to the ship, or onto it. And Ribbentrop knows all about the voyage.”
“And the Führer is angry?”
“We should waste no more time, Hermann. The Führer is waiting. Come, there is my car.”
He gestured to his motorcade, which consisted of a black Mercedes-Benz touring car, two black Mercedes sedans, and about a dozen motorcycles—all with party flags flying.
Goering was not about to become a passenger in a procession so identified with a rival.
“I will join you at the Reichschancellory,” he said. “I must prepare myself.”
As quickly as possible, he changed into his best blue-and-white gold-braided uniform, while his staff organized a separate motorcade for him made up of his Mercedes limousine, three Luftwaffe sedans, an armored car, and every motorcycle in Goering’s motor pool.
Himmler naturally arrived first, but he had not been admitted to the Führer’s inner sanctum by the time Goering waddled into the antechamber.
They were made to wait another twenty minutes. Albert Speer, the Führer’s young architect, emerged from behind the great wood and steel doors, a roll of what Goering presumed were blueprints or drawings under his arm. He nodded curtly to Himmler and more generously to Goering, but said nothing. A moment later, the Reichscommissioner and Reichsführer-S.S. were summoned.
Hitler was thus alone less than sixty seconds. He could not stand to be by himself for any period, a consequence of his time in prison perhaps, or of his miserably lonely youth spent as a friendless would-be artist. Goering suspected that Eva Braun’s function as the man’s mistress had not to do with any sexual acts but was merely to provide him with company while he slept.
The Führer sat exactly at the middle of his elongated desk, his back to the towering windows. The massive black drapes had been drawn to within six feet of each other, leaving most of the vast room in darkness but allowing a shaft of brilliant light to fall on Hitler’s head and shoulders and the papers before him. The effect was almost as theatrical as the light shows Speer had engineered at the rallies in Nuremburg.
The Führer was wearing his customary light-brown military tunic, a white shirt, and a black tie. He was hunched and looked tired. He lifted his eyes from the work in front of him, then rubbed them wearily. When he lowered his hand again, he was staring at the two of them darkly. He was forty-six but seemed a decade older.
“Ribbentrop informs me that the Prince of Wales is sailing to America incognito on a Dutch ship,” Hitler said sharply, as if Goering and Himmler had personally put the British crown prince aboard. “He says that a Markgraf von Kresse, a known troublemaker, is also on this ship. I am also informed that he is there on your orders.” His eyes went from Goering to Himmler and back. “This is true?”
Goering glanced at Himmler, who said nothing.
“Yes, it is true, my Führer.”
“True that you put this Prussian count, this colonel, on this ship with the crown prince of England?”
Himmler had turned to face Goering, as well, as if he were as ignorant of this matter as Hitler was.
“Yes, my Führer.” Goering had stopped calling him Adolf six years before. “But I would not call him a troublemaker so much as an eccentric. I knew him well in the war, in the Richthofen Jagdgeschwader. He was a great hero, very badly wounded. In the end, he fought in the trenches as a common soldier, as did you, my Führer. He still suffers pain, and it makes him irritable. He says things he does not mean. He is very popular with the old officer corps.”
“Yes, yes, very well, Hermann. But why did you put him on the ship? What is he doing there? Is he annoying the Prince of Wales?”
Himmler folded his arms across his chest as he stared at Goering intently. Except for the one’s toothbrush moustache and the other’s spectacles, the Reinchsfuhrer-S.S. and the Führer resembled each other greatly, even to the same pasty faces and pudgy cheeks. Without their uniforms, they looked petit bougeois indeed. Himmler had been a chicken farmer for some years after the Great War. Hitler had left school at sixteen and worked for a time as a laborer.
Goering, like von Kresse, had been one of the most photographed heroes of the war, though the once-jutting squarish jaw had disappeared into softer flesh.
“His sister is with him, my Führer. She is a faithful member of the party. You have no more loyal follower. And she, like von Kresse, is a true Aryan. You should look into their gray-eyed, fair-haired faces. Dr. Goebbels should use them on posters.”
“But why is he on this ship? Why has he been sent after the Prince of Wales, to bother the prince with his ‘eccentric’ ways? The prince is well disposed toward us. I am told this. I have read his speeches. He’s very good for us. Because of him England will yet be with us. Yet there is von Kresse. Why is this, Hermann?”
The Reichscommissioner turned toward Himmler, but the latter’s face remained impassive. Goering would have his revenge for this.
“By sailing to America, the prince has put himself at risk,” Goering said. “There are many in Britain who are combining against him. I thought we should do whatever we can to protect him; whatever we can to stay close to the situation. I needed someone who could move in the prince’s aristocratic circles, who was not too closely identified with our movement, who would do what I told him. And I needed such a person in a hurry. We had only hours to spare, isn’t that so, Heinrich?”
Startled, the Reichsführer only stared.
“We can trust him,” Goering continued. “I have bought this trust with a threat. He knows I can have his wife eliminated with a single telephone call. We have her under surveillance in Krakow.”
“Krakow?”
“His wife is Polish, my Führer. They are separated, but he still cares for her. My threat has meaning.”
“Polish!” Hitler said. “So now you tell me this crippled, troublemaking, eccentric Prussian markgrav has a Polish wife? Next you will be telling me he is Jewish.” The Führer snorted, leaning back in his immense chair.
“Hardly,” said Goering. “In the war he was my best friend.”
“I will remember that, Hermann.”
“My Führer,” said Goering. “A man as loved as you should not be so mistrustful. Was there ever a leader who so possessed the faith of his people? Was there ever a king or kaiser who commanded so much loyalty as you? Von Kresse is a Prussian officer. Every Prussian officer took an oath on his life to you. You saw what that meant in the war. These Ritteren, these Prussian knights, they held firm. They fought to the last. As you have made all Deutschland realize, it was the Jews and the bankers who sold us out.”
Himmler’s gaze was now frankly admiring.
The Führer clasped his hands together in a familiar, bent-wrist gesture that in a lesser man would have seemed effeminate, almost supplicating. He always did this in response to what he took to be affection. Goering had assiduously learned the reason for Hitler’s every tic, nod, and blink. He knew more about the workings of the Führer’s countenance than he did those of the Heinkel III’s in-line engines. As he said to himself, lives depended on it. Including his own.
“Sehr gut, Hermann,” Hitler said, leaning back farther and folding his hands in his lap. “I will presume you know what is best. But I want full reports on everything that occurs, everything that this von Kresse does, everything the Prince of Wales does.” He lifted a hand and an admonishing index finger. “I do not want the prince annoyed! The English and we, we are the same people!”
“Sicher rechts, mein Führer.”
All of them smiled, but Hitler abruptly frowned again and began to shift some of the papers on the desk before him about.
“Heinrich, before you go …” He could not find what he sought. “There was a memorandum. To remind me.”
Himmler stood very stiffly. It was Goering’s turn to fold his arms across his chest and look on as a bemused spectator.
“Yes, yes,” said Hitler. “I remember now. The executions.”
“Executions, my Führer?” Himmler’s doubt was not as to whether there had been executions but to which Hitler referred.
“The executions in Plotzensee Prison!” said Hitler, with marked and sudden anger.
“Allerdings, mein Führer. They were carried out yesterday. Six beheadings and thirty-one hangings. This made for difficulty because we bury them two to a coffin, as you know. But we were able to wedge two children in with their mother and make a fit. Alles ist gerade.”
“I want to see photographs of these dead traitors. Of their corpses.”
“But my Führer, they are all buried.”
“Then disinter them. I want these photographs on my desk this afternoon. After lunch!”
“It will be done, my Führer.”
Hitler’s expression gentled. He smacked his hands against the desktop. “Of course it will. Gentlemen, I think we will go to Berchtesgaden next week. Yes. Inform your wives. We shall have an outing, while the weather is still pleasant.”
“Emmy will be delighted,” said Goering.
The Führer had turned to something else—a map of Austria. “When you go out, you will find Hess waiting. Send him in at once.”
“Heil Hitler!”
He returned their salute, rendered in unison, without looking. He held a magnifying glass in his hand. He looked much the idle stamp collector.
Neither Goering nor Himmler spoke until they had reached their respective motorcades. The courtyard was filled with roaring vehicles. Goering motioned Himmler closer.
“Heinrich,” he said. “You did get someone aboard that ship with von Kresse, isn’t that so?”
The pale face beneath the black hat remained impassive, but the lips compressed into a slight, wispy smile that was his only reply.
“I think, Heinrich, that it is best that we end this now, before anything goes wrong. Ribbentrop apparently learns about everything.”
Himmler thought a moment, then nodded.
“What I mean,” said Goering, “is that I think von Kresse is now dangerous to us. To both of us, and of course to the Reich, as the Führer seems to have observed. I think it is best that he be removed. You can attend to this?”
Himmler grinned, in his face, an expression utterly lacking warmth or humor. “Your war comrade, Herr Flieger?”
“The war was long ago. Do what must be done. Wiedersehen.” Goering hurried away, so that his motorcade might leave before the Reichsführer’s. He needed to get another message to Dagne von Bourke und Kresse, to warn her-about Himmler’s operative. As Goering had earlier involved Himmler in the operation’s possible success, he had now provoked the Reichsführer into implicating himself in the mission’s now probable failure. Himmler’s agent was likely to cause trouble now, no matter what Count von Kresse did. The count could lose his life in this, but that could not be helped. Goering wanted Dagne to survive. He needed her. There were times when Emmy was being particularly hysterical or dense that he wished he had married Dagne instead.
CHAPTER TEN
In the warm, humid, unnatural calm, the Wilhelmina had seemed the largest object in creation, the dominant feature of an empty sea that ran from the edge of the earth to the edge of the earth.
In the sudden, protean tumult of the autumn storm, she’d been rendered the smallest thing imaginable, caught in the colliding marches of thirty- and forty-foot waves and shoved and heaved about like a toy boat in the hands of an impish and violent child.
It was encouragingly manifest that the untried Wilhelmina was not frail. Though she shouldered the oncoming seas with heavy shudders, she emerged from every encounter intact and with the triumph of forward movement, sliding into the deep of the following troughs with almost graceful speed, her bow rising defiant to face the next towering wave crest. Yet there was something of the innocent awkwardness of a wild creature’s first swim, a young bird’s first flight, a foal’s first gallop, in the Wilhelmina’s progress. She responded instinctively, but it was as if she hadn’t quite got the hang of it. The ship wheeled overmuch to port or starboard after each collision with the mountainous water. She heeled excessively: At one point it seemed to van der Heyden that he was looking straight down from the side window by his captain’s chair into the swirling, foamy blue-green depths of ocean to the side—the ship but a few inches of movement, a few pounds of balance, from capsizing.
An extremely high wave taken on the starboard quarter came rushing along the working deck, its waters exploding upward against the bridge windows, a slap in the Wilhelmina’s face by the god of oceans. Van der Heyden, glaring defiantly, waited for the opaque wall of residual water clinging to the windows to be erased by the wiper blades. The next wave was smaller. He continued about his business.
The captain had endured storms infinitely worse, especially in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, and had learned to deal with them in terms of his ship’s response, not nature’s spectacular threats. The Wilhelmina was taking some water forward, a significant amount in Hold No. 1 and somewhat less in Hold No. 2. The pumps had caught up and were prevailing, but the hatch covers were obviously deficient. Van der Heyden made a notation about them on a small piece of paper and added it to several dozen others he had put into a nearby drawer—deficiencies the shipyard would have to correct.
It was clear that the ship’s excessive lateral roll could not be controlled adequately and would have to be endured. The ship performed best taking the waves on the bow quarter. Noting the rapid northeastern track of the storm, though its accompanying winds were out of the northwest, van der Heyden ordered a course change slightly to the south—though not so much that the heaving seas and winds would be put to her starboard beam, aggravating the roll intolerably.
Van der Heyden was weary. He had taken two Bols gins before retiring and had had slightly less than four hours’ sleep. It was unfair of the old Norse gods who held dominion over these seas to order up this storm the morning after captain’s night in the dining salons. They had no respect for the protocol requirements of trans-Atlantic liners. They treated only horny-toed and leather-faced sailors, not dinner-jacketed dancers.
“Should we decrease speed further, Captain?” asked First Officer van Groot, who had been on the bridge since the first sign of bad weather. It was more recommendation than question—even an implied command. It was what van Groot would have done.
Van der Heyden had already slowed the ship to ten knots.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to wallow. In fact, increase the speed a knot or two. In the long run, she’ll take less punishment with more headway.”
“Half speed, ahead one-third,” van Groot commanded. A seaman at the ship’s telegraph complied, two clangs sounding the movement of the lever.
“Half speed, ahead one-third,” the seaman repeated.
Van Hoorn appeared, neatly dressed in a black suit as if reporting for a board of directors’ meeting. Respectful of van der Heyden’s absolute authority on the bridge and urgent duties of the moment, he did not intrude. Nodding in greeting, he gripped the railing that ran along the rear bulkhead and remained out of the way. The captain wished him a good morning, then turned back to the forward windows and the helm. As the ship mounted another gargantuan crest, he had a view of the relentless procession to come. Some of the distant wavetops seemed a great deal higher than those around them, but that could simply be an illusion. So much at sea was illusion. Decisions based on it were often drastically wrong—and deadly.
Karl Poeder, the junior officer who had gone out onto the bridge wing for an observation of the decks aft, returned through the sliding door. His shoe caught on metal stripping and, tumbling forward, he slid along t
he sloping deck as the ship heaved into another roll. His back struck a stanchion and he cried out.
Van Groot and a seaman went to Poeder’s side.
“I’m all right, sir,” the young officer said, but his contorted face contradicted him.
“You may have cracked a rib or something, Karl,” van Groot said.
“Get him to sick bay,” ordered van der Heyden. “You can stand for him till the end of this watch.”
Van Hoorn, the cautious company man, came forward now. “Are we in any trouble?” he asked.
The captain grinned. “Small trouble. There will be a lot of vomiting today, however. We are fortunate we have so few passengers.”
Van Hoorn nodded, though he was unhappy with the captain’s sense of irony.
Third Officer Kees Witte entered, though he was not yet on watch. He carried a signal from the wireless room.
“A disaster, sir,” he said.
The others snapped their heads around. Van der Heyden took the message grimly, but his expression eased as he read it.
“A disaster for a Dutch shipping line,” he said, “but not this one.” He handed the signal to van Hoorn, turning to his first officer.
“Holland Amerika?” said Van Groot.
“The Rotterdam,” said Van der Heyden. “She’s run aground on a reef east of Jamaica. Hurricane out of the Gulf of Mexico passing over Cuba. The Rotterdam was carrying four hundred sixty passengers and a crew of five hundred twenty-six. But she’s beached, not sinking.”
“Four hundred sixty passengers?” said van Hoorn. “That’s a passenger list almost as small as ours.”
“Bad times, mijnheer,” said van der Heyden. “For everyone.”
“East of Jamaica,” said van Groot. “That’s three thousand miles from us at the least.”
“For now,” said the captain. “But that hurricane is moving due north.” A pair of binoculars fell from a shelf and skittered across the floor. “This pleasant weather may not last.”
Nora Gwynne awoke as she was being flung violently to the floor of her cabin. She crawled back to her bed, gripping its wooden siding, then sat back against it, feet and lovely legs splayed out before her on the carpeting.
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