Into Darkness

by Anton Gill

  'Over here.'

  Brandau and Hoffmann followed Galen to where a green bike leant against a bale of hay. Brandau dropped his provisions into the basket, where he found a pair of cycle clips. Galen really had thought of everything.

  'Long time since I've ridden one of these,' said the lawyer.

  'It'll get you to the station. Not far.'

  'What do I do with it when I get there?'

  'Leave it outside. You'll see a bicycle rack. Its owner will come and collect it before you've settled in your compartment.'

  Hoffmann looked around again, breathing the comforting smell. It was all so secure here, so natural, you wouldn't think anything out of the ordinary was happening anywhere.

  Hoffmann turned to Franz and shook his hand. 'Thank you, old friend.'

  'Christian duty.'

  'More than that.'

  'If we meet afterwards,' Franz said, addressing them both, 'I've still got a bottle or two of Eiswein. Really good stuff. Better than champagne, and it's good until 1955, which gives us plenty of time. I won't drink it until then. After that, if you still haven't shown up, well, it'd be a pity to waste it.'

  He shut up then, as they could hear the noise of a farm cart labouring along the road, so slowly that they thought it would stop. But the heavy tread of the mule drawing it didn't change rhythm, and it passed.

  'Let's go,' said Hoffmann, briskly. He got into the car and started it. The motor hummed into life at the first pull of the button.

  He reached a hand out to Brandau. 'Goodbye, Hans.'

  'We'll keep an eye on you from Bern.'

  'Just make sure you get there.'

  'Good luck.' Brandau spread his hands. They ought to have had a more formal leave-taking than this, thought Hoffmann, after what they'd been through.

  A gravel drive led to the church gate, already open, beyond which the drive curved to the left and down to the road. Galen walked to the road and looked carefully left and right. Then he waved his hand.

  Hoffmann pushed the VW into gear, grinding the box as he did so, and flinching; but it was all right. He pulled away slowly, turning right onto the road and out of Teudorf, heading south. He didn't look back.

  31

  Hoffmann drove hard for two hours along roads deserted except for the occasional ox-cart or small military convoy. He drove through huddled villages that looked deserted, and past grey farms whose yards were morasses. He found a stretch of road by a pretty little beech-wood and pulled over into its edge. He climbed out and stretched - his frame was better suited to a Mercedes than a VW - relieved himself, walked up and down, shaking his limbs. He felt better alone.

  Just one case to close.

  It would be a gamble, but what wasn't? Would he have time to finish his work before they caught up with him? In the few days before the young communications officer had denounced him under torture, he'd seen the size of the operation Hitler had mounted against the conspirators. Now that the Führer had recovered sufficiently from his shock not to shit himself every time a shadow moved, and convinced as he was that some kind of divine hand held itself protectively over him, he had unleashed a whirlwind.

  Much as he wanted a future beyond this mire, Hoffmann was under no illusions.

  The little Walther automatic dug into his hip. He took it out and checked it. He had two clips of ammunition, and one more in the gun. And his service pistol. Plenty. Stawizki wouldn't get to play tunes on him.

  He lit one of his Murattis. Good cigarettes. Even tasted good in the fresh air. He'd give himself time for one quick smoke. He thought of his father, nicotine-stained fingers like his own, always smelling of tobacco, always in a tweed jacket, always sad that his son had never shared his enthusiasm for mathematics, which he'd taught for thirty years in the same school in Dahlem. His horror in 1919 when Hoffmann, fresh from the trenches, had announced that he was going to study to be a pastor.

  'Are you quite mad?'

  'No.'

  'But how can you have reached such a decision?'

  'I want to help people.'

  'Then be a doctor.'

  'I want to help them spiritually.'

  'Then be a psychiatrist. Go to Vienna. I'm sure I - '

  'I can't help it, father.'

  'There's no reason in religion. No rationale.'

  'I think there is.'

  But he'd been wrong.

  The sun was well up now. It wasn't a particularly hot day. There was still a haze which hadn't dispersed.

  Along the road came a man tending a gaggle of geese, maybe fifteen of them. Hoffmann leant against the car, watching.

  As they came up, the geese became uneasy, chattering nervously. Hoffmann didn't like geese.

  'Smells like a good cigarette,' said the man. About sixty, weatherbeaten face, short white hair, countryman's clothes, carried a long stick. Where had he come from? A hamlet off the road? Hoffmann hadn't passed anywhere for several kilometres.

  'Have one,' said Hoffmann.

  'Swiss,' said the man, accepting. He didn't look like the kind of person who'd know.

  'Black market,' said Hoffmann. He didn't want any conversations. The cigarettes were a mistake. He looked at the man's eyes. Intelligent. Who might he tell?

  'I must be going.'

  The man inhaled, ignoring this. The geese tutted, uneasy at having their trek interrupted. 'A very luxurious smoke, best I've had in years. Don't worry about the geese. Except Otto,' he pointed to the gander, an elderly, bad-tempered looking bird, which despite some aggressive posturing was nevertheless keeping its distance. 'But even Otto is beginning to see sense.'

  'I know about geese,' said Hoffmann.

  'Do you?' The man looked thoughtful. 'Really.' He paused for a moment. 'I'm still learning about them.'

  'Really?'

  'Yes. Used to do something else.'

  'I must be going,' Hoffmann said again.

  The man shrugged. 'Of course. You look like a busy man.'

  Something made Hoffmann relent. 'Have another cigarette.'

  The man looked at the proffered packet, but shook his head. 'You probably don't have many, and you'll need them more than I do. But thank you.'

  Hoffmann watched him go, the geese following him eagerly, like a bunch of children. The man didn't look up or wave when Hoffmann overtook him a few moments later.

  32

  The brown plain had taken on colour; the green of trees and the blue-black of lakes, poppies in the hedgerow and the scattered blues and yellows of wildflowers. The sky was full of swallows. Still not much traffic. Every so often, he passed a wooden cart, laden with hay or manure, always accompanied by a bent figure alongside a gaunt horse or mule. There was more active and even prosperous farming here than around Teudorf - look at that flock of geese, how had they survived so long? - but not much sign of life in the handful of villages and hamlets he drove through.

  He'd covered fifteen kilometres after his meeting with the gooseherd when he saw the roadblock.

  He looked at his watch. Nine. Better time than he'd thought. Mühlersheim already. On a hill in the middle distance he could see the modest Gothic cathedral and the grey-and-beige buildings spilling down the slopes from it to the river, and the tanning factory, the road ahead running towards them.

  A pretty sorry sight, this roadblock. A tractor trailer hauled across his path, yoked to a bored-looking ass, accompanied by a more bored-looking countryman in shirtsleeves, and a waistcoat made from a potato sack. Two Home Guard types, fourteen or fifteen years old, thin necks sticking out of heavy collars. As he drew up Hoffmann could see that their necks were rubbed raw by their uniforms. Shifty eyes. Their rifles - old Type 98s - were too big for them. But their fingers were on the triggers, and they were levelling the guns at him. Don't underestimate fear; that can kill you. Don't show fear either. He gave them no more than a glance, and shifted his attention to their boss.

  The man in charge was a plump SS Rottenführer, about thirty, could be older, didn't matter, w
hose black uniform was shiny with wear. He was shiny himself, sweating. His cap was too small for him. Little film-star-type black moustache. He held up a meaty hand and approached the car. Hoffmann sensed his uncertainty. The car was modest, but new, and these days any car was a luxury - who had petrol? - and was to be treated equally with suspicion and respect.

  He lowered the window and waited. The corporal waddled over and leant towards him. Hoffmann smelled a cocktail of odours: beer, schnapps, BO, boiled cabbage, sausage, tobacco; the smell that haunted a thousand offices and a thousand torture chambers and a thousand prisons. The smell of the poor.

  Only in the east, in Poland, had it been different. Acrid there, the smell, the smell of starving women. Everything was grey there. And there was another smell, the smell of burnt meat.

  'Out,' said the SS man, but hesitantly. Perfect specimen. Bully. As ready to cringe as to hit. He scratched his left upper arm. Was his service tattoo irritating him?

  Hoffmann uncoiled himself from the small car and draped the leather greatcoat over his shoulders. He towered over the other man. He placed Galen's black trilby on his head. He saw the man's eyes go small and clever. The boys had lowered their rifles. They were already looking respectful.

  'Papers,' said the corporal, with fading conviction.

  Hoffmann wasn't going to overplay his hand. People were touchy these days. Too much arrogance or too little confidence could tip the balance. He allowed himself the ghost of a sigh, dealing with an underling, and produced his wallet, letting the silver eagle-and-swastika motif embossed on it catch the sun. He snapped out the travel authority and the identity card and held them for the corporal to take. He wouldn't give them to him.

  Have they got my description out already? If they know, surely they'll be concentrating on the northern ports, and the Swiss border? Had keeping the greatcoat been a mistake, after all?

  The corporal screwed his eyes up and looked at the papers. Hoffmann stood erect, drew in his breath impatiently, but not too impatiently. He could see that the corporal was just going through the motions. He wasn't reading the documents. He was seeing the symbols and the rubber stamps and the important signatures. After a minute he handed them back and saluted.

  'Thank you, sir.'

  'Doing your job.' Hoffmann briskly returned the salute. The boys stood to attention, and saluted too, muttering uneven Heil Hitlers at him. He nodded his approval and they looked almost as pleased as if he'd given them a kilo of coffee for their mothers.

  He got back into the VW, waited until the ass had trundled the trailer off the road, and drove on.

  It won't be long, Kara, he said to himself. It won't be long.

  33

  He drove south-west through the rest of the morning across the unforgiving plain, blinking his eyes against the sun, which had at last dispelled the haze. This part of Germany would have a perfect summer's afternoon.

  Ten years, he thought. A long time for two people to occupy the same mind. Two souls live, alas, within my breast. Hoffmann grinned. Could Goethe have imagined this situation? He tried to suppress the memories that came to him, and failed.

  His was a situation he could control. He knew which the true man was, and which the false. But the strain of maintaining the balance was great, and that of auditing the moral profit-and-loss account, greater still. That was a job he didn't dare address, because it would call into question which of the two men he'd made himself into had been the more effective, and he couldn't face the answer, any more than he could stop someone in a room at the end of a half-forgotten corridor in his mind working on the problem.

  The last year had brought many things to a head. There had been a problem in the spring, deciding who should live and who die of among the seventy-six recaptured air force prisoners-of-war who'd escaped en masse from a camp in Poland, Stalag-Luft III. They were mostly officers, valuable men, pilots and navigators and bomb-aimers: the same sort of men, in fact, who were pounding Berlin - and Leipzig and Frankfurt and Dresden - to pieces now.

  Plans for the assassination attempt on the Führer were already well advanced then, so there was no question of his compromising his position. The job had to be done, and it wasn't the worst he'd had to face. As usual, he'd approached it with the aim of mitigating its effect as far as possible. He'd done his best to select, as humanely as possible, the fifty men to be slaughtered by the Gestapo acting on a direct Führer-Order (the Führer had gone into one of his rare, carpet-chewing fits over this). Filing cards with the men's details had been piled up on his desk. From them he was able to sort categories of married and unmarried, those who were fathers and those who weren't; and able to sort the young from the old, as far as that was possible within an age range of nineteen to thirty. All the information came of course from conversations between prisoners and guards, who were airforcemen themselves. Friendships were struck up. Some of these people had been in camps for three or even four years. Name, rank and number only? Forget it. And some of them had been sending information on German morale back to their own secret service in coded letters home.

  But shooting fifty of them in cold blood? No.

  Fifty out of a total of seventy-six.

  Filing cards on his desk.

  Names, ranks, dates of birth. So many married; so many married with children; so many engaged to be married; so many single.

  Fifty lives. A difficult choice.

  He remembered the discussions over lunch with Kaltenbrunner of the Central Security Office, and with Müller of course. Those endless business lunches to talk about the measures to be taken, and how they could be covered up. Everybody hated bomber crews, everybody hated Allied airmen in general, but killing prisoners out of hand wouldn't do Germany's reputation a lot of good if the Allies found out and made propaganda capital out of it.

  The lunches in Berlin generally took place at the Adlon, over Dover sole and Pouilly Fumé. And, inevitably, Hennessy XO and Monte Cristo cigars afterwards. As for the subject, they might as well have been discussing commodities, and the tendency to use euphemistic language - 'product' when they meant 'people' - muddied everyone's thinking. Something else he had to be aware of.

  If he got out of this, he'd live on black bread and water for the rest of his life. He owed that to the ghosts, who would in any case never go away.

  Latterly, the two other men, both younger and more powerful than him, had passed remarks about his being the only Berliner in the High Command; and once or twice he'd caught up with a comment from behind his back - especially from Kaltenbrunner - about the size and shape of his nose. At the time he'd been confident of Hitler's support, and as for his looks, his Ancestry Certificate showed an impeccable Aryan line: his family went back a century in Berlin, and three hundred and fifty years before that in Kiel. He was a good deal 'purer' than most, and as for physical appearance, it was a common joke in Berlin, though still whispered, that as far as all that was concerned, Hitler, Himmler, Göring and Goebbels were hardly paragons of any Master Race.

  He'd put matters off for as long as he could, which was to say, no more than a week. Then he'd sat down at his desk and drawn up the death list in an hour. Balancing so many fates that quickly. Seeming to know these people, but not knowing them at all; only really knowing that his judgements, though based on what he hoped and prayed were the most humane principles he could evoke, were nevertheless mere guesswork. How did he know this wife wasn't pregnant? How did he know that that marriage was a success? He balanced youth against responsibility: he put all the men under twenty in one pile; some of the older fathers went into the other.

  The next job was sending the telexes authorising the murders to regional secret police cadres scattered from Hamburg to the Saarland to Krakow, wherever the escapers had been picked up and were now being held in ordinary police station cells.

  Which meant his own men would have to hand the prisoners over to the Gestapo.

  There was no way out. None. He went through the motions with disgust, but it
had to be done. There were big things at stake now. In a few months, perhaps, the Nazis would be swept aside. The sacrifice had to be made. But then there had almost been a hitch at the end. It might have ruined everything, as he then had thought. But to what good end, after all, had he kept his cruel word?

  The sun was beginning to beat through the windows of the Volkswagen. His senses had been fully alert to get him through the roadblock, but the involuntary recollection of the enemy officers from Stalag-Luft III and their fate had lowered his spirits, and the tiredness which he continued to battle would not be defeated. His head felt light, objects seen through the windscreen seemed far away, as if he were looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope. His mouth and nostrils were dry, his eyes prickled, and his new suit rubbed uncomfortably against his thigh. The car was too small for him. He felt cramped.

  He was tempted to stop in Mühlersheim, find a hotel, see if they had anything decent to eat and a room he could use for a few hours. He hesitated right up to where the road leading to the centre of the town diverged from the one he was on, which bypassed it.

  He drove on. It was too soon. He'd find somewhere quiet where he could pull over and sleep for an hour, two if he was lucky. That night he'd find somewhere with a bath or shower that worked. Maybe he'd get the suit pressed, even have them launder the things he was wearing. The hotel staff would remember that, but it was important to look as good as possible for as long as possible. He should be able to manage that for a week. More than enough time, God willing, to get the job done. How long he'd be able to keep the car was another question - with luck, until it ran out of petrol - and he couldn't guess how long his forged identity papers would last, though there was no way that his pursuers could possibly know what they were, or under what name and cover he was travelling.

  He had no material problems: there were plenty of banknotes in the lining of the back-seat of the VW, as well as hotel and travel warrants.