Night Crossing

by Robert Ryan

  ‘No. Not at all. I think you are very brave,’ she said truthfully. ‘And considerate.’

  ‘Good.’ He kissed her gently on the mouth, turned and disappeared into the phalanx of white marching their way to platform four to board the train for Neustadt and its School of Anti-Submarine Warfare.

  Colonel Donald Ross found the weather-beaten Senior Professional of the Stoke Poges golf course, near Windsor, in the back of his shop, winding a new grip onto a driver. As Donald Ross entered, the man looked up and wiped his fingers on a cloth before accepting the proffered hand.

  ‘Hello, Charlie,’ said the Colonel.

  ‘Hello, sir. You don’t get out this way much these days.’

  ‘More’s the pity. You seen my partner?’

  ‘That would be the young man, would it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Charlie gestured over his shoulder at the putting green. ‘He’s back here, practising.’

  ‘What did he tell you his handicap was?’

  ‘Nine, same as yours. At Huntercombe, though, so he may struggle a bit here. You’re still playing off nine?’

  ‘Yes. But these days it’s a real nine, Charlie.’

  The professional laughed. ‘Good to see you again, sir. Been busy?’

  Colonel Ross nodded. He’d been busy all right, feeding information into the great maw of Winston Churchill who chewed it up and spat it out faster than they could gather it. ‘Busy, yes.’

  ‘Well, you come here a bit more often, and I’d get you to scratch, I promise.’

  ‘I think there’ll be time to work on my golf after the war, Charlie.’

  Charlie felt the colour drain from his face. He had two boys of call-up age. ‘I thought after Munich—’

  ‘Piss for our time?’ said Colonel Ross with a sneer. ‘Come on, it’s a slow day—will you caddy for me, Charlie?’

  Charlie pulled himself together, thinking he might get some more information if he tagged along. ‘With pleasure, sir.’

  ‘Did the young man give his name?’

  ‘Cameron, sir.’

  The Colonel laughed. ‘That’s his Christian name. Cameron. Cameron Ross. We’re about to give my son a good thrashing, Charlie.’

  The quartet, two players and attendant caddies, met outside the extravagantly porticoed clubhouse. ‘Hello, father,’ said Ross, holding out his hand.

  The Colonel gripped it hard for the briefest second, then waved towards the course. ‘You haven’t played here before, have you? Number seven’s the hole. A four hundred and twenty-five, par four. It’ll sort the men from the boys. Eh, Charlie?’

  ‘How’s that?’ Ross asked the caddy.

  ‘Pond, just fifty yards short of the green,’ he explained. ‘Rather punishes those trying to make up for a poor tee shot.’

  ‘Charlie’s going to caddie me,’ said the Colonel. ‘You can have Marks here.’

  ‘That’s fine, Colonel.’

  Ross shook hands with Marks, and the quartet set off across the five hundred yards of immaculately shaved grass towards the first tee. The hole was a three-hundred-and-ninety-five-yard one, par four, with a chain of bunkers and a loop of the course’s river guarding three-quarters of the green.

  ‘What sort of man was he? Draper?’ asked Ross.

  Ross senior signalled for the caddies to drop back and slowed to a leisurely pace. Ross knew that his father got out of breath easily, thanks to a damaged lung from his gassing in the Great War. Now and then you could hear it, a strange wet slapping as the scar tissue tried to extract oxygen.

  ‘Oh, the usual kind for a casual. A misfit. A dreamer. Although this one had a silly sense of humour. Loved pranks. But—’ his father paused and looked at him—‘a patriot, if I might use that unfashionable word. Prepared to take risks for his country.’

  ‘Was he one of yours?’ He was asking whether the Colonel had recruited him personally.

  His father shook his head. ‘Dansey brought him on board a few years back.’

  Claude Dansey had set up his Z Organisation in the early 1930s, picking up operatives where he could—mostly toffs and businessmen of independent means, although anyone with a decent cover story for Continental travel was welcome. Draper, as an Imperial Chemical Industries free-roving salesman and purchasing agent, with good contacts in Germany, Austria and Hungary, was perfect.

  ‘So, no sign of whatever it was that Draper had discovered?’

  ‘No, sir,’ replied Ross.

  ‘Shame.’

  ‘All might not be lost, though. I had a meeting with Canaris.’

  The Colonel looked at him in amazement. ‘For crying out loud. Wilhelm Canaris? Tell me from the beginning. Everything, mind.’

  Ross began, his account interrupted only by the need to play some golf and to be circumspect around the caddies. On the first tee they tossed for honour, and selected their balls, the Colonel going with a Dunlop, Ross a Penfold. Ross’s opening effort was messy—he pulled the ball way over towards the trees to the left. He shaded his eyes and watched it clip the edge of the rough and roll back onto the fairway. Still a long way short of the green.

  Marks said quietly: ‘Not bad. If you don’t mind some advice—’

  ‘Advise away, Marks, please.’

  Marks gave him some quick pointers on stance and ball placement, finishing with an encouraging: ‘Early days yet, though, sir.’ Ross nodded his thanks.

  The Colonel’s shot was much smoother, his footing and swing more convincing, and he dropped a good twenty yards further on the fairway. As they strolled on, his son described the meeting with the White Fox.

  ‘Are you sure it was Canaris?’

  Ross suddenly had an attack of self-doubt. It never occurred to him he could have been an impostor. ‘Yes,’ he said, with all the conviction that he could muster.

  ‘Well, well, well. Shall we play on?’

  After they completed the first—the Colonel ahead by one stroke—they walked on to the second, a treacherous three-hundred-and-ninety-yard dog-leg, par four. ‘Canaris is no fool,’ said the Colonel. ‘He knows you’re soft on Germans.’

  ‘That’s not true. I like them as a people, but—’

  The Colonel sighed. ‘I should never have sent you on that exchange. It was meant to be a case of “Know thine enemy.” Not give you some misty-eyed idealism about the country. The same country that has taken Austria and the bulk of Czechoslovakia.’

  Ross stopped walking. ‘That is unfair. I hate Nazis as much as the next man. Trouble is, you think the whole nation has gone over.’

  ‘Haven’t they?’

  ‘No. The Walters, for instance. Good people—’

  His father waved his club to dismiss this. ‘Cameron. The Walters are related to Otto Vedder, you said. Vedder is a nasty piece of work.’

  Ross knew that he was going to get nowhere. It would be a waste of his breath to explain that he had found a natural lie-detector in Uli, someone who might be very useful to the Colonel. But he would certainly suspect some sleight of hand, especially given her nationality. Nothing good could possibly come out of Germany, was the Colonel’s current creed. ‘What do you suggest I do? About the bank account?’ asked Ross.

  ‘Canaris wants to establish a dialogue with us somehow. In return, you get Draper’s information. Or something that passes for it. You, flattered, fall for it—’

  ‘Dad. That’s not what happened.’

  ‘Quiet. I’m running you through the scenario. You, flattered, fall for this “Friend to Germany but not the Nazis” nonsense. So, what do you do? You activate the account and play along.’

  ‘Father, I have to be back on duty at A Division on Friday.’

  The Colonel glared at him. ‘I’ll have a word with John Moylan.’ He was talking about the Police Commissioner himself. His father always went to the top. Ross started to protest, feeling himself railroaded, but his father poked him in the chest with the handle of his club to silence him. ‘There is going to be a war, Cameron. No ifs or bu
ts. I know that. Your new chum Canaris knows that. And I’ll make sure John Moylan knows it. He’ll agree that the defence of the realm takes precedence over mere coppering. I went along with your choice of career when you argued that it was a more useful choice than Z. Well, the position’s reversed. You’ve a link to Canaris, man. That’s worth six A Divisions right now.’

  The Colonel bent down and placed his ball on the tee, and Ross suppressed the urge to hit him with his wood. His father had always resented his son’s choice to join the regular police force after university, where his facility with languages ensured a rapid rise in the fast-modernising organisation. This was his revenge, Ross was certain, his way of demonstrating to his son that it was possible—and preferable—to play on a larger stage than West End Central.

  As the old man straightened he said quietly, ‘Welcome to the spying game, m’boy.’

  Seven

  BERLIN: NOVEMBER 1938

  The Schleehalle was near Stettiner Bahnhof, at the unfashionable end of Friedrichstrasse. It had been built in 1903 by a Berlin philanthropist to bring music to the surrounding tenements, although once the family fortune had been lost high-brow culture had given way to crowd-pleasing cabaret.

  In the last few years the place had mostly fallen empty, its audience taken by the three kinos within easy walking distance, and, thought Uli, the neglect was starting to show. However, the acoustics were passable, the stage was deep, and, after much cajoling, the ancient heating system had raised the temperature to the point where it was possible for Uli to take her gloves off.

  She fussed with the Magnetophon, hoping that the chill wouldn’t affect the mechanism as she spooled the fat ribbon of tape through the complex maze of recording heads, as directed by Erich’s father. She had set up the machine in the orchestra pit, fed by three microphones through a device called a balancer.

  Uli peered over at the rim of the pit at the sparse audience. There was an hour to go, so she shouldn’t get anxious. She’d received her first letter from Erich that morning. He was at Wilmhelmshaven, undergoing his intensive training, and he described hours spent in a steel boiler, being rocked back and forth to try and simulate conditions on board a U-boat. She could tell from the tone that some of the perceived glamour of the Bootwaffe had been chipped away by the experience. What would the navy turn her former fiancé into? In normal times, she knew exactly what Erich would be. An engineer at AEG, like his father. But now?

  She was still perplexed by him breaking off the engagement, and her own reasons for wanting to do so. Were her motives something to do with Inspector Ross? She found herself thinking about the policeman, imagining herself a little Hausfrau with him, in much the same way that she had with Erich. Except life in London, with a Scotland Yard detective, seemed more glamorous than settling for being an engineer’s wife.

  Yet that was ridiculous. What she had seen in Ross’s face, in that hallway, hadn’t had anything to do with domestic bliss. Her Duchenne ability—the freak of nature that enabled her to read expressions, no matter how fleeting—had picked up something altogether more base. She’d felt bad afterwards, of course. It wasn’t the first time that she’d seen lust in a man’s eyes. It was a while since it had shone through so strongly, however. She’d gone to Tempelhof to make it right, and had ended up even more confused.

  Sometimes she wished she could just look away, ignore her Duchenne facility altogether, but God had given it to her for a reason, even though it had dogged her for years now. She still remembered catching the lie when her father had assured her that she could be one of the top violinists in Germany. Even as his voice said that, his face told her he thought she could be good, but not that good. It was then she knew that the years of rehearsal and performance he had mapped out for her would, ultimately, result in failure and bitterness. All those hours and days of endless repetition, trying to master the nuances of the concert repertoire, the never-ending practice sucking the life out of her. It had taken her months of torment to realise that it was better to end it then, with two snapped wrists. Better to be a person, with room for living and loving, than a performing machine.

  Uli felt someone staring at her and looked up. It was her father peering down from the footlights. He smiled, but the expression was strained. ‘Don’t you wish you were up here?’

  She grinned back and said, truthfully: ‘I’m happy where I am, father. I’ll do you proud.’

  He sat down on the boards, legs dangling into the pit, and held out another letter from the RMK. For a second she thought that permission to perform had been revoked, but she remembered the oily clerk who had turned up earlier and signed the documentation. As she read, her father said, ‘Two violas down, the woodwind is short, too. No percussionist. People are scared, Uli. And they’ll be even more scared when this gets out.’

  ‘This is preposterous,’ she said as she scanned the single page. ‘This applies to a third, a half of the musicians in the city.’

  He nodded. The RMK was proscribing any musician who had even a single Jewish grandparent. It meant that Fritz Walter’s scratch orchestra, and the Müller quintet, would be decimated. She was shocked when she saw the tears in her father’s eyes.

  ‘Make sure you get everything,’ he said quietly, pointing to the tape machine. ‘This could be our swansong.’

  The gramophone had a crocodile-skin finish and, so the salesman had said, a Garrard Number 22 motor, an excellent soundboard and a supply of spare needles. Ross had paid ten shillings for it, rather a lot for a reconditioned model, he’d thought, until he recalled guiltily just how much money there was in that Barclays account. He’d asked his father’s advice on what to do with the treacherous windfall: ‘Spend it, you blithering idiot,’ the Colonel had said.

  The gramophone, his first purchase, was now in the corner of Ross’s apartment, a ground floor flat with living room, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, leading off a square hallway. Alongside the machine was a growing collection of recordings, mostly Beethoven and Bach, which he played when he needed reminding of Germany’s gifts to the world, and some Hugo Wolf lieder when he needed to remind himself of Ulrike.

  That morning, when he had realised that her father would be playing the concert at the Schleehalle, he had gone along to the music department upstairs at Foyle’s on the Charing Cross Road. He had returned with a box of four shellac discs containing the Mendelssohn E minor and the Bruch G minor concertos recorded in Paris and London by Yehudi Menuhin.

  With a sleet-filled November rain rapping at the window, Ross stoked the coal fire, took the first of the fragile black records from its crinkling sleeve, laid it on the turntable and lowered the arm before retreating to his armchair.

  As he listened to the violinist’s fingers skittering up and down the neck in the first movement, he pictured Uli watching her father’s ensemble play the same piece, hundreds of miles away in Germany. He smiled to himself. I know your secret now, he thought. The book had hinted at it, but the fingerprint expert DS Cherrill had confirmed it, albeit in hushed tones, as if it were dangerous to speak of such black arts in the modern Metropolitan Police Force.

  The physiologist Duchenne had discovered that some people can spot minuscule changes of expression. There are many thousands of faces we can show, often for the merest fraction of a second, that reveal our true feelings. Everyone, apparently, does it, but the vast majority of people cannot see them. Uli and her kind could. It wasn’t mind-reading as such, but it was close.

  The insistent buzzing finally broke through his thoughts and he was aware of the click of the needle on the record’s exit groove. The door bell sounded again and Ross leapt up, lifted the arm from the disc and hurried into the hallway.

  As he opened the door a gust of wind threw rain into his face, and it was a second before he could focus on the man in front of him.

  ‘Well, Inspector Ross, aren’t you going to invite me in?’

  Ross nodded and stood aside to let Oberst Otto Vedder of the Abwehr step into the
warmth.

  The first half of the concert went by in a blur. Uli was balancing the microphones, making sure that the machinery didn’t overheat, keeping an eye on the spool speed and trying to move as quietly as possible as she tiptoed around the installation. The opening Liszt was shaky, she thought, the sound too bright, and she had repositioned one of the microphones before the Schumann, which was an improvement and again before the Blacher, which made it as perfect as she could have dared hope. Now there was just the Mendelssohn and the Paul Winter Fanfare to come.

  She was gratified to see the hall filling for the second programme. Her father brought her a coffee and she ran through the technical difficulties with him, but he shrugged them aside, his mind on other things. Fritz Walter checked his watch. ‘I’m sure it will be fine,’ he said. ‘It’s time.’

  He stood, straightened his clothes, walked to the centre of the stage, and silenced the auditorium with outspread arms.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for coming. I hope you are enjoying the performance. I have been asked … told to say something about this music, which is about to be played by my colleague and friend Franz Haug.’ There was a smattering of applause. ‘But, to be honest, I think we should let the music speak for itself. Ladies and gentlemen, Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor.’ There was enthusiastic clapping and a few shrill whistles of approval.

  Oh God, Uli thought. He’d skipped the RMK-approved intro. There’d be hell to pay for that if there were any officials out there. She hesitated over the tape control until she was sure that the orchestra and the lead violinist were ready. With just twenty minutes of tape, she was anxious about capturing the whole performance, and she hoped her father took the concerto at a brisk tempo. Slowing it down would be a disaster.

  The needles on the circular dials flickered as the piece began, but almost at once she realised that something was wrong. The rear microphone was far too twitchy, its indicator stabbing right round over to the right. Then the sound reached her ears. They were yelling at the back: ‘Arschloch, Beschissener, Sackratten,’ and other insults that she couldn’t catch. She heard the normally unflappable Franz rumble, discordant notes issuing from his instrument. There was a low growl now, a hum almost, from the audience. She pulled herself up over the pit edge, hoping to silence them, but she could see that the newcomers were slipping off their coats to reveal their uniforms underneath. Their faces were contorted and angry, fists were being shaken, and a fight had broken out in the back row.