For Kurt, any escape at this time from the Bavarian powerhouse represented a reprieve, even though it precipitated an emotional decision that he was not yet prepared to make vis-à-vis Helga Gruytens. And the later prospect of a week abroad in a country free of the stench, which still stayed with him, of human crematoria at once set his mind racing—only to stop short at the same dead end that had loomed across every tentative solution to his acute moral dilemma. He would lose himself in Madrid, make contact with underground Republican circles and find sanctuary—as many German antifascist fighters had done —while he planned his next move. But it was a selfish, stillborn idea. Within hours of even a suspicion of defection by anyone from Hitler’s staff, the suspect’s entire family would be put to torture by the Gestapo. Against that prospect, his own mental torment was a trifle.
There remained a minor service he should render his sister before leaving for Berlin. That night, after dinner, he paid his first call on Werner Voegler since their return to Obersalzberg five days previously. The SS officer, who was working at the desk in his quarters, closed his file and sprang up, smiling, as Kurt walked in.
“You must be psychic, my dear fellow! I was just going to drop in on you for a drink.”
“You’d have found me packing, I’m afraid. I’m off to Berlin tomorrow for two weeks. Then Madrid, with the Fuehrer.”
“I know about your Madrid trip, lucky bastard! Unfortunately there’s only a company of Leibstandarte going with Oberfuehrer Rattenhuber, and he’s just passed on to me his entire backlog of paperwork.”
It was some relief at least to know that Voegler probably wouldn’t be taking time off in Munich over the next two weeks. But after that, with the Fuehrer away from the Berghof . . .
Kurt said, “I doubt if I’ll even get to a bullfight. I’ve had to promise Sophie I’ll spend any spare time I get with this Spanish fellow she keeps writing to.”
“Oh?” Voegler’s eyebrows went up but the stiff little smile stayed graven on his long face. “What’s this—Cupid’s arrows, across the Pyrenees?”
“It would seem so. They’ve made a pact to get married when the war is over. I’m under orders to reassure this fellow—Pablo whatever-his-name-is—that my dear sister is remaining true to him.”
Voegler made a face. “What a sacrilege, losing a lovely German girl like that to a dago! Well—” he raised his glass—“here’s to your trip, but don’t bother to pay my respects to Señor Pablo—” a second’s pause as his eyes locked with Kurt’s—“what-ever-his-name-is.”
Kurt was not going to spend his first night in that clinical little room in the Chancellery’s SS quarters while he made up his mind what to do about Helga. He could have afforded the Adlon or the Bristol, and a room would have been found for him, on the double, on production of his gold-embossed Chancellery card. But he had had his fill, lately, of Party bigwigs and strutting Schutzstaffel officers, and so he chose the Europeischer Hof on Dorotheenstrasse, conveniently placed for both the Wilhelmstrasse and the Chancellery Secretariat. He had just returned to his room from his first day’s work in the Foreign Ministry when the telephone rang and Helga’s coolly reproachful voice came over the line.
“I’m still technically your secretary, you know. Why didn’t you tell me you were in Berlin?”
“Hardly necessary, was it? You’ve found out quickly enough.”
There was a grunt of displeasure in the earpiece and he could visualize the flash of her eyes, the contraction of her thin avid lips.
“Only because Fräulein Eppler happened to call me from the Berghof. Apparently you found time enough to let her know your whereabouts.”
“Chancellery routine—you should know that. Anyway, how are you and what are you doing?”
“I’m back in the typists’ pool, that’s what I’m doing. But I’m to put myself—” her voice switched to a harsh imitation of Fräulein Eppler’s—“at the Herr Captain’s disposal, should he require my services.”
“I don’t think I’ll have to bother you. I’m stuck at the Foreign Ministry for the next ten or twelve days, reading and note-taking. Then straight back to Obersalzberg.”
There was a long silence. Then her voice again, much lower, barely audible. “I’m leaving the office in five minutes. Shall I drop in to see you?”
His hand tightened on the receiver. He was tongue-tied. Again her voice, warmer. “It’s on my way home, Kurt.”
“All right.” How did one fight it, when the anger really wasn’t there? “I’ll meet you in the lobby.”
They sat facing one another in the leather armchairs, with potted palms on one side and the reception desk a few paces away on the other. They spoke quietly and with outward politeness as they ripped into each other.
“Didn’t you enjoy that night with Hanni and me?”
“Like a pig at a trough. It’s taken me till now to get the taste out of my mouth.”
“You’re a prig, Kurt Armbrecht. I could think of a hundred men who’d give their right—” She broke off, twisting her mouth.
“I wish you the joy of them.”
“Do you want to come home now and have me, just the two of us?”
“What would that prove—that we’re a couple of nice normal people?”
A silence. Then: “What’s bothering you most, Kurt—that Hanni and I did it together or that you did it to the two of us?”
“This is getting us nowhere. I have to dine with the head of the Spanish department, out at Wilmersdorf. May I give you a lift?”
It was getting on toward midnight when the taxi arrived to take him back to the hotel from the Foreign Ministry official’s house. Directing the cab along the Kurfuerstendamm, he stopped it outside Helga’s apartment building. Her windows were dark, and the guard in the downstairs lobby informed him that Fräulein Gruyten had gone out to dinner and wasn’t back yet. He scribbled a note and slipped it under her front door.
“You were right. I am a prig. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
The first thing he noticed as he let himself into the hotel room was her scent. There was a bedside light on and she was asleep under the covers, her clothes neatly draped over a chair. She stirred as he slipped in beside her, then turned and reached down to him.
“My Paros Apollo,” she murmured. “Don’t send me home.”
II
ACCOMPANYING HITLER to Madrid went—apart from his adjutants, secretaries, chauffeur, orderlies, interpreter, cook and his new doctor—Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Reichsleiter Bormann, Feldmarschaelle Keitel and Jodi, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Admiral Canaris, Albert Speer, Otto Dietrich and Heinrich Hoffman. The old Royal Palace overlooking the Campo del Moro had been redecorated and refurbished to accommodate the German Fuehrer and his entourage and a company of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler paraded twice a day in the magnificent forecourt for the benefit of an admiring throng of gaping Madrileños. The Fuehrer’s personal standard with its central swastika wreathed with gold oak leaves and the golden eagles at each corner flew from one of the palace flagstaffs.
Daily conferences took place between the heads of state every morning at the Generalisimo’s official residence, El Prado, where Hitler’s SS men shared guard duty—by special dispensation of Franco—with the Spanish dictator’s colorful Moorish guards. Every evening around 6 p.m. a prepared statement was read out to the world’s press by a Foreign Ministry official at the German Embassy on the Paseo de la Castellana, and Stimmer was there to answer more general questions concerning the Nazi regime and the New Order.
It was said that you only had to call for a waiter in English, from one of the pavement café tables on the Gran Via to be surrounded at once by a dozen plainclothes Gestapo agents and invited to sample the hospitality of the Seguridad HQ at the Puerta del Sol. Peter Waldheim, who had offered to show Kurt the city, while Hitler and Goering visited the Prado the second evening of the conference, thought there were probably about two hundred of Gestapo Mueller’s lads shadowing every blue-eyed civilian
venturing onto the virtually traffic-free streets and plazas of Madrid. “They’re looking for British agents, émigrés, Dutchmen, and so on,” he chuckled. “Half the time the poor fools finish up tailing one another.”
They had wandered into the maze of narrow smelly streets to the east of the Gran Via and were trying the wine and tapas at their third port of call along the Calle de la Ballesta. The narrow shell-littered room was packed with the usual democratic assortment of white-collar and cloth-capped workers, whose ear-splitting brouhaha had dropped to a corporate murmur at the entry of the tall young Germans in their Wehrmacht uniforms.
“How can they eat this stuff?” Kurt muttered, palming a half-chewed cube of salted cod from his mouth and letting it fall to the stone floor.
“They were eating cats and dogs not so very long ago. If the Chief really wants those bases in Spain he’s got to come up with food, on top of everything else Franco’s asking for.”
A shabbily dressed Spaniard who had been sidling ever closer to the two German officers now whipped off his black beret, made a stiff bow from the waist and nervously introduced himself in halting German as former Sargento Alberto Arias, late of the Spanish Army. He turned back the lapel of his threadbare black jacket with a hand from which two fingers were missing.
“There, meinen Herren! You know this medal, yes?”
Kurt craned closer. Embossed in relief on the visible side of the white-metal disc was a steel helmet and swastika with a sword horizontally suspended behind two shields, one bearing the eagle emblem of Nazism, the other the Falange bundle of arrows. He turned the medal over, holding his breath against the garlic-laden sighs of the Spaniard. The inscription read, División Española de Voluntarios en Rusia.
“The Ostmedaille.” Waldheim gave Kurt a soft nudge. “Better known as the Frost Medal. Rare decoration, only given to 47,000 Spaniards who served with the Blue Division.”
“Is right!” ex-Sargento Arias broke in eagerly. “Blue Division! See!” He spread his dismembered hand. “How you say—vom Froste beschaedigt!”
“No wonder they called themselves the Blue Division,” Waldheim slurred the words quickly as he smiled and nodded to the Spaniard. “We were just leaving, Sargento, but allow me to offer you a glass of wine.”
“Con mucho gusto, meinen Herren! Is great honor for my country, the Fuehrer in Madrid. Here—!” He fished a paper ticket out of his wallet and waved it before them. “The corrida on Sunday. I go. Manolete, Domingo Ortega, Pepe Luis Vásquez—but que vale eso! I go to salute Adolf Hitler, greatest matador in history of the world!”
“Is he putting us on, do you think?” Waldheim murmured. And then aloud, as he handed the glass of wine to the sargento: “The Fuehrer won’t be there, my friend. He’s too fond of animals. But Herman Goering—he’ll certainly be at the corrida.” He made a gesture with his arms and hands, signifying girth. “Provided they can find a chair large enough for him in the Presidente’s box.”
The Spaniard cackled his appreciation of the German officer’s pleasantry and translated it for other patrons of the tasca now crowding that end of the bar. And it seemed to Kurt that their roar of laughter was exaggerated, a release of tensions following a tilt at authority and about as natural as the outbursts at that first luncheon party in the Berghof. Offering Arias a cigarette, he slipped the pack quickly back in his pocket as the Spaniard raised the gift reverently to his nose, rolling his eyes in delight. Waldheim used the distraction to settle with the barman and drain his glass.
They left to a round of handclaps but were no sooner out on the pavement when the ex-sergeant came hurrying after them, the unpinned Ostmedaille nestling in the palm of his hand.
“For your cigarettes, meinen Herren?” His other hand gestured to their tunic pockets. “Rare decoration? Memory of Madrid?”
Waldheim turned away, chewing his lip in embarrassment. Kurt, frowning, dug his hand in his pocket and thrust the pack of cigarettes at the man. “Keep your medal,” he snapped. “You earned it, didn’t you? For God’s sake, Peter, let’s get out of here!”
On a loftier level, at El Prado, the would-be trading of honor for commodities was making sticky progress. Franco, and to a lesser extent Salazar, needed food (particularly wheat), heavy armaments, including shore batteries, and sophisticated weapons of all types. But neither of the Latin dictators saw the need for Wehrmacht divisions on Iberian soil or for the full-scale militarization of their coastlines, as Hitler was urging. Franco would concede a stiffening of German technicians in the Spanish army and air force; Salazar would accept the principle of a mutual-defense pact between his country and Spain and the deployment of tactical divisions of the Spanish army along the land frontier between their two countries, but both rulers politely but firmly declined Hitler’s offer to “improve” the defenses of Madeira, the Cape Verde islands and the Canaries.
The weather being exceptionally warm for May, it was decided to give the reception for the diplomatic corps, Falange chiefs and Madrid aristocracy in the Retiro Park, a few blocks south of the German Embassy. Entrance was gained through the majestic gates of the Plaza de la Independencia, which were closed to all general traffic from 6 p.m. and the entire plaza ringed by the policia armada wearing the field-gray uniform recommended by Heinrich Himmler at the end of the Civil War. Kurt’s instructions were to seek out any minor notabilities with whom he might have a language in common and to let slip an “unguarded” allusion or two to Germany’s new secret weapons, shortly to be deployed against Great Britain and on the eastern front; but for the first hour or so he was cheated of prey. The dark bejeweled ladies with their strutting undersized escorts alighted from prewar Rolls-Royces and Mercedes and advanced through the honor guard of blond Leibstandarte giants to be greeted by Hitler and Franco. They then immediately attached themselves to one of the several circles congealing around Goering, Ribbentrop, Bormann, Admiral Canaris and the two Feldmarschaelle on Hitler’s staff. None of the ambassadors of nations at war with Germany, or of émigré European governments, had been invited to the reception, but the United States ambassador had been advised by the State Department to put in a brief and formal appearance, and Kurt noted, to his amusement, the rigid thumbs-to-the-seams postures of both the American diplomat and the Fuehrer as the mumbled introduction was made by Franco.
There was a stir of interest and a craning of heads when a short stocky figure wearing the black cassock with red piping, the red moiré zuchetto and sash, and the buckle shoes of a papal nuncio advanced slowly and broadly smiling between the ranks of the Leibstandarte, to be received by Adolf Hitler. As Kurt edged around the fringe of the loose crowd to get a better view of the prelate, he heard the name muttered from all sides,
“Monsignor Giovanni Donati . . ."
Hitler had taken the archbishop’s hand and was now averting his face as the,nuncio addressed him with unmistakable affability, though his words did not carry to where Kurt stood. It was extraordinary how unlike the northern European concept of a prince of .the church was this tubby, neckless Donati, with his craggy face, wide mouth and broad hooked nose. As the nuncio muttered something quietly to the Fuehrer before moving on through the dictator’s immediate entourage, Kurt was piecing together what he remembered from his Berlin research notes.
Born in 1881 of mezzadri peasant stock in the tiny mountain village of Manostrana in the Abruzzi. Ordained a priest at age twenty-three, served as military chaplain in World War I. Toured France and Germany in 1921 as secretary of the Council for the Propagation of the Faith, was made a bishop a few years later, then sent to Bulgaria as Apostolic Delegate. Moved, as an archbishop, to Istanbul, in 1935, and remained a Vatican diplomat in Turkey and Greece until 1942, when he succeeded the papal nuncio in Madrid on that prelate’s transfer to France. Held in affection by Eugenio Pacelli, who, as a young Roman priest, had invigilated Donati’s written examination for his doctorate. A man of deep but unpretentious piety. No intellectual.
Ten minutes later, when Kurt broke
free from a would-be Spanish biographer of Hitler, he noticed that the Leibstandarte honor guard was no longer in its place and, as he scanned the reception area of the Retiro enclosure, it occurred to him that the Fuehrer had made a characteristically brusque exit to show his irritation with Franco’s stance at the conference. Then he looked away toward the far end of the lawn, and his jaw fell open. A long line of Hitler’s SS men stood at ease facing the marquees and buffet tables. Beyond them and thus protected from any interruption, two figures paced the grass side by side, clearly absorbed in deep and earnest conversation: one of them was Adolf Hitler, the other Giovanni Donati.
The man calling him on the telephone at the Royal Palace identified himself as Federico Jiménez, a friend of Sophie’s from her student days in Madrid. He said that he had an urgent message for Kurt from Munich which he was required to deliver personally. If the Herr Captain could meet him in five minutes outside the Teatro Real, across the Plaza de Oriente from the Royal Palace, they could take a little walk and he could pass on the message. The man’s German was not very good and the voice crackled with nervous tension.
There were a fair number of pedestrians taking their Saturday evening paseo around the huge plaza, but as Kurt, breathing hard, reached the pavement outside the theater a young man standing on the corner of Calle Felipe V quickly folded up his newspaper and came toward him.
“Captain Armbrecht? Federico Jiménez.” They shook hands, and Kurt fell into step with the Spaniard as he headed for the next corner and turned into Calle Carlos III. Sophie’s friend was a good deal too thin for his height. He wore thick-framed spectacles. His white shirt was crisp and clean, but neatly patched just below one of the tips of the collar.
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