Winter of the World (Century Trilogy 2)

by Ken Follett

  Their chant changed. ‘Smash Jew papers!’ they said in unison. One of them threw something, and a rotten vegetable splashed on the door of a national newspaper. Then, to Carla’s horror, they turned towards the building she was in.

  She drew back and peeped around the edge of the window frame, hoping that they could not see her. They stopped outside, still chanting. One threw a stone. It hit Carla’s window without breaking it, but all the same she gave a little scream of fear. A moment later, one of the typists came in, a young woman in a red beret. ‘What’s the matter?’ she said, then she looked out of the window. ‘Oh, hell.’

  The Brownshirts entered the building, and Carla heard boots on the stairs. She was scared: what were they going to do?

  Sergeant Schwab came into Mother’s office. He hesitated, seeing the two females; then seemed to screw up his nerve. He picked up the typewriter and threw it through the window, shattering the glass. Carla and the typist both screamed.

  More Brownshirts passed the doorway, shouting their slogans.

  Schwab grabbed the typist by the arm and said: ‘Now, darling, where’s the office safe?’

  ‘In the file room!’ she said in a terrified voice.

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘Yes, anything!’

  He marched her out of the room.

  Carla started to cry, then stopped herself.

  She thought of hiding under the desk, but hesitated. She did not want to show them how scared she was. Something inside her wanted to defy them.

  But what should she do? She decided to warn Mother.

  She stepped to the doorway and looked along the corridor. The Brownshirts were going in and out of the offices but had not reached the far end. Carla did not know whether the people in the conference room could hear the commotion. She ran along the corridor as fast as she could, but a scream stopped her. She looked into a room and saw Schwab shaking the typist with the red beret, yelling: ‘Where’s the key?’

  ‘I don’t know, I swear I’m telling the truth!’ the typist cried.

  Carla was outraged. Schwab had no right to treat a woman that way. She shouted: ‘Leave her alone, Schwab, you thief!’

  Schwab looked at her with hatred in his eyes, and suddenly she was ten times more frightened. Then his gaze shifted to someone behind her, and he said: ‘Get the kid out of the damn way.’

  She was picked up from behind. ‘Are you a little Jew?’ said a man’s voice. ‘You look it, with all that dark hair.’

  That terrified her. ‘I’m not Jewish!’ she screamed.

  The Brownshirt carried her back along the corridor and put her down in Mother’s office. She stumbled and fell to the floor. ‘Stay in here,’ he said, and he went away.

  Carla got to her feet. She was not hurt. The corridor was full of Brownshirts now, and she could not get to her mother. But she had to summon help.

  She looked out of the smashed window. A small crowd was gathering on the street. Two policemen stood among the onlookers, chatting. Carla shouted at them: ‘Help! Help, police!’

  They saw her and laughed.

  That infuriated her, and anger made her less frightened. She looked outside the office again. Her gaze lit on the fire alarm on the wall. She reached up and grasped the handle.

  She hesitated. You were not supposed to sound the alarm unless there was a fire, and a notice on the wall warned of dire penalties.

  She pulled the handle anyway.

  For a moment nothing happened. Perhaps the mechanism was not working.

  Then there came a loud, harsh klaxon sound, rising and falling, which filled the building.

  Almost immediately the people from the conference room appeared at the far end of the corridor. Jochmann was first. ‘What the devil is going on?’ he said angrily, shouting over the noise of the alarm.

  One of the Brownshirts said: ‘This Jew Communist rag has insulted our leader, and we’re closing it down.’

  ‘Get out of my office!’

  The Brownshirt ignored him and went into a side room. A moment later there was a female scream and a crash that sounded like a steel desk being overturned.

  Jochmann turned to one of his staff. ‘Schneider – call the police immediately!’

  Carla knew that would be no good. The police were here already, doing nothing.

  Mother pushed through the knot of people and came running along the corridor. ‘Are you all right?’ she cried. She threw her arms around Carla.

  Carla did not want to be comforted like a child. Pushing her mother away, she said: ‘I’m fine, don’t worry.’

  Mother looked around. ‘My typewriter!’

  ‘They threw it through the window.’ Carla realized that now she would not get into trouble for jamming the mechanism.

  ‘We must get out of here.’ Mother snatched up the desk photo then took Carla’s hand, and they hurried out of the room.

  No one tried to stop them running down the stairs. Ahead of them, a well-built young man who might have been one of the reporters had a Brownshirt in a headlock and was dragging him out of the building. Carla and her mother followed the pair out. Another Brownshirt came behind them.

  The reporter approached the two policemen, still dragging the Brownshirt. ‘Arrest this man,’ he said. ‘I found him robbing the office. You will find a stolen jar of coffee in his pocket.’

  ‘Release him, please,’ said the older of the two policemen.

  Reluctantly, the reporter let the Brownshirt go.

  The second Brownshirt stood beside his colleague.

  ‘What is your name, sir?’ the policeman asked the reporter.

  ‘I am Rudolf Schmidt, chief parliamentary correspondent of The Democrat.’

  ‘Rudolph Schmidt, I am arresting you on a charge of assaulting the police.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I caught this man stealing!’

  The policeman nodded to the two Brownshirts. ‘Take him to the station house.’

  They grabbed Schmidt by the arms. He seemed about to struggle, then changed his mind. ‘Every detail of this incident will appear in the next edition of The Democrat !’ he said.

  ‘There will never be another edition,’ the policeman said. ‘Take him away.’

  A fire engine arrived and half a dozen firemen jumped out. Their leader spoke brusquely to the police. ‘We need to clear the building,’ he said.

  ‘Go back to your fire station, there’s no fire,’ said the older policeman. ‘It’s just the Storm troopers closing down a Communist magazine.’

  ‘That’s no concern of mine,’ the fireman said. ‘The alarm has been sounded, and our first task is to get everyone out, Storm troopers and all. We’ll manage without your help.’ He led his men inside.

  Carla heard her mother say: ‘Oh, no!’ She turned and saw that Mother was staring at her typewriter, which lay on the pavement where it had fallen. The metal casing had dropped away, exposing the links between keys and rods. The keyboard was twisted out of shape, one end of the roller had become detached, and the bell that sounded for the end of a line lay forlornly on the ground. A typewriter was not a precious object, but Mother looked as if she might cry.

  The Brownshirts and the staff of the magazine came out of the building, herded by firemen. Sergeant Schwab was resisting, shouting angrily: ‘There’s no fire!’ The firemen just shoved him on.

  Jochmann came out and said to Mother: ‘They didn’t have time to do much damage – the firemen stopped them. Whoever sounded the alarm did us a great service!’

  Carla had been worried that she would be reprimanded for causing a false alarm. Now she realized that she had done exactly the right thing.

  She took her mother’s hand. That seemed to jerk Mother out of her momentary fit of grief. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, an unusual act that revealed how badly shaken she was: if Carla had done that, she would have been told to use her handkerchief. ‘What do we do now?’ Mother never said that – she always knew what to do next.

  Carla be
came aware of two people standing nearby. She looked up. One was a woman about the same age as Mother, very pretty, with an air of authority. Carla knew her, but could not place her. Beside her was a man young enough to be her son. He was slim, and not very tall, but he looked like a movie star. He had a handsome face that would have been almost too pretty except that his nose was flattened and misshapen. Both newcomers looked shocked, and the young man was white with anger.

  The woman spoke first, and she used the English language. ‘Hello, Maud,’ she said, and the voice was distantly familiar to Carla. ‘Don’t you recognize me?’ she went on. ‘I’m Eth Leckwith, and this is Lloyd.’

  (ii)

  Lloyd Williams found a boxing club in Berlin where he could do an hour’s training for a few pennies. It was in a working-class district called Wedding, north of the city centre. He exercised with the Indian clubs and the medicine ball, skipped rope, hit the punch bag, and then put on a helmet and did five rounds in the ring. The club coach found him a sparring partner, a German his own age and size – Lloyd was a welterweight. The German boy had a nice fast jab that came from nowhere and hurt Lloyd several times, until Lloyd hit him with a left hook and knocked him down.

  Lloyd had been raised in a rough neighbourhood, the East End of London. At the age of twelve he had been bullied at school. ‘Same thing happened to me,’ his stepfather, Bernie Leckwith, had said. ‘Cleverest boy in school, and you get picked on by the class shlammer.’ Dad was Jewish – his mother had spoken only Yiddish. He had taken Lloyd to the Aldgate Boxing Club. Ethel had been against it, but Bernie had overruled her, something that did not happen often.

  Lloyd had learned to move fast and punch hard, and the bullying had stopped. He had also got the broken nose that made him look less of a pretty boy. And he had discovered a talent. He had quick reflexes and a combative streak, and he had won prizes in the ring. The coach was disappointed that he wanted to go to Cambridge University instead of turning professional.

  He showered and put his suit back on, then went to a workingmen’s bar, bought a glass of draft beer, and sat down to write to his half-sister, Millie, about the incident with the Brownshirts. Millie was envious of him taking this trip with their mother, and he had promised to send her frequent bulletins.

  Lloyd had been shaken by this morning’s fracas. Politics was part of everyday life for him: his mother had been a Member of Parliament, his father was a local councillor in London, and he himself was London Chairman of the Labour League of Youth. But it had always been a matter of debating and voting – until today. He had never before seen an office trashed by uniformed thugs while the police looked on smiling. It was politics with the gloves off, and it had shocked him.

  ‘Could this happen in London, Millie?’ he wrote. His first instinct was to think that it could not. But Hitler had admirers among British industrialists and newspaper proprietors. Only a few months ago the rogue MP Sir Oswald Mosley had started the British Union of Fascists. Like the Nazis, they had to strut up and down in military-style uniforms. What next?

  He finished his letter and folded it, then caught the S-train back into the city centre. He and his mother were going to meet Walter and Maud von Ulrich for dinner. Lloyd had been hearing about Maud all his life. She and his mother were unlikely friends: Ethel had started her working life as a maid in a grand house owned by Maud’s family. Later they had been suffragettes together, campaigning for votes for women. During the war they had produced a feminist newspaper, The Soldier’s Wife. Then they had quarrelled over political tactics and become estranged.

  Lloyd could remember vividly the von Ulrich family’s trip to London in 1925. He had been ten, old enough to feel embarrassed that he spoke no German while Erik and Carla, aged five and three, were bilingual. That was when Ethel and Maud had patched up their quarrel.

  He made his way to the restaurant, Bistro Robert. The interior was art deco, with unforgivingly rectangular chairs and tables, and elaborate iron lampstands with coloured glass shades; but he liked the starched white napkins standing to attention beside the plates.

  The other three were already there. The women were striking, he realized as he approached the table: both poised, well dressed, attractive and confident. They were getting admiring glances from other diners. He wondered how much of his mother’s modish dress sense had been picked up from her aristocratic friend.

  When they had ordered, Ethel explained her trip. ‘I lost my parliamentary seat in 1931,’ she said. ‘I hope to win it back at the next election, but meanwhile I have to make a living. Fortunately, Maud, you taught me to be a journalist.’

  ‘I didn’t teach you much,’ Maud said. ‘You had a natural talent.’

  ‘I’m writing a series of articles about the Nazis for the News Chronicle, and I have a contract to write a book for a publisher called Victor Gollancz. I brought Lloyd as my interpreter – he’s studying French and German.’

  Lloyd observed her proud smile and felt he did not deserve it. ‘My translation skills have not been much tested,’ he said. ‘So far, we’ve mostly met people like you, who speak perfect English.’

  Lloyd had ordered breaded veal, a dish he had never even seen in England. He found it delicious. While they were eating, Walter said to him: ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’

  ‘Mam thought I would learn more German this way, and the school agreed.’

  ‘Why don’t you come and work for me in the Reichstag for a while? Unpaid, I’m afraid, but you’d be speaking German all day.’

  Lloyd was thrilled. ‘I’d love to. What a marvellous opportunity!’

  ‘If Ethel can spare you,’ Walter added.

  She smiled. ‘Perhaps I can have him back now and again, when I really need him?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Ethel reached across the table and touched Walter’s hand. It was an intimate gesture, and Lloyd realized that the bond between these three was very close. ‘How kind you are, Walter,’ she said.

  ‘Not really. I can always use a bright young assistant who understands politics.’

  Ethel said: ‘I’m not sure I understand politics any more. What on earth is happening here in Germany?’

  Maud said: ‘We were doing all right in the mid-twenties. We had a democratic government and a growing economy. But everything was ruined by the Wall Street crash of 1929. Now we’re in the depths of a depression.’ Her voice shook with an emotion that seemed close to grief. ‘You can see a hundred men standing in line for one advertised job. I look at their faces. They’re desperate. They don’t know how they’re going to feed their children. Then the Nazis offer them hope, and they ask themselves: What have I got to lose?’

  Walter seemed to think she might be overstating the case. In a more cheerful tone he said: ‘The good news is that Hitler has failed to win over a majority of Germans. In the last election the Nazis got a third of the votes. Nevertheless, they were the largest party, but fortunately Hitler only leads a minority government.’

  ‘That’s why he demanded another election,’ Maud put in. ‘He needs an overall majority to turn Germany into the brutal dictatorship he wants.’

  ‘Will he get it?’ Ethel asked.

  ‘No,’ said Walter.

  ‘Yes,’ said Maud.

  Walter said: ‘I don’t believe the German people will ever actually vote for a dictatorship.’

  ‘But it won’t be a fair election!’ Maud said angrily: ‘Look what happened to my magazine today. Anyone who criticizes the Nazis is in danger. Meanwhile, their propaganda is everywhere.’

  Lloyd said: ‘Nobody seems to fight back!’ He wished that he had arrived a few minutes earlier at the Democrat office that morning, so that he could have punched a few Brownshirts. He realized he was making a fist, and forced himself to open his hand. But the indignation did not go away. ‘Why don’t left-wingers raid the offices of Nazi magazines? Give them a taste of their own medicine!’

  ‘We must not meet violence with violence!’ Maud said emphat
ically. ‘Hitler is looking for an excuse to crack down – to declare a national emergency, sweep away civil rights, and put his opponents in jail.’ Her voice took on a pleading note. ‘We must avoid giving him that pretext – no matter how hard it is.’

  They finished their meal. The restaurant began to empty out. As their coffee was served, they were joined by the owner, Walter’s distant cousin Robert von Ulrich, and the chef, Jörg. Robert had been a diplomat at the Austrian Embassy in London before the Great War, while Walter was doing the same thing at the German Embassy there – and falling in love with Maud.

  Robert resembled Walter, but was more fussily dressed, with a gold pin in his tie, seals on his watch chain, and heavily slicked hair. Jörg was younger, a blond man with delicate features and a cheerful smile. The two had been prisoners of war together in Russia. Now they lived in an apartment over the restaurant.

  They reminisced about the wedding of Walter and Maud, held in great secrecy on the eve of the war. There had been no guests, but Robert and Ethel had been best man and bridesmaid. Ethel said: ‘We had champagne at the hotel, then I tactfully said that Robert and I would leave, and Walter –’ she suppressed a fit of giggles – ‘Walter said: “Oh, I assumed we would all have dinner together”!’

  Maud chuckled. ‘You can imagine how pleased I was about that!’

  Lloyd looked into his coffee, feeling embarrassed. He was eighteen and a virgin, and honeymoon jokes made him uncomfortable.

  More sombrely, Ethel asked Maud: ‘Do you ever hear from Fitz these days?’

  Lloyd knew that the secret wedding had caused a terrible rift between Maud and her brother, Earl Fitzherbert. Fitz had disowned her because she had not gone to him, as head of the family, and asked his permission to marry.

  Maud shook her head sadly. ‘I wrote to him that time we went to London, but he refused even to see me. I hurt his pride by marrying Walter without telling him. My brother is an unforgiving man, I’m afraid.’