The Iron Heart - [Franz Schmidt 02]

by Marshall Browne

  He had not moved. ‘Nonetheless, you should be careful. No-one, not even acquaintances of whom one has a high opinion, can be taken at face value in these times.’

  ‘You come here, and I think it is good for her to know your face.’ Her voice had become pragmatic, giving a hint of her strong character.

  He had declined her invitation to remove his overcoat, did not intend to stay long. He said, ‘I came to tell you about an edict they’ll be putting out soon. Our people will no longer be permitted to own gold or jewellery. It’s to be confiscated, with the exception of wedding rings.’

  Frau Singer stared at him, her be-ringed hand instantly against her cheek.

  He added, ‘It will be a criminal offence not to turn in such items.’

  She continued to stare at her friend. She had old family valuables in the flat and at her bank, inherited from her mother and several aunts, and bought for her by her late husband, who’d loved to do that at every opportunity.

  Watching her face, Rubinstein sighed to himself. The few places he went these days he seemed to bring only bad news. Their families had been friends for sixty years. She’d long since refused his offer of help to leave. Not because of the danger but because her beloved husband was in the cemetery at Weissenssee and must be visited on certain days; and because the Dortmund sisters, her school-girl friends, were in Berlin sanatoriums and relied on her weekly visits.

  Her daughter and son were in America, thank God.

  ‘I’ll think about what to do,’ she said.

  ‘There is a little time. If you need my help…’

  ‘I know you wish to be away or I’d ask you to share my supper.’ She looked into his eyes. He appeared to have no nerves, but she knew he was wire-tight with caution. Every hour he was in deadly danger. He could have left the Reich long ago, as his family had. Now it was much more difficult. He’d never spoken of his reason for staying; she ascribed it to his humanity. He had helped many with their troubles, many to escape from the Third Reich.

  He kissed her on both cheeks. ‘I’ll come again soon.’

  She did not hear him leaving, then remembered he was wearing rubber-soled shoes. ’Come, Fritz,’ she said, ’supper.’ The aged dog moved its tail lethargically, the best it was capable of.

  ~ * ~

  Was it wise for that man to be visiting Frau Singer? He was a Jew. She’d recognised the physical appearance but also knew that fact instinctively. There were few enough of them in Berlin these days. And Frau Singer was Jewish. Anna wished now that she’d ignored her neighbour’s partly open door. Though he’d shown nothing, she sensed her call had been unwelcome to the bearded man. But it wouldn’t have occurred to Frau Singer, with her warm nature and perfect manners, not to invite her in.

  She had seen enough with her own eyes, heard enough at the bank, to know that the man would need all his wits about him.

  Frau Singer was extremely wealthy The Reichsbank secretary had no doubt of that. Somehow she’d held on to at least a part of her wealth. Three years ago her mansion in Grunewald had been seized, and doubtless a Nazi high up and his family now lived there. Anna didn’t know which house it was but she was familiar with Grunewald. In her teenage years she had been a frequent visitor at several mansions in the suburb. Alas, those families were gone.

  She made tea and remembered the letter. She retrieved it from her coat and slit the envelope. A card. Elisabeth invites you to tea at 2.30 pm on the 28th. Saturday. Nothing else. Her heart was beating a little faster. More than to tea. She put the card aside and poured her own tea, a far-seeing look in her eyes.

  Elisabeth von Bose had been her teacher in the 1920s at an exclusive girls school in Heidelberg. She’d become famous for her progressive teaching methods; it was a mark of distinction to have attended her school. A year ago she’d been forced to resign because of anti-Nazi remarks she’d made to certain staff members. Now she had her tea parties for friends and ex-students, who were often one and the same.

  Anna had confided in her cousin, an army captain, about the tea parties and the nature of the discussions among the participants. She’d been shocked at his reaction. Eugene had stared at her for a long moment. ‘Anna, you must avoid these parties. Conversations like that are deadly treason.’ He’d lifted his head, his face set. ‘You’ll have to stop seeing Elisabeth.’

  She’d gazed at him, amazed. He and Elisabeth had been lovers, and she sensed that he might still be in love with the famous teacher, though he’d never said a word about it. Elisabeth was the woman she admired most in the world. Loved the most. Eugene was correct to be concerned, but they were being as careful as could be; all sensible, trusted old friends.

  He’d said, ‘Never ever trust the telephone.’

  ‘We don’t, Eugene,’ she replied.

  Her cousin had been on sick leave. It was tuberculosis. She didn’t know how bad it was. He wouldn’t say but she suspected it was bad. For a military man he had an unusual background: a poet and a Shakespearian scholar who had studied for two years at Oxford.

  Standing almost in darkness with only one sidelight on in her living room, Anna sipped her tea and looked out the window at the house opposite. It was in darkness. An industrialist and his family had lived there. They weren’t Jews but he’d resisted the Nazis and had been forced to flee the country, abandoning his factories, his lifetime of work.

  A tramcar rattled and clanged by on its way east, a piece of prosaic existence on top of the fearful underworld. Dear Eugene. She said a silent, fervent prayer for him.

  ~ * ~

  Chief Auditor Schmidt rode the tram out to Savigny Platz watching a passing parade of darkish, suburban streets that were all new to him. He dabbed his handkerchief at his eye. The discomfort that had begun with the morning fog persisted. Tonight he would treat it.

  The tramcar soon ran into the big platz; motor cars were emerging into its spaciousness from the straitjackets of the adjoining streets. With a few other passengers, he alighted at the stop and walked back toward the multi-storeyed shops, cafés and blocks of flats on the southern side. Blinking against the freezing air, he arrived at a small residential building and entered a tiny foyer. He had been here two days without seeing another resident. He climbed the wooden stairs, almost as icy as the breeze-swept platz, to the third floor, unlocked the door to his flat and stepped into its frigid silence.

  Von Streck had taken no interest in his accommodation; however, he’d had no trouble in finding the flat. Four rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom — all painted in brown. It was clean and comfortable, the walls decorated with watercolours of Munich streets. He’d chosen one room for a study, though what would he be studying now?

  He removed his overcoat and hung it in the hall with his hat. Yesterday he’d unpacked his suitcase of clothes. In the kitchen he filled a percolator with water from the tap over the enamelled sink, spooned in coffee he’d bought yesterday, and put it on the gas ring to heat.

  He carried his steaming cup into the study, turned on the gas fire, and sat down. Hunched over the fire, sipping the coffee, methodically he re-lived each phase of this first day: Fräulein Brandt, Fischer, President Funk — each department head that he’d called on. And, the encounter with Anna von Schnelling. It had certainly been that!

  The attitude of Herr Fischer, manager of foreign bank relations, had been careless when they’d first met - in the presence of a Party member. And again tonight. But was the fellow uncaring, rather than careless? This man who had known Wagner.

  Schmidt sat erect and turned in his chair to look at the Dürer engraving he’d hung on the wall. Apart from clothing, this was one of the three personal items he’d brought from home. Knight, Death and the Devil, a wedding gift from his father. On his father’s side, their family was descended from a knight of the medieval Teutonic Order. But Dürer’s knight was of a more humanistic cast. The knight in full armour rode through a threatening landscape.

  It had been one of the levers that had sprung him out of his c
onservative life; brought him to von Streck - or rather, the Nazi special plenipotentiary to him; and had left Schmidt with blood on his hands. Nazi blood.

  The gas fire hissed in the silence.

  It was only four months since the Nazi Party banking accounts had transferred to Bankhaus Wertheim, but it seemed an age. And only last October since the high-ranking Nazi had come into his life that night at the municipal library. He’d been studying Felix De Sales’ Annales de l’ordre teutonique in the deserted special reading room, heard his name whispered, and looked up into the face of a man sitting opposite. The man had flicked an object with a gloved index finger so that it slid across the table to Schmidt.

  In amazement, the auditor had gazed down at the leather identity-holder, at the gold embossed eagle and swastika. He’d read: Manfred von Streck. Special Plenipotentiary.

  In the short conversation that followed Schmidt was told that, as chief auditor at Bankhaus Wertheim, he was to watch over the Party’s accounts; to spy on the Nazi director appointed, on the general-director, and report any matters of significance to this man.

  Schmidt had been astonished and declined the assignment, pleading professional ethics. ‘I’m not comfortable with such a deceit,’ he’d said.

  The Nazi official had pondered the pleasant-looking, correct man. ‘I respect your ethics, but you should look at it this way: it’s ... an escape road . . . purely for emergencies.’

  Von Streck had given a dark smile, and continued. ‘We live and work in complicated times. In the past year there’ve been five assassination attempts against the Fuehrer. When you’ve thought about it you’ll see no insurmountable difficulties, only advantages. I’m going to count on that.’

  Before he left, von Streck had handed over a Nazi Party ID card with Schmidt’s photo on it and nodded at the volume before Schmidt. ‘I’ll leave you to your research. There’s a paragraph which I, personally, find of particular interest.’ He’d given a page number.

  When he’d gone Schmidt had looked it up. It concerned a knight of the order called Erik Streck, who had gone with the Grand Master to Marienberg, the new headquarters of the order’s feudal state. A man who’d lived in the fourteenth century.

  And so began the connection between himself and Manfred von Streck.

  Schmidt had forgotten the coffee, now it was cold. He went into the bedroom, hung up his clothes and changed into pyjamas, slippers, and dressing gown. Then he entered the bathroom.

  ‘Oh, Papa, it’s so blue and shiny,’ Trudi’d said.

  He’d told her about his prosthetic eye the last day they’d been together, with Helga watching from the door. He’d grieved for his eye, after the SA flagpole had scooped it out like an oyster from a shell during the skirmish that Sunday afternoon in 1935. No-one except Helga had known about his pining. She’d been kind, offering comfort but mainly, perceptively, leaving him to his grief. The wound had healed, Professor Hesse’s marvellous colour-matched prosthesis had been fitted, and that was that.

  He mixed the special solution in a glass, washed and dried his hands, then bent his head down and expelled the prosthesis into the palm of his right hand, catching it adroitly. He put it aside on some cotton wool. Holding his head back, he dribbled the solution into the socket, left it for a few moments then dabbed it with a ball of cotton wool. He washed the prosthesis in a fresh glass of solution, dried it and then concentrated on the tricky bit of getting it back in. Done. He dabbed his eye dry, and went to bed.

  Lying there, in Berlin’s ultra-secretive darkness, Helga and Trudi’s faces in faraway Dresden appeared in his mind’s eye, floating like white flowers.

  His divorce was like a stone on his heart. But to protect his family there’d been no other way. Preparing to move deeper into the anti-Nazi labyrinth, Schmidt had insisted on it. To the world at large, he no longer had a family. It was the cruellest thing in his life — one that the old Franz Schmidt couldn’t even have dreamed of.

  But it was the face of Fischer’s secretary that came into his mind as he finally drifted into sleep.

  ~ * ~

  4

  T

  HE METALLIC SCREECHING of tramcar wheels on their tracks woke Schmidt; it was to become a familiar awakening. He lifted his head toward the window then checked his watch: 6.35 am. No sign of daylight. He lowered his head to the pillow as the early tramcar juddered around the edge of the platz on its way to Mitte - the city centre. He hoped to sleep for a half-hour more, but yesterdays faces and events, like film images on a screen, were flickering in his head.

  Today he’d continue to travel the Reichsbank’s corridors, familiarising himself with the sober building’s layout, meeting more staff members, absorbing routines and structures; perfecting his camouflage, his mantle as chief auditor; inducting himself back into the dangerous realm of deception he’d perfected at Bankhaus Wertheim.

  He threw back the covers, phlegmatically accepting the chilled air.

  Shaving and washing in the white-tiled bathroom, his thoughts turned to Herr Fischer. Storm clouds were assembling above the manager of foreign bank relations; over anyone in the bank who wasn’t a Nazi. Though Fischer’s Swiss banking contacts and experience might help him survive for a bit. Reluctantly, Schmidt bracketed the ethereal Anna von Schnelling with the endangered Fischer; airiness spun of the finest steel. He sensed that kind of strength in her character. He carefully dried his face, dried away the thought.

  Schmidt entered the kitchen. The second valued possession he’d brought to Berlin was Helga’s Meissen coffee pot; the breakfast table remarks he addressed to it had always delighted Trudi. Sometimes, he still spoke to it, recalling her excited giggles: at the funny man, her father. This morning, sad-hearted, he merely poured coffee from it.

  In the tramcar, scarved and gloved, a copy of the Frankfurter Zeitung with a front-page photograph of Reich Minister Goebbels addressing a convention at Bremen, lay on Schmidt’s lap. However, he concentrated on the passing street-scenes washed with grainy grey light. No paralysing city fog today. He noted the steam drifting up from the pavement gratings. Cocooned in a lull before their daily toil, warmth also exuded from the bodies of his fellow passengers.

  Now Schmidt studied the photograph. How did the limping leather-clad man whom he’d seen with Fräulein Brandt, the startling look-alike of the rabid Nazi propaganda chief, fit into her life?

  He took a shallow breath. There was much to find out and he sensed that this information might be important to him.

  The tram stopped. With a stab of surprise, Schmidt glimpsed Fräulein von Schnelling squeezing in the rear door. The aisle was now crowded with standing passengers. The bell clanged and they moved off. He caught the name of the cross street: Rankestraat. He moved his head but couldn’t see her because of the closely packed bodies. When he alighted from the tram in Wilhelmstrasse, Schmidt looked in vain for the blonde woman. Strange. She must have got off at an earlier stop. He turned and hurried toward the bank.

  Under the cupola, the Fuehrer’s all-seeing bronze face scrutinised the entering interloper. Thank God it didn’t speak! At attention in his cubicle, Herr Wolff’s ruddy chins shook as his boot heels crashed together. He’d found out the fellow’s name.

  At 10.00 am, sipping coffee brought to him on a tray by the perpetually perspiring Fräulein Esser, Schmidt decided to postpone further introductory visits to the bank’s departments and sections. Instead, he plunged into folders that had arrived containing copies of the bank’s voluminous daily correspondence. He continued to sip the bitter brew, his eye skimming a multitude of matters.

  The president’s and the deputy president’s correspondence weren’t circulated, nonetheless at the work a day level, he was assimilating what was happening in the bank. He paused at memoranda between the heads of precious metals, and foreign bank relations. The fräulein queried the absence of a report from Fischer on a visit he’d made to the Bank for International Settlements in Basle. Fischer responded that nothing had been discussed
relating to her responsibilities; that his report had gone to the president. The tone of each memo was as frosty as the winter air. Fräulein Brandt’s signature blazed out of control across the page; Fischer’s was straightforward.

  Schmidt put a lot of credence on signatures. He laid the folders aside. He’d decided something. There was one area he wished to look into, should be seen to be looking into without delay. At 11.00 am he picked up the internal phone and called his deputy.

  ‘Today, Herr Chief Auditor?’ Gott asked, surprised.

  ‘Within the hour, Herr Gott.’

  ~ * ~

  ‘Our new chief auditor wishes to inspect the gold vaults.’ Fräulein Brandt’s eyes flickered over the face of the large, over-fleshed man with the constellation of moles on his face whose name was Rossbach. ’In fifteen minutes. Of course, we will accompany him.’