Schmidt put down his glass.
‘You don’t know?’
He shook his head. She regarded him thoughtfully, the rim of the wine glass against her sculpted mouth. ‘As is her former schoolteacher. A well-known woman.’
With a sharp pang of fear, Schmidt knew that he’d been seen at the café with Elisabeth von Bose. What he’d feared had happened, the schoolteacher had been under surveillance. Her Gestapo friend must have passed this on. He thought quickly and said, ‘Fräulein von Bose.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Yes. How do you know her?’
The truth, up to a point, would serve best. ‘I don’t know her, fräulein.’ He paused. ‘She brought me a message from Fräulein von Schnelling, whom I was to meet at a café. A sudden illness in the fräulein’s family prevented her from keeping the appointment, and this lady volunteered to tell me.’ He spoke with his infinite sincerity.
As the deep silence of the winter-entombed suburb flowed into the flat, she did not ask any further questions. In the heating pipes, the water gurgled. Freda Brandt smiled. ‘Never mind. The fräulein didn’t come to work today. Nor did she attend Herr Fischer’s funeral.’ She lifted an eyebrow at Schmidt.
Schmidt shrugged, spreading his hands. Suspicion was grounded in this woman’s character — as it was his own. However, surprising him, she changed the subject.
‘You must have more of my wonderful hometown wine. You drink so little.’ She wasn’t holding back herself. The maid served the dessert as she filled his glass.
He became aware that her voice had changed. The brisk, interrogative tones had vanished; now it was husky and slower, as though she’d become sleepy. The wine? Abruptly she rose and went to a corner. Piano music from the wireless drifted into the room. She turned and pointed to the couch. ‘Let us sit down here and finish our wine. The maid is now going home.’
Schmidt realised that the remainder of the evening was being laid out as straight as one of the new autobahns.
He joined her, wine glass in hand.
‘Drink that up. We must have schnapps,’ she said. In a moment she had a new glass in his hand. ‘Now, Herr Schmidt, I want to know how a good-looking, eligible man like you stays out of the clutches of we females of the Reich.’ Her vivid blue eyes had become smoky, like her voice.
He glanced at her, absorbing this extravagant statement, and sipped the schnapps. Her breast was rising and falling. She moved closer, her breath came into his face in champagne-scented puffs. ‘That is a serious question, Herr Chief Auditor, requiring a serious answer.’
‘I am human,’ Schmidt told himself.
‘Herr Schmidt!’
‘My duties have left little time for a social life.’
‘Ha! Even Herr Goebbels finds time, if the rumours are true.’ She leaned against him and put her hand on his thigh. Despite himself, he jumped.
‘I’m afraid I’m a conservative fellow.’
She laughed deep in her throat and took the glass from him. ‘God! Where have you been? The world has changed. Everything is possible for people like us.’
In a fluid movement she took his head in her hands and turned it toward her. Her mouth fell on his. Her tongue darted inside his mouth. His brain was processing the pros and cons. It had been a long time between drinks. He had an erection. Her hand was on his flies, flipping the buttons open one by one. She pushed his hand against her breast. Her hand was freeing his organ from his clothes. Her mouth came away from his. ‘God! I expected smaller and neater.’ She was urgently rearranging her body, lowering her mouth to another destination. Then her tongue was darting over his swollen flesh, twirling around it.
She removed her mouth and whispered in the languorous voice, ‘Down there I’m as wet as our Berlin marshes. And so are you.’ She returned with renewed vigour to her tongue-work. Thirty seconds later, Schmidt gasped.
~ * ~
He’d gone. On the couch, her feet up, Freda Brandt analysed each phase of the evening, each response that he’d made to her questions. She knew now that in their world of secrets, and secret thoughts, this auditor was a consummate practitioner.
She smiled in the semi-darkness. She’d broken down his sexual conservatism, and she’d penetrate this other barrier too. When she had his soul spilled out on the table, she’d know his fate. Tonight her damned menstruation had come early or more progress might have been made. Also, her damned constipation.
With the taste of him still in her mouth, she thought: What’s behind that milk and water exterior? If I can rip back the curtain from your past, what can I bring you to account for? She knew there was something. She’d not believed him about the teacher.
But, in tandem with this, she wanted, with a powerful urge, to have the handsome little bastard in her. Once would be enough!
~ * ~
Schmidt sat in the tramcar bound for Mitte, the various tastes of the evening in his mouth. Six months ago, in his former life, he would’ve been stunned by the evening’s climax; aghast at himself, and consumed by guilt. But he seemed to have exhausted those emotions following his affair with Lilli Dreisler. Now there was no place in his life for regrets of that type; such an event washed over you like a wave and was gone.
As he peered oat at the dark streets, he knew that he’d been lured here by this sex-crazy Nazi zealot for his past and present to be laid out and dissected. The woman was wired-tight with suspicion. She was jealous of his relationship with the president. Her professional ambition was, doubtless, in play but her tigerish mind was prowling deeper. Like the Reich’s sleek new submarines. The tramcar juddered over points, dissipating the thought.
He straightened up in his seat. Freda Brandt was a more complex personality than he’d judged. He’d stepped into a minefield, as had poor Herr Fischer, who tonight lay deep in the frosty earth. No schnapps down there.
~ * ~
23
E
LISABETH VON BOSE walked quickly along a street in Tiergarten toward the Kapps’ house. It was three minutes to seven. The narrow street was drenched in darkness, and the meagre municipal lighting served only to emphasise its impenetrable character. She was so rugged up against the mind-numbing cold as to appear anonymous; she wore a fur hat; the time for her chic hats was over.
At 7.30 am, following Eugene’s instructions, she’d left her house, telling her maid that she’d return in the evening, a lie which she’d detested uttering. She’d retrieved her money, and carried only items that fitted in her pockets. She’d hurried into a web of narrow streets very familiar to her, hastening down alleys and through archways. Ten minutes later she’d picked up a taxi and spent the next hour crisscrossing inner Berlin in taxis and on foot, until she was as certain as she could be that no-one was following. At ten, she’d arrived at her friend’s unoccupied flat.
Her phone calls last night to her friends from the public phone had been brief. Praying that no agency was yet listening in, she’d pleaded with them to quit their residences - and Berlin. Pressed for time, she’d hung up on their shocked exclamations, even though a day earlier the countess had forewarned them. She’d been unable to get through to Frau Kapp. She’d decided to risk going to the Kapps’ house. Now she hurried towards it, tension gripping her throat.
Automatically, she swerved into the shadows at the sound of motors. Two cars. They cruised past and eased to a halt in the street outside a house. Her heart froze. The Kapps! Three men alighted, glanced around, and ran up the steps. The staccato concussion of their shoes on the stone abraded the snowy silence.
Fifty metres away, hand to her heart, she waited. The Kapps’ front door had opened and the men had entered the house. Elisabeth moved closer, keeping to the darkness under the porticos.
A commotion. Oh God! Frau Kapp was being half-carried down the steps by two men. Her two young children and the maid were crowded in the open door. Frau Kapp appeared to have fainted.
Elisabeth gazed at the catastrophe. I must go and stand with her. This flashed into h
er mind. But the teacher was paralysed. Her limbs wouldn’t function, and it saved her.
Frau Kapp was lolling in the car’s rear seat. In the doorway, the children were now weeping uncontrollably. The car doors slammed shut. The cars moved off and Elisabeth gazed after them, as though witnessing the end of her world.
In a daze, she returned to her friend’s flat. An hour later she’d regained some of her composure, and was thinking hard. Frau Kapp and her husband were upright citizens; what she’d done must be low on the scale of misdemeanours, even to the paranoid officials who now sought to control the lives of citizens with an iron hand. Humanity and common sense couldn’t have evaporated totally from their minds. They were Germans with their own families. This hopeful logic was quite hopeless. Elisabeth, pragmatic and intelligent woman that she was, felt it ebbing from her as the next hour passed.
Dear God! How stupid! — sending the letter to Switzerland. The Swiss doctor was the catalyst for this disaster. The countess, in bringing him to the tea-party, had been duped — fatefully and fatally duped. Elisabeth’s heart ached.
Last night, in the back seat of the taxi, Eugene had laid down a plan for her to leave Berlin. A mutual friend, at this moment, should be driving down the autobahn from Potsdam to the flat. Eugene had given her the approximate time of eight o’clock to expect him; he was a Lutheran minister and the husband of one of her former students. Eugene had warned that delays or changes might occur, and that she should be prepared for any contingency.
She sat at the first-floor window in the darkened room, watching the street. She’d kept on her hat and coat. The heating in the flat was not turned on. As she concentrated on the street, the horror of Frau Kapp’s arrest replayed again and again in her mind. What of the others? She realised that she no longer had faith in anything but her religion.
~ * ~
Herr Rossbach left a bar near his flat where, nursing his injured groin and a foul temper, he’d been drinking beer for three hours. It was only a short walk to his flat but the bar owner, tactfully, had suggested that he depart while he was still in a condition to do so. The man helped him into his overcoat. Grumbling, the Reichsbank manager stepped out into the freezing night.
The sole pedestrian in evidence, he weaved his way up a cobbled street. In an angry reaction to his drink-sodden thoughts, he pulled up short, cleaving the air with his hand. One way or another, the bitch would get her desserts. He began to snigger. At least he’d fixed up her Jewish friend. After what he’d said to that miserable bastard, Sack, the Gestapo would’ve picked up the old Jewess. Who in hell did she think she was? Speaking like that to him - stepping between him and that little aristocrat’s fanny. Christ!
He resumed his lurching walk. Gusts of steam rose through iron gratings in the pavement, giving the scene a surreal look. He would return to work tomorrow and begin sorting things out. That damned auditor. The little shit wanted it for himself.
Rossbach ineffectually tried to smack his hands together to emphasise that point . . . He’d reached a flight of stone steps that ascended to a parallel street; his own. He stopped, his gloved hand fumbling for a steel railing, and peered up at the steep challenge. He began to climb. He swore bitterly as the pain in his wounded balls jabbed at every upward step. A few moments later, breathing hard, he paused and looked up.
What? Rossbach blinked, then squinted, trying to focus the blurry image. Two metres above him at the top of the steps a giant figure had materialised. ‘Herr Rossbach?’
Rossbach rubbed his eyes with an icy gloved hand. ‘Yes. Who are you? Where in hell did you come from?’There was no reply. ‘Mein herr, get out of my way.’ Rossbach angrily fumbled his overcoat undone and pushed forward his chest, displaying the Party badge. In a blur of movement that Rossbach barely registered, the giant was upon him. The attacker’s arms spun the flabby banker around and in one movement took Rossbach’s wobbling head between huge hands and broke his neck. He was moving away even before the corpse had thudded to the bottom of the steps.
Unhurriedly, silent-footed, the huge figure walked away between the geysers of steam swirling up from the grates.
~ * ~
Sturmbannfuehrer Sack paced his room, his face rigid with strain. The ebullient morning mood was gone. His limp was more pronounced since his fall in the street but he wasn’t conscious of the painful bruising tonight. He was perspiring. It was warm but not that warm. He shuddered at what the Reich Minister’s office might say — and do.
At 7.00 pm his men had picked up only one of the five — Kapp — the woman who’d sent the letter to Switzerland. An hour ago he’d heard that the Countess von Dreisler and her husband had defected to the British in Cairo. The blame for that shouldn’t fall on him; but the teacher, the Reichsbank secretary and the other two were squarely on his shoulders. This morning the teacher had again eluded her watcher. The agent was sweating it out in a cell.
The Reichsbank secretary had vanished. They had found her flat lit-up, with the radio playing. It had obviously been hastily abandoned. As for the others . . .They’d all been warned - a disaster. The surveillance should’ve been tighter. He hadn’t enough men, but that excuse would not be accepted. Even the old Jewish woman, it could be said, had slipped through their fingers. Both flats in the Reichsbank woman’s building had not held even an echo of the departed occupants.
A fucking disaster! He went to the window and gazed down into Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Unless he could rapidly recover the situation, his career was trash. Maybe his life was. His hands were shaking.
Behind him the telephone rang. His nerves jumped and he turned to stare at it. The ministry? His superior? With a nervy shrug, he moved to take up the receiver. He listened, and snapped upright. ‘Pick her up immediately. Make sure of it.’
He hung up the phone and breathed an immense sigh. Thank God! The teacher had been traced to an address in Steglitz. A block spy had reported a woman and someone at headquarters had been awake. Cars were already on their way. He looked up. Buhle stood, uneasy, in the doorway.
‘The Kapp woman’s hysterical. We’ve got nothing out of her yet about the others.’
‘Get a doctor, a sedative,’ Sack ordered. ‘Then start again.’
The untersturmfuehrer hurried away.
His face more animated, Sack sat down at his desk. With any luck he’d have the teacher in the interrogation room within the hour. She wasn’t the hysterical type, if the record was accurate. He glanced at the glossy photograph lying in his in-tray. A handsome face. Another aristocrat. Captain Eugene von Beckendorf on sick leave from the Abwehr; recently an inmate of a TB sanatorium in the Bavarian Alps, from which he’d signed himself out and come to Berlin. Cousin of the Reichsbank woman fugitive. The man whom he’d seen with that woman and the teacher in the tearoom. They’d traced the taxi to a hospital. Last night he’d signed himself out from there too. It was a matter of time before they had his Berlin address - the fellow had given a false one at the hospital; that said a lot about him.
The miraculous Central Security Office filing system, which a colleague had installed, and which that fearsome bastard Heydrich was claiming as his own, had yielded the Abwehr man’s identity — and a report two years ago that had brought him to the Gestapo’s attention: his English contacts at Oxford. At the time, his position in the Abwehr had stalled an investigation.
The teacher would tell them about this fellow. Then they’d bring him in for a little talk. A degree of caution would be necessary.
It had been a long night and it was going to be longer.
~ * ~
Savigny Platz — 11.55 pm. An insistent breeze played havoc with his eye as Schmidt crossed the grubby white tract of frozen snow. He slipped several times. He was braced for a tumble; it could happen without warning, just like the other dangers lurking in his life. But he made it to his building. Dabbing at his eye and tearstained cheek, shivering, he climbed the stairs.
In the building, everything was eerily still. He let hims
elf into his flat. Immobile in his hall, he listened for a telltale movement. The breeze had risen higher and he heard it whining at the windows. This menacing winter was prowling Berlin like a famished wolf. He felt himself back in dearest Trudi’s folktale world, back with the stories he’d read her, the blue eyes gazing up at him in wonder. He pivoted from this to look in the mailbox attached to the front door.
A slim, elongated brown paper parcel lay there. No postage stamps. No name and address. He carried it into the study, stripped off his gloves, slit the seals with his father’s ivory-handled paper knife, and unwrapped the paper. A cardboard box. He lifted the lid. Bedded into the box was soft plastic material. He pushed a finger into it at the edge and the indentation remained.
He turned to gaze at the engraving. More and more, he was doing this, as if the etched image of the knight’s sortie was a touchstone on which to test his own actions, and renew his determination.
The Iron Heart - [Franz Schmidt 02] Page 19