‘Are you Georgie Young?’ Her blue eyes were rimmed with red and her make-up clearly yesterday’s application, blonde hair pushed up into a beret. She was pencil thin, with a lean, almost gaunt, face. Despite this, she was beautiful, petite features and wide, full lips just touched with faint remnant of lipstick.
‘Yes.’ Still wary, Georgie was reluctant to throw open the door. The Gestapo came in all shapes and sizes.
‘I’m Margot Moller,’ the woman said. The name resonated – Georgie had surely seen or read it somewhere, and the voice was familiar. Fraulein Moller tried to smile but her lips crimped, a zipper to her distress. ‘I didn’t know where else to look. Paul’s gone missing. I can’t find him anywhere.’
For the second time in two days, Georgie was obliged to use her tea supply as some kind of panacea. ‘Surely, he’s still back in England,’ she tried to reassure her. ‘My London office says he’s not due back for a while, spending time with his family.’
She sat and faced Margot, feeling sorry for this young, beguiled and misled woman having to face up to the truth; with a new young baby, Paul Adamson had seen the error of his ways, deciding that his loyalties lay at home. ‘It’s not even clear whether he is coming back to Berlin,’ Georgie added.
Margot set down her cup heavily, tea slopping over the side. ‘But don’t you see? He was back,’ she said, lips pursed. ‘He came back to Berlin three days ago. He was staying with me. And then last night he went out, said he was meeting a contact. And he hasn’t come back.’
‘Did he say where he was going?’
‘No. And I’ve been to all the places I can think of, those where he sometimes drank, or met people. No one’s seen him.’ She blinked back tears. ‘Or will admit to it in any case.’
Georgie deliberated for a minute. She didn’t know anything about Paul Adamson, other than he’d been a good, but distracted, reporter. They’d had a handful of decent conversations, but only about work, and nothing about himself. Only twice had he joined the Adlon crowd, hovering on the periphery. Where would she even start to look? And had he even gone missing, or was he simply shirking his responsibilities, as he’d so far been fairly skilled at?
Margot shuffled in her chair, agitated, mentally clutching at something and clearly deliberating on letting it go.
‘Is there anything else?’ Georgie probed gently. ‘That maybe I should know?’
‘He was working on a story,’ Margot said, voice quivering. ‘He wouldn’t say what, only that it would be big, and if anything happened to him, I should get out of Berlin. Out of Germany if possible. I’ve been to his apartment – it’s been searched. Still ordered, things put back, but I know someone’s been there. Things have been moved.’ She gulped back some tea, unable to stop. ‘Paul told me the number of a locker at Alexanderplatz station. I couldn’t write it down, I just had to memorise it. He said if anything happened then I should go to it.’
Georgie shifted in the chair opposite. It was hard to assess what this woman was saying; whether she’d been hoodwinked by a man who was leading a double life and trying to paint himself as a mysterious investigative reporter, simply to make himself more appealing. Or whether the so-called story Paul was working on – the one Georgie had merely thought a ruse for his philandering – was actually a reality. A dangerous one.
There was only one way to find out. ‘Margot, do you remember the locker number?’
They agreed to meet at Alexanderplatz station in the next hour. In the meantime, Georgie rang the London office – Henry was out but she left a message. It was important to know for sure when Paul had left England and to ask for her editor’s advice; already she feared being drawn into the pages of a spy novel. There was no time to find Rubin so she took a taxi to the Adlon, hoping to catch Rod and bleed him for advice.
Max was the only member of the press in residence, sipping coffee at the bar. Clearly, she wore her concern on her sleeve.
‘Georgie? What’s up?’
While she was determined to maintain her independence, Margot’s disclosure had already put her on the back foot. More plainly, she felt out of her depth. And she was proud but not downright stupid enough to go alone. If Paul’s flat had been searched, as Margot insisted, it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine the actress was being tailed by Himmler’s men.
Max, fortunately, was in a better mood that when they’d last met. He seemed intrigued, if a little sceptical of what she told him, and drank down the last of his coffee quickly. At least he wasn’t outwardly dismissive.
‘What do you know of this Margot woman?’ he asked as they hurried towards Alexanderplatz. ‘Isn’t she an actress? I’ve seen her face on one or two posters.’
‘I know almost nothing about her,’ Georgie admitted, ‘aside from the fact that they were having an affair. I’d heard them over the phone in the office. But Paul has always been fairly reticent, at least around me. I just put it down to the fact he was cheating on his pregnant wife and felt ashamed to be brazen about it. As for her, she seems genuinely upset. And worried.’
‘That’s as may be,’ Max said, ‘but it will also mean no exit visa for her now. If she’s in Joseph Goebbels’s little stable of movie starlets, the Reich will be keeping a close eye on her. Joey keeps them on a tight leash, more so if she’s been liaising with an English press man.’
Georgie felt doubly sorry for Margot – kept in check by Goebbels’s all-seeing eye and strung along by Paul. Naive or not, no woman deserved that.
Margot was hovering inside the station entrance at a bar, a cup of coffee in hand and looking anything but relaxed. Her body language pulsed with anxiety. Georgie noted Max scanning the area left and right; people were rushing to and fro in the direction of the platforms, but nobody appeared obviously out of place, pretending to read a newspaper with their eyes anywhere but on the print. Or had she conjured a scene from the latest Hitchcock film?
The three greeted each other with false smiles, like long-lost friends, and Georgie relied on Margot to continue the pretence – she was an actress, after all. But her body was like wood, her actions stiff.
‘This is Max,’ Georgie said. ‘He’s a friend – you can trust him.’ And Margot nodded but didn’t waste the effort of trying to smile.
All three took a circuitous route to the luggage lockers, Max at one point hanging back and checking any stragglers in their wake, but he caught up and signalled to go on. Margot recited the code to the left-luggage attendant and received a key, fingers shaking as she pushed it into the lock. Georgie and Max stood back, one eye each on Margot as she reached in and pulled out a single large brown envelope, sliding it into her sizeable shoulder bag. She joined them again. ‘There’s just one package,’ she reported, ‘nothing else. Shall we go to a café and have a look?’
Max scanned the station again. ‘Not advisable.’ His air of innocent intrigue had disappeared, replaced with gravity. ‘Let’s go to my office. It’s private but safe. I’ll go with Margot by tram and you, Georgie, follow up in a taxi, although give us twenty minutes. We’ll change lines a few times. Okay?’
Georgie raised her eyebrows. His head shook minimally, though not enough for Margot to notice. Later, he was saying.
Georgie hovered in a café for her allotted time and sank a cup of strong coffee, much needed by then – she was beginning feel entrenched in that spy novel, and not merely a light case of murder in the style of her favoured Agatha Christie. The Telegraph office was only several blocks from her own, and she was the first to arrive, let in by the elderly office assistant, who only grunted and carried on working at the teletype keyboard. Georgie looked with envy at the state-of-the-art machine, able to send stories instantly across continents, unlike the distinctly less modern Chronicle offices, relying on phone lines, telegrams and the train mail to London. As Max and Margot arrived, flushed from the journey, the assistant was packing up and putting the cover on her machine.
‘Thank you, Inga,’ Max said, ushering her out of the door. Her
backwards glance cast disapproval at not one but two strange women in her domain. ‘I think she’s trustworthy, but you can never tell these days,’ Max whispered to Georgie.
Opening the envelope felt like the sinister unveiling of a booby trap device, Margot’s fingers gingerly reaching in and pulling out several papers, and one or two fuzzy photographs. The papers were variously typed and handwritten, no eagle icon of the Reich at their head, but on notepaper from some kind of hospital or private clinic – the Haas Institute – an address to the south of Berlin. The typed pages were lists of names alongside a numbered code, from one to nine. At first glance, Georgie assumed it might be a nursing home, but the birth dates alongside the names were varied, aged twenty to sixty-plus. The handwritten print was a jumble of notes, with a loose spiral of scrawl circling the page.
‘It’s like the rough workings from inside someone’s head,’ Georgie murmured. She could translate the letters and words, but as to meaning, it was more like double Dutch – a blend of numbers and letters, the words ‘capacity’ and ‘forecast’ picked out. The rest appeared to be technical jargon and beyond Georgie’s everyday German.
‘What on earth does it mean?’ Margot said in a small, disappointed voice.
‘I have no idea,’ Max admitted. He looked at the photographs, hand printed by an amateur – perhaps Paul himself – of two heavy-set men in overcoats leaving a building, their faces too blurred to pinpoint any features.
Georgie sighed. What they had was virtually useless in leading them to the source or the object of Paul’s story. Or his whereabouts.
‘I think the only thing we can do for now is alert the press crowd and get everyone to put out their feelers,’ Max said.
‘I’ll get Henry back in London to ring the British Embassy here,’ Georgie added. ‘And if he doesn’t turn up soon, we’ll need to call the police.’
Margot looked stricken – she’d clearly hoped they would track Paul to a secret bolthole known only to the press, drunk and contrite but unharmed. And maybe that’s where he was, hiding yet again from his responsibilities. But increasingly, it didn’t seem likely.
Georgie did her best to reassure Margot, though she didn’t believe her own empty pledges.
‘We’ll call as soon as we hear anything,’ she said on showing her out; Margot had an audition and needed to prepare. She was a single working woman and, right then, living life as normal was her best route to remaining safe. Without Paul, she had to rely on her work entirely.
The door shut, Max switched on the radio, turning up the volume and moving in towards Georgie, heads close enough she could smell his aftershave.
‘Well?’ she said, eyes wide with intrigue.
‘This is confusing, but equally, it doesn’t look good,’ he replied, fingering the pages. ‘I thought I saw a familiar man arrive at the left-luggage as Margot was searching, doing a bad job of loitering. I can’t be entirely sure, but I think I’ve seen him in the Adlon bar from time to time. Even if it is a coincidence, it’s an uncomfortable one.’
They agreed to meet at La Taverne and alert the press pack, but only to Paul’s disappearance and not the possible reasons behind it. Max placed the typewritten sheets in the small office safe, and Georgie folded and tucked the handwritten pages in a small compartment of her handbag. She planned to tackle them with a dictionary, possibly to ask Rubin for some help in translating. Already, it irked her that she couldn’t make head nor tail of it – another puzzle to unpick.
‘Sorry, but I’ve got some ridiculous ceremony to cover for the office,’ Max said. ‘Cliff’s liver has finally given him a warning sign and he’s in hospital, so I’m covering all the diary events.’
They looked at each other but no words were needed. Boarding the plane towards Berlin all those months ago, how could either of them imagine their baptism of fire would flare so soon?
Back in her own office, Georgie dialled the number for London. ‘What’s going on, Georgie?’ Henry said, his concern evident despite the weakness of the signal. ‘Paul’s wife confirmed he left home five days ago, apparently to give in his notice in London and tie up a few loose ends. But we’ve not seen or heard from him.’ He sighed heavily. ‘He’s always been a bit of a loose cannon, and maybe I shouldn’t have tolerated it, but he always came up with the goods. He had excellent contacts.’
‘Maybe too good,’ Georgie muttered into the receiver.
She told Henry scant details of Paul’s disappearance, though not the discovery. She’d been warned again that the phone lines in all foreign newspaper offices were no longer secure – that tell-tale clicking she’d heard from time to time being the proof. The Reich had ears everywhere, even at the Adlon, it seemed, where Bill Porter cautioned even the public telephone booths were tapped. The press used them for generalised stories, but anything mildly controversial meant going elsewhere, cabling over stories or using a courier mail service if it wasn’t immediate ‘hard’ news.
‘I’ll call the British Embassy here – I know someone in the German office,’ Henry went on. ‘They might be able to root something out before we have to go to the police.’
Georgie was relieved at not having to ask Sam Blundon for a second favour when they spoke. What with Rubin’s request, and now this, she was feeling less like a reporter and more like a detective.
‘Oh, and Georgie?’
‘Yes, Henry.’
‘Do not go playing sleuth on this, all right? Let me handle it from this end.’
Christ, that’s why Henry had been such a good reporter in his day – he could sniff out a story ‘with legs’, as the press were apt to say, even with a sea and continent between them.
‘Understood,’ she said, thankful he couldn’t see the guilt across her face. Everything told Georgie she should leave it alone. The papers she had in her handbag were sodden with suspicion. The question was: could she?
Unable to settle to any work, she walked towards the Unter den Linden and Café Kranzler, which gave off its usual buzz of late-afternoon customers. Despite a good deal of military personnel at the tables, it was still a comfortable place for her to sit and think – the Reich couldn’t put a tap on her thoughts. Yet.
She settled at the table she’d frequented over the past weeks, and where Karl the waiter had brought her coffee and asked on most occasions if she wanted extra cream on the side. She had said, ‘No, thank you, not right now,’ and his features hadn’t flinched. Rod the wise had counselled her to use a contact sparingly, saving their services for when they were needed most.
‘Afternoon, Fraulein,’ Karl said dutifully. ‘What can I get for you?’
Georgie’s face burned, the loud, boorish voices of several Wehrmacht officers suddenly amplified. ‘I’ll have a coffee and a slice of strudel, with some extra cream on the side.’ She smiled courteously, finding it hard to keep her face from ridiculous gesticulation. Georgina Young, what are you playing at?
Karl, though, was the consummate contact. ‘Certainly, Fraulein,’ and he floated away. Her eyes fanned Kranzler’s semi-opulent room, and she was flushed with a memory of Lyons Corner House on London’s Tottenham Court Road, with its flowery-themed lights and exotic indoor plants. She had gone to Lyons after her final, successful interview at the Chronicle, treated herself to the biggest cream cake she could find and speculated then what life as a journalist would bring. It was where the similarity ended: Kranzler was more luxurious than Lyons, and heavily populated by men of possibly the biggest threat to European peace. And here she was, engaging a contact to ferret out potentially perilous information. That’s where life had taken her.
Karl returned several minutes later and set down her coffee, a plate of flaky strudel – which wasn’t necessary for their discourse, but much wanted – and a jug of cream on the side. He tucked the bill underneath the jug, nodded and walked away.
She sipped at the coffee, itching to pluck out the small tab of paper, but forcing herself to gaze casually out of the window at the stream of peo
ple passing by, a ripple of red flags reaching into the distance. Inside, the colour scheme was the grey and green of army and SS, any one of them with grounds to arrest her based on the words written on the underside of the bill. Charge her with conspiracy, deport or imprison her. Or worse. And yet there was no going back, the crime of asking for cream on the side already committed.
The strudel eaten and her coffee drained, Georgie coolly picked up the bill and turned it over. Schiller’s bar 7 p.m. was scribbled in pencil.
She pulled in a deep breath – no choice but to get on with it. She went to leave, dampening the quiver inside as she stood, when a new insult thrust at the inside of her gut. She heard him first, tucked in a corner table. One swift glance confirmed it was Kasper, with several other SS officers, holding court among three women, the type that – if she applied a crude stereotype – might be called uniform chasers: those German women enchanted by the crisp grey and black of the SS and the power it held. It wasn’t so much the women’s dress, or the way they styled their hair, more an eagerness in their faces. A desperation to please, to snare a man with a future in the new Germania.
Face to the floor, Georgie slunk by, careful not to attract any attention, least of all from Kasper. But she needn’t have worried – he was captivated by the company of the women, his deep laughter and the smoke from his large cigar rising above the table. Georgie found herself more relieved than envious; she did not want to be in the sights of any SS officer, ‘lowly’ or not. Especially now.
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