by Anton Gill
He'd rehearsed often enough the argument that if he hadn't done what he'd done for the regime, one of his colleagues, not a member of the Resistance, would have worked in his place, and only returned evil for evil. But in the course of his career over the last decade, there had been no escaping the question: hadn't he himself committed worse crimes than those young men, blindly following what they were too ignorant to question, could even dream of?
No matter how often he told himself that the only reason he had had for serving the state was to maintain a position from which he could most effectively work against it, no matter how much he tried to persuade himself that his job had enabled him to obscure and waylay investigations into at least three assassination attempts on Hitler; or reminded himself that he had managed to misroute and delay shipments of poison gas to the camps; that he had secured profoundly confidential information on the administration of the camps and relayed it to Oster and his associates as proof - one day to be presented to the Allies by a surrendering provisional government after a successful coup against Hitler - of the regime's crimes: no matter how frequently he trawled and dredged his mind and his conscience, over and over again, revolving it as long as Ixion ever turned on his wheel, he could not convince himself that the evil he'd done would ever justify the good.
There had been no coup. The Resistance had failed. The good had come to nothing. Only the bad remained. In the eyes of the enemy, who were not the enemy, but the liberators of Germany and of the camps, Hoffmann would still be just another Nazi on the run. How could he convince them of where his heart had been for ten long years and more? And even if he could, he would never escape the memory of the screaming women and children, the terrified infants, at Auschwitz and Sobibor and Treblinka, at the camps he'd had to visit as a member of various efficiency consultancy units, discussing better ways of processing the Produkt; and once hearing and seeing that filthy Alsatian dog - snarl and bark as it chased a naked, fleeing little boy at Treblinka; having to watch what happened when it brought the child down.
And those guards, even the officers, so full of schnapps they could hardly stand, applauding. And the sound of the geese at Sobibor, that flock of geese brought in to cry down the howls of the Jews as they were herded into the death shed, so that the Poles on nearby farmsteads would not hear?
He had to concentrate on his last work now. In the dawn which followed, after his second inspection of his battered features in the mirror, and after checking the perimeter of the farm to make sure he was still undisturbed, he peeled off his clothes and washed as best he could at the pump in the yard. The farm overalls he'd discovered the day before were clean, at least, though musty and damp, and one set was almost big enough for him. Better than the clothes he had been wearing since the gunfight, and though they'd scarcely go with the journalist Dieter Weitz's identity, at least he hoped they'd let him pass unnoticed in a rural environment. He'd taken the boots off at last. He inspected his feet, knowing from experience that when you are up against it, your feet must be cosseted. If your feet can't carry you, you're dead. But Kurtz's boots had treated them well. He slid the boots on again over his dirty socks, which he'd turned inside-out, and flexed his feet. Then he took the sharpest knife he could find from the kitchen and used it to cut pieces out of the other pair of overalls.
There were a few other jobs to do. He wrapped some gherkins, onions and eggs in the bits of cloth, and stuffed them into the pockets of the overalls, filled a discarded bottle with water from the pump, shoved the knife into his pack, ate as much as he dared of the rest of the food. He buried his old clothes under three or four bales of decaying hay in the darkest corner of the barn.
He knew that his instinct not to finish off the stocky Werewolf boy had been sentimental, stupid. But with luck the little bastard would have died anyway. He was messed up enough.
He would have to find transport. Meanwhile, he would make his way to a bigger road. There would be people on the move, on foot and in carts, and the advantages of being one among many, of losing himself in the crowd, outweighed the risk. He might even get a lift, though travelling alone would be preferable.
He slung his bag over his aching shoulder, and set off.
85
He thought, she didn't say she loved me. When I told her I'd met Oster; when I was already committed, when I was beginning to pass on what information I could information from the meetings. I shouldn't have told her: perhaps she sensed what I had done anyway. I know part of me regretted ever having taken the step, but things were happening within the Party which... She hugged me and she laughed...
But there was still something hidden in her eyes...
His thoughts trailed off, bringing him back to the present. It was ten o'clock. The road he was on had grown broader and there were more frequent tracks and lanes leading off it. There were clumps of alder and birch, and dark swathes of pine further up the sloping hills. There were villages again, no more than two or three kilometres apart, but the people about, women and children and a few men, most of them over fifty, paid no attention to him. His road came to an end soon afterwards, where it reached a much larger highway running roughly north and south. There was no signpost.
He turned southwards, and as he walked the sun rose, beating on his back and the back of his neck. He worried about his bag, which, though battered now, did not go well with his country clothes. He paused to rub mud from a cart-track onto it, but he need not have been concerned. The occasional cart passed him, and now and then he either overtook, or for a short time fell in with, groups of people moving from village to village. He did what he could to disguise his Berlin accent without attempting to mimic the local dialect, but he found that his fellow travellers were too much taken up with their own concerns to feel any curiosity about him. Some were simply moving from job to job, even from field to field, busy with what harvest there was. People still had to eat. Fields were jealously protected, but the only dogs he saw were trotting along beside the carts they were tied to.
He'd been walking for two hours when he saw a crowd up ahead, though still moving slowly forwards. He got into the lee of a wagon and soon reached the checkpoint, manned by two Home Guard soldiers wearing campaign medals on their tunics and sporting Hindenburg moustaches. They would be easy to kill, but what then? By now he was surrounded by other people. He had no papers which would serve him here. He kept his head down and he kept behind the wagon.
As he approached the two soldiers, he realised with alarm that they knew many of the people passing through the checkpoint personally, nodding and greeting, occasionally putting out a discreet hand to take a proffered piece of fruit or a salami, which they would transfer into the canvas forage sacks slung from their shoulders.
But he needn't have worried. They were waving people through. So no-one had telegraphed ahead to this town - Neuhaus, as he saw from a sign - to alert them. What route, then, did they think he had taken? He couldn't afford to let up. In the pretty little red-roofed main square he found a shop which sold him a canvas bag and two pairs of hiking socks; and another where he bought a loaf of bread, sausage, potato salad and beer, tobacco and cigarette papers. He didn't want to linger, and he needed to husband his money.
He had reached Neuhaus! He had made better progress than he'd expected; but there was still a long way to go, and he wouldn't relax until Tilli's door closed safely behind him. A little country town like this was all right, even ideal: there were plenty of people who looked as scruffy as he did, and he could hide among them. But he would have to avoid any large place from now on.
He went into a church and, in a quiet corner, transferred his belongings to the canvas bag, together with his supply of food, putting his guns, ammunition and money in a separate compartment. The papers which were still usable, the travel documents and the Swedish passport, he stuck in an inner pocket of the overalls with the little Walther pistol. Leaving the church and circling it, he found a crumbling pile of masonry behind it, part of a forgotten re
storation project, and buried his leather satchel under it. The now useless ID papers he tore into shreds and discreetly fed into different drains, as he walked through the town, eyes open for any kind of transport. His thighs still chafed from the walking and he needed to make better speed.
There was only one possibility, as things stood. Near the southern outskirts of the town stood a cart piled high with furniture, the modest contents of someone's cottage. A mule stood between the shafts, and sitting up on the driver's box - a plank of wood fixed to the front of the cart, sat a young woman, her arm round a little boy of about six. They were waiting for someone. Both had the blank look that tiredness and travel weariness bring. Tied to the back of the cart, hidden from the front by the bedstead, wardrobe, table, chairs and rugs, was a bicycle.
It would have been easy; but he couldn't take it. In any case, he didn't want to get caught just for stealing a bicycle.
As soon as he was clear of the town he found a place to sit, eat and drink. He thought about Tilli's country house. It was in another world.
86
The truck laboured down the country road, spitting stones, raising dust. It was a 1940 Ford, one of thousands sold to the Party by the Americans before things turned sour. Hoffmann knew all about them, just as he remembered being told by a colleague that Hitler had once had a picture of Henry Ford, whom he admired, displayed in his office.
Though newish, this lorry had come down in the world, from army vehicle to farm workhorse, converted to run on coal. It wouldn't be joining its fellows on the West Front, facing similar vehicles, adorned with white stars instead of black crosses, as the Yankees poured eastwards across France. Hoffmann, travelling in the back, bracing himself against two of the sacks of early-harvest grain which filled the space, grinned sourly at the thought.
He'd been walking along the side of the highway, climbing up onto the verge to be nearer the shelter of the trees as he heard the hammering engine getting louder behind him. When he sensed that the lorry was slowing, he slackened his pace and turned.
The truck stammered to a halt, shrouding itself in fumes, but the motor, though it gave a kind of death-rattle, did not die, deciding instead to tick over, muttering and clanking through a variety of dissonances.
The passenger door, on Hoffmann's side, groaned open - no-one had given this machine more than the bare minimum of love - and the driver, a hairy giant in a tattered check shirt, beckoned to him. On the remains of the passenger seat perched a wooden crate containing several wretched-looking chickens.
'Where're you off to?' the man said.
'Anywhere south.'
'I can see that. Coburg any good to you?'
'Sounds fine. Thanks!'
'Get in the back. Make yourself a chair out of the sacks, and don't throw up over them if you get sick.'
'What's in them?'
'Wheat. I'm going to the Scheidmantel brewery. They're lucky to be getting this much.'
The driver heaved himself out of his cab, lowered the tailgate, and gave a mock bow.
'Whatever happens, there's got to be beer.' The man went and rummaged in the cabin, and produced two dusty bottles. 'Not as cold as they could be. Prost!'
'Prost!'
The man stuck out a hand. 'Kirchner,' he said.
'Grosz.' This guy wasn't going to ask for papers, and Weitz the journalist hardly fitted Hoffmann's present persona.
'Where're you from?'
Hoffmann hesitated. 'Freyburg.'
'You're a long way from home. And you could do with a bath! Been working on a muckheap, have you?'
Did Hoffmann imagine a flicker of doubt in the man's eyes? He knew his accent was imperfect, but he hoped he'd managed sufficiently to disguise the Berlin in it.
But he wouldn't pass for a labourer - one had only to look at his face, his hands. A couple of days on the road and a bit of grime only stood up to the lightest inspection, despite the fact that he smelled like a midden. What would Brandau have thought?
Had Brandau made it?
If he had sensed anything, the driver let it go.
'Got to make one stop,' he said as he closed the tailgate again. 'Get rid of these birds. We'll have a really cold beer and a natter then.'
He returned to the cab and wrenched the gears around, giving a thumbs up through the tiny rear-window. Hoffmann considered. Garrulous but not too curious. And going to Coburg. The driver might have been sent by God; but Hoffmann knew he couldn't depend on God. He looked up at the sun, then at his watch. They should be there by early evening.
The road wasn't as rough as he'd expected it to be.
His thoughts turned to the past again.
***
The summer had passed quickly. By the end of October, her pregnancy was obvious. She worked among doctors. Some of them were curious. Kara had never mentioned a partner to any of them, but she had a reputation for secrecy that her colleagues - some of them despite themselves - respected. She insisted on working for as long as she could; and there was no objection at the Charité: she was a valued member of staff for one thing, and for another the Party, eager to increase the population after the lean years that had followed the war, encouraged children, in or out of wedlock. They were even offering incentives to people to get married - big loans which would be written off in percentages, according to how many kids the newly-weds went on to produce.
There was something else. Hagen was back in Berlin, and basking in the triumph he'd made of his stint in the Black Forest. His training-programme had been so successful that they'd extended his stay. In getting rid of him, Hoffmann had helped his career.
Now, Hoffmann was no longer confident that he could contain anything Hagen chose to do.
87
Hagen wasn't the only problem. So far Hoffmann had done little more than relay coded copies of the documents that passed across his desk to Oster, but that was more than enough to hang him if he were caught. He was in no position to raise his head above the parapet.
His decision, he knew, was based as much on wanting Kara to see him in a good light, as on any principles of his own.
Whatever happened, there was no going back now; and whatever happened, though there were moments when, being human, he cursed himself for allowing Oster to have persuaded him, there was never a moment when he fundamentally regretted his decision. The Party had betrayed his faith, and the Strasser brothers, the only members to have stuck to socialist ideas, were losing ground fast.
Apart from that, nothing had changed, except the nature of the game. The game itself was the same: problems and solutions. The solutions were increasingly brutal; but Hoffmann was used to living in a cruel world.
His work now lay in trying to make it less cruel. An impossible task to complete, but always interesting.
They had to be cautious. Emma had become their go-between when she was able. Emma was ten years old, and luckily had taken to Kara as strongly as Kara had taken to her.
Hoffmann hadn't seen Kara for well over a week. He walked to her flat. It was an iron-grey day, the light washing the colour from everything, the first day to indicate that autumn was gone now, really gone, and that winter's cold arms would soon cradle the city. As evening approached, a vile drizzle started, which worked its way through his coat. The wind, nagging its way from the Urals and meeting no resistance in all the space that separated those mountains from Berlin, got into his bones and made his shoulders ache.
He passed a Weinstube, the orange and yellow light inside, beyond the glass panes which sequestered the interior from the bleak darkness of the street, spilling onto a mahogany bar and its brass fittings. Men and women, hunched over tables or seated on stools drawn up along the bar, smoked and drank and lingered as if they would never be able to bring themselves to leave that temporary comfort for the reality of the lives that lurked beyond it, waiting implacably to go on. Hoffmann slackened his pace to look, but did not stop, did not go in.
He had spoken to Tilli Cassirer, and prepared his gro
und. Kara was fond of Tilli, trusted her. Tilli still had some powerful friends. She still saw a lot of the actress Emmy Sonnemann, and Emmy, a pretty woman of some talent, who was under no illusions at all, had been seeing a great deal of Hermann Göring. Göring was popular - he'd been a fighter ace during the ’14-18 war - and although he was running to fat now, and, rumour had it, taking just a little too much cocaine for his own good - his charisma and his position at the right hand of the Führer, as Hoffmann liked to think of him, made his friendship worth cultivating.
How far he could be trusted, Hoffmann had no idea. He'd been charming on the handful of occasions they'd met, but he was also drunk with his own success. He was building a vast mansion just outside the city. There were rumours that Emmy would soon be mistress of it. As the Führer showed no signs of marrying himself, it was a safe bet that Emmy would soon be the country's first lady.
For Hoffmann, that was an attractive thought. Tilli had told him not to expect too much, but Tilli herself, he argued, still had cachet and she was divorcing her husband, which turned Party faces warmly towards her. Kara would be safe with her until he could make the arrangements necessary for her to leave.
He got to Kara's door at a quarter to seven.
It took her a while to answer. When she did, he could see that her makeup was fresh. She'd been expecting him at seven, she said. Had she been crying? She stood aside to let him pass, unusually quiet, eyes downcast. She had put a bottle of wine and two glasses on the coffee table, and near them an ashtray and a bowl of green olives; the furniture was as it had always been, and the curtains drawn. But there was a coldness about the light which he couldn't understand, so full was his head with what he wanted to say to her.
Then he became aware that the African masks had been taken down, that there were no pictures on the walls, no books on the shelves. And behind the sofa, he noticed a pile of cardboard boxes. Looking towards the kitchen, he could see more packing-cases, and a heap of straw.