It was a commodious monstrosity typical of those built by wealthy industrialists in Victorian times. That Ribbentrop had not left it after his rise to power for some more spacious and imposing mansion showed that he had neither the taste nor ostentation of Goering; but he would naturally do his public entertaining at the Foreign Office and, Gregory suspected, probably continued to make the villa his home for sentimental reasons, as it had been the scene of many momentous meetings during the rise of the Nazi Party.
Gregory regarded it with interest, recalling what he had heard about the place. Ribbentrop had been one of the very few of Hitler’s early adherents who had money; or, rather, his wife had, for he had married Anneliese Henkel, the heiress of the great German Sparkling Wine House, of which he had been an employee. Hitler had often stayed with the couple in this Dahlem villa and as he understood no language other than German, Ribbentrop, who was fluent in both French and English, habitually read out to him translations of the political articles in the leading foreign Press. It was their long discussions after having read these articles that had convinced Hitler that Ribbentrop was another Bismarck, and later led to his appointment as Ambassador to Britain, then as Foreign Minister of the Third Reich.
As Gregory stood there he thought how differently things might have gone had those intimate talks never taken place. It was Ribbentrop who had convinced Hitler, in spite of the strenuous, contrary opinions expressed by the professional diplomats and by Goering and the General Staff, that the British people had become entirely decadent and that there was not the least likelihood of their Government going to war on behalf of Poland. That he had proved completely wrong had not shaken Hitler’s faith in him; for, even to himself, the egomaniacal Dictator would never admit that his judgement had been at fault; so it was the vain, self-opinionated, ex-wine-salesman who had been mainly responsible for bringing about the war, and who continued to lord it at the Foreign Office.
Pushing open the side gate, Gregory walked up a path that led to the back entrance of the villa and rang the bell. It was answered by a kitchen maid, of whom he asked if he could have a word with the Herr Reichsaussenminister’s valet. She told him to wait and after a few minutes an elderly fat-faced man came to the door. Departing a little from his normally impeccable German, Gregory said to him:
‘Forgive me for troubling you, mein Herr, but I am a Hungarian, recently arrived from Budapest. My mother was the nurse of the Frau Baronin Tuzolto and I have messages for her. But I have not her address and she is not in the telephone book. My mother told me that she is a close friend of the Herr Reichsaussenminister; so it occurred to me that someone in his household might be able to help me.’
The fat-faced man grinned. ‘Yes, she was a friend of his and as lush a piece as anyone could find to go to bed with; but I don’t think he sees much of her now. She never comes here, of course. The missus wouldn’t have stood for that. The boss installed her in a nice little villa he owns on Schlachten Insel, just at the entrance to the Wannsee. Used to use it for boating parties when times were better. For all I know she’s still there. Anyway, you could go there and enquire. That’s the best I can do for you.’
Having learned that the place was called the Villa Seeaussicht and the best way to get to it, Gregory thanked the man profusely and turned away. From Dahlem he walked back to the Round-point, from there he took a tram a further two miles along the road to Potsdam, then walked again down a side road through the woods to the Havel.
At that point the fifteen-mile-long lake was a good mile and a half wide and he saw that Schlachten Island projected from near the shore on which he stood, about three-quarters of a mile into it. Crossing a short causeway to the island, he found that there were several properties on it and that the Villa Seeaussicht was on the south shore; so evidently derived its name from having a splendid view right down the broad arm of the Havel known as the Wannsee.
Framed in trees, the villa stood about fifty yards back from the road. To one side there was a separate building, obviously a big garage with rooms for a chauffeur above, but it was shut and no car stood outside it. The villa itself had three storeys and its size suggested that it was about a ten-room house. Muslin curtains in the upper windows implied that it was occupied, but in the drowsy heat of the summer afternoon no-one was about; so Gregory felt that he could carry out a reconnaissance without much fear of being seen.
Being so doubtful about the sort of reception Sabine would accord him—if, indeed, she was still living there—he was most anxious to avoid presenting himself in circumstances which might prejudice the results of their meeting. For that it was essential that he should come upon her unannounced and alone, so that should she prove willing to help him there would be a chance for her to hide him there temporarily without any servant being aware of his presence or, should she at first prove hostile, he would at least have a chance of talking her round before she gave him away in front of any third party.
Entering a side gate he stepped into a shrubbery, then made his way along a narrow passage behind the garage to a small yard. Beyond the yard there was another shrubbery, under cover of which he continued to advance. From between the bushes he could now see that the back of the villa looked out on to a pleasant lawn that ran down to the water and that at one side of its extremity there stood a low boat house. He saw, too, that about half-way down the lawn, on his side of it, there was a swing hammock with a striped canopy. As the hammock was end on to him he could not see if anyone was in it; but a book lying on the ground and a garden table nearby, with a glass on it, suggested there might be. Treading with great caution he reached the back of the deep hammock and, holding his breath, peered over the edge. His heart gave a bound. Sabine was lying there asleep.
So his luck was in. He had sought and found her. But was finding her really good luck, he wondered, as he gazed down at this lovely wanton creature who had been the mistress of both himself and Ribbentrop. From what the fat-faced valet in Dahlem had said it seemed that Ribbentrop had cast her off. If that had been due to the false information with which he, Gregory, had sent her back to Germany, she might seize eagerly on the chance to revenge herself. And there was another thing. If he could succeed in explaining away his having lied to her, and she ranked the safety of her old lover above her duty as a Nazi, her welcome might prove almost as dangerous as her enmity. He knew her amorous nature too well to suppose that, should she agree to hide him, she would not expect him to go to bed with her again. And he was most loath to be unfaithful to Erika. Yet in Sabine lay his only hope of getting safely out of Germany.
16
The Lovely Wanton
Sabine was dressed in a light summer frock, and for a few moments Gregory stood there admiring her slim figure and the perfection of her features. She was now about twenty-eight and had changed little since he had first known her. A few tiny laughter wrinkles showed at the corners of her mouth and her hips and bust were slightly larger, but her magnolia-petal skin remained unblemished and a splendid foil to the dark hair that grew down so attractively into her smooth forehead as a widow’s peak. Her mouth was a little open and showed a glimpse of her small, even teeth; her lips had always been a bright red, which he knew owed little to lipstick, and her dark eyelashes curled up making delightful fans on her cheeks.
Stepping back out of sight, in a clear voice he spoke one of the few sentences in Hungarian that he knew: ‘Holy Virgin, we believe that without sin thou didst conceive.’ It was the first line of a couplet he had heard her say a score of times before they had gone to bed together.
Suddenly there was a stir in the hammock. As Sabine sat up he ducked down behind it. With a low laugh she completed the couplet, ‘And now we pray, in thee believing, that we may sin without conceiving.’ Then she cried, ‘Come out from behind there, whoever you are.’
Putting his head up above the back edge of the hammock, he grinned at her.
‘Gregory!’ she exclaimed, her black eyes going round with amazement.
‘Then I’m not the only one who has heard you say your little prayer,’ he laughed.
‘Goodness, no,’ she laughed back. ‘But I thought you must be one of my old Hungarian boy friends. What in the world are you doing here?’
‘Oh, I’m in Berlin to destroy the Third Reich and put an end to the war,’ he replied lightly.
‘I wish to God you could,’ she said with sudden seriousness. ‘The air-raids have become simply ghastly. Every night I go to bed expecting to be blown to pieces before morning. But, honestly; how do you come to be in Berlin?’
‘The usual way. I caught an aircraft and was dropped by parachute.’
She frowned. ‘You’ve come as a spy, then? After you got me out of the Tower and failed to get away yourself it was certain you would be arrested. I thought, perhaps, that you’d escaped from prison and managed to get here as a refugee. You told me that if your plan failed you would be finished with the British and try to get to Ireland.’
‘It didn’t fail, as far as you were concerned,’ he said quickly. ‘But, of course, I was arrested. They gave me a whacking great prison sentence; so I’ve had a very thin time these past eighteen months. I’m only out now on what you might call ticket-of-leave. Sent here to spy for England.’
As he told the lies he had prepared should he succeed in finding her, he watched her expression intently. For now was the critical moment. To his immense relief the frown left her face and, shaking her head, she said, ‘So you’ve been in prison on my account. You poor darling. But come round here and tell me about it.’
‘I’d better not,’ he replied. ‘I might be seen from the house and I’m on the run, remember. I knew I could trust you, but for both our sakes we mustn’t be seen together.’
She shrugged. ‘You needn’t worry. In the daytime I’m all alone here except for my maid Trudi; and it’s her afternoon and evening off.’
Reassured, Gregory came round from behind the hammock and sat down beside her. With a smile, he said, ‘You wouldn’t be you, my sweet, if you didn’t have company at nights. Is it still Ribb, or have you another boy friend?’
‘I still see Ribb at times, but not often these days. He lets me stay on here, though, and my present boy friend, if you can call the old so-and-so that, was provided by him. He’s a once-a-weeker. Think of that, as a contrast to yourself, my dear, and those wonderful first weeks we spent together in Budapest.’
Of them Gregory needed no reminding. As her dark eyes, full of wickedness, caught his he could see her again lying naked and laughing on a bed, shaking her hair back a little breathlessly as she reached for a glass of champagne. This disclosure made him more uneasy than ever; for, since Sabine had such an unsatisfactory lover, he felt certain now that if she did let him stay there she would look on him as a heaven-sent outlet for her amorous propensities. As he was wondering how he could deal with such a situation, she said:
‘You’d never guess who my present boy friend is.’
‘Without a clue, how can I?’
‘Oh, he’s an old friend of yours; at least, a sort of connection—er, by marriage.’
‘But I’m not married.’
‘No, but there’s that lovely blonde that got so het-up when she learned about our trip together down the Danube. You told me in London that for a long time past you had looked on her as your wife.’
‘What, Erika? But I’ve never met any of her relations.’
Sabine’s big, dark eyes twinkled with amusement. ‘You’ve met her husband.’
‘Kurt von Osterberg! My God, you can’t mean …?’
‘I do. He has been living here with me for the past three months.’
‘But damn it! He must be nearly sixty and …’
‘Don’t I know it, my dear. And I shouldn’t think he ever was much good between the sheets. But there it is. I’m saddled with him and trying to make the best of it.’
‘But in God’s name why?’ Gregory stared at her in amazement. ‘You’re as lovely as ever you were, and could take your pick of a hundred lovers. Von Osterberg hasn’t even got any money. Erika married him only because it meant so much to her dying father that she should rehabilitate herself in the eyes of the aristocracy after her affaire with Hugo Falkenstein; and she picked Kurt because she knew that if she financed his scientific experiments with a part of the millions Falkenstein left her he would raise no objections to her having boy friends.’
Sabine made a little face. ‘My dear, for getting me out of the Tower you say you had to pay by being sent to prison. After I got back here I had to pay in another way, because the information you gave Colonel Kasdar was false.’
‘I know; but I didn’t realise that till afterwards,’ Gregory lied smoothly. ‘As I told you, I was never a Planner myself, only one of the bodies in the Cabinet War Room who stuck pins in maps. I thought that I’d passed the right dope to Kasdar for you to take back, but my pal on the Planning Staff had sold me the Deception Plan.’
‘Is that the truth?’ she asked, a shade suspiciously.
‘Of course,’ he replied, without blinking an eyelid. ‘Kasdar’s price for getting you away in a Moldavian ship was that I should get him the objectives of Operation “Torch”; so that by passing them on to the Nazis he would stand well with them when they had won the war and Hitler took over all the little neutrals that had stayed on the fence. He was pretty well informed about most things, so I didn’t dare try to trick him. If he’d found me out he would have ditched us both.’
‘Well, I’ll take your word for it. There are times when even Ribb doesn’t know what the Führer has really decided. He’s often told me that so many different versions about our next moves are put out by Bormann and Keitel that he is led to believe one thing and Goering and Himmler others. I suppose in Churchill’s headquarters it’s much the same. Of course, I couldn’t help suspecting you, but I did think you might have been fooled yourself.’
Gregory suppressed a sigh of relief at having got over that nasty fence. But she was going on:
‘All the same, you landed me in a pretty mess. As your information tallied with so much else they’d had, the Führer didn’t take it out of Ribb; but Ribb did out of me because he had given himself a lot of kudos from having had in me a first-class spy who had done better than any of Admiral Canaris’s people or Himmler’s. As soon as it emerged that I’d been fooled the fat was in the fire. Himmler came back at Ribb and raked up his man Grauber’s report about you and me in Budapest. They swore I’d deceived Ribb deliberately and demanded that I should be handed over as a British agent.’
‘My dear, I am sorry!’ exclaimed Gregory, with genuine feeling.
‘And well you may be,’ she said, frowning at the memory. ‘For a few days I was scared stiff. But Ribb saved my bacon. By sheer luck one of his agents had just turned in information that Marshal Weygand was contemplating a break with Pétain and planning to make himself Chief of a separate French State in North Africa, then bring it over to the Allies. Ribb said I had got it for him in London. Weygand was arrested before he could leave France and evidence was found that he meant to play traitor. That evened up the score against the black I’d put up and enabled Ribb to claim that I was on the level. But to keep Himmler and Co. quiet I had to keep the pot boiling.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘The Gestapo were still so suspicious of me that Ribb had to show my Nazi zeal by using me in other ways. He made it obvious in public that he had dropped me as a mistress, so it should appear that I was no longer in favour with the Nazis, then he arranged for me to get to know various people who were believed to be plotting against the Führer. The first group was a Professor of Philosophy named Kurt Huber and a couple named Scholl. It wasn’t difficult to fool the old boy and I got hold of some of his papers.’
‘Do you mean that you turned them in?’ Gregory asked, with difficulty concealing how shocked he felt.
Sabine lit a cigarette and nodded. ‘Of course. I could only enable Ribb to keep me
out of a concentration camp by showing willing, and they were, as near as makes no difference, Communists. That’s the one thing Hitler and I think the same about. All Communists are poison and the sooner they are eliminated the better.’
Gregory knew her views about that from the past too well to argue the matter; and as he considered Communism to be as much a menace to civilisation as the Nazis he only asked, ‘What then?’
‘Later I was given the Kreisau Circle to tackle. The group takes its name from the Silesian estate of Count Helmuth von Moltke, because he and Count Peter Yorck and others used to meet and plot there. But they came quite frequently to Berlin. They were intellectuals who started off as Socialists, but they went Communist, too, and were trying to sell us out to the Russians. That little coup put me in the clear. And when Ribb gave Himmler the information I’d obtained about them even that big fat slob had to admit that his suspicions of me had been unfounded.’
‘Well, you’ve been a busy girl,’ Gregory smiled.
‘Busy in a way I don’t like,’ she retorted. ‘There have been others, too, that I’ve failed to get anything on. And I prefer to pick the men I go to bed with. Still, it’s better than having to eat offal in a concentration camp and being had by three or four Nazi thugs every night.’
‘How about von Osterberg?’ Gregory enquired. ‘I’d bet my last cent that he is not a Communist.’
‘Oh no. That’s quite a different kettle of fish. But the aristocracy and most of the Generals have always been anti-Hitler. On and off for years they have been plotting to kill him, and since the Allies landed in France it’s been brewing up again. Kurt is in it. I’m certain of that. He has been working for years on these Secret Weapons, and for the past year or more he has been the top boy at an underground laboratory near Potsdam. As that’s not far from here Ribb thought it would be a good idea for me to play around with him, then when he was bombed out of his flat suggest that he should come to live here. Reluctantly I obliged. He was terribly flattered, of course, that anyone like myself should take an interest in him, so he fell for me like a ripe plum. I’m really like a mother to him and he gives me very little trouble.’
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