But even Heydrich had to be careful with Sara, in case whispers got back to Heinrich Himmler. Sara smiled at the irony; the man who had unleashed a wave of terror to force Jews to leave their country, the man who was said to be working on more sinister means to solve “the Jewish Problem”, could do no more than grope her under the table. She was Jewish and supposedly forbidden even to one of the most powerful men in the Reich. When Heydrich was drunk, such rules did not apply, of course. He would stagger back to one of the rooms with her, while his bodyguards waited at the bar. An hour or so later he would leave hurriedly, the peaked cap pulled well down over his face.
The greatest irony of all was that Reinhard Heydrich was said to be Jewish too. At least, that is what Bonner had told her one night when drunk. It had been late, well past midnight, and they were sitting at a corner table. Bonner was trying to please her. He wanted to be friends with his star attraction at the Salon. He wanted her to understand that he was doing his job, just as she was doing hers. In a slurred speech that kept repeating itself, he told her how much he admired and appreciated her work, and he knew she felt the same way about him.
“I’m going to tell you a secret,” he had said.
“I don’t want your secrets,” she replied. She didn’t want to talk to him; she didn’t want him near her. She didn’t even want to have to look at him. But Bonner was both her captor and saviour. He kept her alive, and that meant survival for Joseph.
He had bent towards her, pulling her head so as to whisper in her ear. His breath reeked of an evening drinking schnapps.
“Heydrich is Jewish.”
He had looked at her triumphantly through glazed eyes.
“I don’t think so,” she had said.
“Exactly. He can’t be, can he? It wouldn’t make sense, would it? But think about it; maybe it does make sense. Maybe it explains a lot. There are important people who say his grandfather married a Jewish woman, name of Süss. That would be back in the late 1870s. And that would make him a Jew. And you know what? The bodyguards have heard his wife, during their rows, screaming at him ‘You filthy Jew!’ And then he goes mad and threatens to kill her!”
Sara said nothing. It was always best to allow Bonner to ramble on to the end of these occasional monologues. He had no one to talk to, because he trusted no one and no one trusted him. He usually complained about his wife, the long hours of the job and the fact that no one trusted anyone else in the closed world of the Gestapo.
“Strange thing is, the party had an investigation and cleared him of racial impurity. Himmler made sure of that. I don’t think Himmler gave a damn who his grandfather married. Heydrich was too useful, too clever and, above all, too ruthless to be thrown out of the party. He knew too much.”
Bonner was talking to himself more than to her. He had drifted off into an alcoholic dreamland where he could denounce his boss as a Jew and have him drummed out of the party. Then Heydrich would disappear in a “Nacht und Nebel” operation, one of those dark foggy nights when murder squads tracked down enemies of the Reich. And he, Joachim Bonner, would become SS Obergruppenführer, chief of the most powerful and feared secret police force in the world.
Normally, Sara quickly forgot whatever Bonner was complaining about. But that time she tucked the information away. It might just be useful. Heydrich seemed to be able to get away with anything. His treatment of women was known to all senior members of the party and security services. It was true that his bodyguards occasionally gossiped about the rows they had witnessed between Heydrich and his wife, with flying Meissen crockery and insults of the most personal nature flung back and forth.
It was after these rows that he would cruise the bars of Berlin at night with his guards. He would never wear uniform, preferring a long black leather coat over a suit with a fashionable trilby pulled well down over his face. He liked to go into the poorer suburbs seeking out girls behind the bars in working men’s clubs or in cheap restaurants. Whenever he saw a girl he liked, she would be drawn aside by his guards and offered a chauffeur-driven car to one of several apartments Heydrich used. If the offer was refused, Heydrich would move on to find another woman. But the bodyguards always went back later in full SS uniform and the woman who had been foolish enough to say no to the Obergruppenführer would be dragged out and beaten up in a nearby back street. If the guards went too far, and they usually did, the woman would be raped and thrown into the river. Everyone knew about it. No one dared make a complaint.
If Heydrich was Jewish, it might explain what she was doing in the Salon, Sara thought. Maybe deep down in whatever dark soul was possessed by that tormented psychopath, there was a flicker of guilt or shame. Maybe his self-loathing made it easier for him to use a Jewish woman to trap his enemies.
Sara stood up. Heydrich had gone to the bar. He was talking to Kitty Schmidt and beckoned his group to follow him. This would be one of the inspection nights when he would go to the control room on the top floor and view recent film of the activities in the rooms. Usually after such sessions the cameras and recording equipment would be switched off and Heydrich and friends would go to what was euphemistically called the Group Room. The girls from the Pink Room would all assemble there and their other guests would simply be told that they would be busy for an hour or so.
Heydrich and his party had gone. The Salon was filling up with customers. She walked through the fanlight door to the Pink Room. In an hour or so, when the film show had finished upstairs, there would be no girls in this room. For now, they were accepting a few carnations. Sara sat down and lit a cigarette. She had to get out of this place. She had to escape. What could they do to her brother in that camp that they were not already doing? What would he say if he saw the life she was leading in Berlin? It was all she ever thought about.
7
Noel Macrae began to squeeze the trigger gently, holding the stag in the telescopic sights, moving the cross-hairs from the magnificent antlers to the heart of the beast just above the shoulder. The animal was about seven hundred and fifty yards away, hobbling slowly through thick heather.
Lying beside him, Koenig peered through a short telescope and whispered, “No. He’s too far. We’ll walk up on him.”
The stag swung its head towards them and began to move. Macrae tightened his finger on the trigger. It was a long shot, at the outside range of the gun, but there was no wind and the target was moving slowly. He was a large beast, but for a clean kill the shot would have to be through the heart. He had done this many times before at the same range. In the trenches you could kill a man at eight hundred yards with good sights – if your target gave you time. They rarely did, of course. Their heads bobbed up and down like those moving targets at a fairground, and then you had to chance a quick shot without time to aim properly.
For a snap shot, the maximum range was two hundred and fifty yards, and then there was only a split second to aim and fire. More often than not, you missed or wounded the target. The disadvantage was that you gave away a carefully camouflaged position and had to start all over again elsewhere on the line. The advantage was that a traumatised soldier, with his shoulder or arm blown away by a highvelocity .303 bullet, would have to be taken back through lines of trenches to a field station and then to a rear hospital. This required first manpower, then the attention of nurses, then transfusions, bandages and finally further transport to a hospital well away from the war zone. All the time the target would be screaming in pain and begging people around him not to let him die. In purely military terms, it was a better result than a clean shot, which would see the enemy swiftly dumped into a common grave.
Macrae pulled the trigger, felt the recoil kick into his shoulder and saw the stag sway for a second, then crumple to the ground.
“Nice shot!” said Koenig admiringly, getting to his feet again. He helped Macrae up and said, “Can I see the gun?”
Macrae handed him the rifle. Koenig examined it.
“This is an old Lee–Enfield,” he said. “My b
rother brought one home on leave once. Picked it up after they had taken one of your trenches. This should be in a museum.”
“It’s the sights that count, not the gun,” said Macrae, holding out his hand for the gun.
Koenig swung the rifle up to his shoulder, assumed firing position and squinted through the sights. He gave Macrae an odd look.
“This is a sniper’s rifle,” he said, handing the gun back.
“Which is why I am standing here today.”
“And why a lot of other men are not?”
“It was a long time ago,” said Macrae. “Let’s look at the stag. A sixteen-pointer, I think.”
They walked over the hill, down across a small stream and up the far side of the valley, to where the stag’s antlers protruded from the heather. Its eyes were open and its flanks still heaving. Blood was pumping from a small hole in its side. The bullet had missed the heart. Koenig knelt down, pulled a pistol from a holster on his belt and fired one shot through the head. The animal jerked convulsively and lay still.
That night, they dined at what Koenig called his hunting lodge in the low hills of the Mecklenburg lake district, about 250 miles north of Berlin. Primrose said the three-storey mansion, designed in Gothic style with turrets and battlements, looked more like a Scottish ancestral home than a German hunting lodge. Macrae had taken the wheel of a pool car from the embassy, a Daimler with diplomatic plates displayed front and rear. Primrose had sat beside him on the four-hour drive from Berlin. It was a crisp day in late March and she seemed pleased to be leaving the city for a weekend with strangers in the deep countryside. The autobahn speeded them past small towns that were footprints in time for anyone who knew the rich history of north-west Germany. From Roman times, the rolling flatlands had been a battleground between invaders from the frozen north and the powers that held the warm, rich southern states.
At a little town called Oranienburg, Macrae pointed out a distant group of buildings surrounded by watch towers that would leave their own mark on history. Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he said, recently built for political detainees arrested in Berlin.
Primrose turned her head and looked briefly at the white-painted towers and the wire-topped walls. She looked back at the smooth ribbon of tarmac unspooling before them between filmic images of churches, farms, herds of cattle and well-timbered houses all planted on the dark earth of the north German plain.
“Say what you like about the Nazis, but they build wonderful roads,” she said. She was far from Berlin, where she had friends and things to do. But she liked the idea of this weekend and laid a hand on her husband’s arm.
Good tank country, thought Macrae as he glanced across the plain to a ridge of distant hills covered in green gorse and purple heather. They had arrived in Berlin in the middle of a bitter winter and now spring was bringing colour to the countryside. Soon the gorse would flower and turn the hills a buttery yellow. That’s where the infantry would be dug in, along those hills, he thought, while the tanks raced across the plain. Battle would one day come to this quiet corner of the country as an invading army closed in on Berlin. They would come, whoever and whenever. He knew that.
For the last few miles they had driven on a private road through a dark pine forest. Now the trees parted and the Humber crunched over carefully swept gravel to stop before a large wooden front door.
Koenig’s wife received them politely but without enthusiasm and took them upstairs and down a long corridor to their room. A servant followed with the luggage, including Macrae’s leather rifle case. Koenig had told him to bring it, although there seemed no reason, since the hunting season had long ended. Koenig’s wife introduced herself as Gertrude and, facially at least, reminded Macrae of an actress in an early silent film. She was pale and looked undernourished, with a thin body that lacked shape and suggested a recent serious illness. Like her husband, she spoke perfect English. He wondered where she had learnt it.
“Come down when you’re ready and we’ll have drinks,” she said. “Florian will be back soon.”
Primrose looked around the room. It was much more modern and pleasing to the eye than the exterior of the house had suggested. There was a proper bathroom, with a shower and bidet. The sheets had been turned down on a big four-poster bed. Carafes of water, glass tumblers and hot-water bottles lay on side tables. She put a hand on the radiator and found it warm. She threw open the window and took a deep breath.
The country air was different, less smoky and sweeter than in Berlin. She wondered about their pale, disapproving hostess. She could hardly imagine such a woman as the wife of the sociable Colonel Florian Koenig. He was charming and undeniably handsome, with that close-cropped greying hair making him look older than his years, and that smiling face, faintly pockmarked from a childhood attack of chicken pox, she imagined. There were no greater secrets than those held in a marriage, as one of the Berlin wives had remarked the other day. Perhaps the spectral figure of Mrs Koenig turned into a vampire at night and danced in the moonlight wearing a scarlet robe. Primrose sighed, knowing that she would be seeing a lot of Gertrude Koenig that weekend. They had been invited so that the men could talk freely, far from the prying eyes and ears in Berlin.
“I’m going to have a bath,” she said.
A few minutes later, there was a shout from downstairs and a thunder of feet on the stairs and then a loud knocking on the door. Macrae opened it and Koenig stood smiling in the doorway, dressed in a brown checked hunting jacket, corduroy trousers and leather boots.
“Sorry I wasn’t here to welcome you. How was the drive?”
“Fine,” said Macrae.
“Where’s Primrose?”
“In the bath.”
“I’ll bet she didn’t want to come. I’ll bet she said she was going to be in for a boring weekend in the country.”
“Not at all,” said Macrae, forced to deny what had certainly been true when he first mentioned the visit to Primrose. Now she seemed happy to be there.
“Come down when you are ready, and please tell your wife we have our amusements in the country.”
They drank sparkling wine before dinner and sat down at an elaborately laid table to a meal of venison soup and roast pheasant as the main course. The birds had been kept in the ice house since the end of the shooting season eight weeks earlier. A servant appeared at regular intervals to serve wine.
Koenig talked of his family history, of growing up in a house into which his father, grandfather and great grandfather had been born. The money came from farming, he said, and whenever one generation broke away from the soil to make money in commerce or industry, the next generation always lost it.
“Families are like empires,” he said, “their fortunes rise and fall, but in our case we have always had three thousand acres here in the lake district of Germany to fall back on. And in a hundred and fifty years we have not sold an acre. We are Prussians, you see. We love the land and the army. Bismarck was our god and the army was our life, but we always kept one son back to run the land.”
Gertrude said suddenly, “Do our English guests really want to hear about your family’s love of Bismarck and the army?”
“Quite right, dear,” said Koenig. He began talking of the ties that had once bound Germany to England, the shared bloodlines of their royal families, the parallel rise of great writers such as Goethe and Dickens, and a common passion for sports, especially, among the upper classes, hunting and shooting.
“We don’t hunt now the season is over, but there is an old stag on the far side of the lake in a valley. He’s caught himself in barbed wire and has a nasty gash, which has become infected. We will go after him tomorrow,” he said, and turned to Primrose. “And tomorrow night, Mrs Macrae, to make sure you will not be bored so far from Berlin, some guests are coming to join us for a little dance.”
“A dance? Where?” she said.
“Here. There is a small ballroom at the back.”
“And who will come?” asked Macrae.
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“I have asked some neighbours. Just a few of us.”
Primrose clapped her hands. “How exciting. Isn’t that exciting, Mrs Koenig?”
Gertrude Koenig gave a wan smile by way of reply.
“Usually we ask local musicians to play, but they are so old-fashioned, they do nothing but the waltz, wouldn’t you agree, darling?” said Koenig.
His wife looked at Primrose and Macrae in turn, as if reminding herself who these strangers were at her table.
“I like the waltz,” she said. “It reminds me of when I was young.”
“And what dance music do you like, Mrs Macrae?” Koenig asked Primrose.
“Primrose, please,” she said. “Oh, jazz, swing, something with a bit of life in it.”
“Now, that is my kind of music,” said Koenig.
The two of them began to talk about music for the dance. Primrose named her favourite American bands, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Fletcher Henderson. Koenig knew them all and had a collection of their records and what he called a squeaky-creaky gramophone. Primrose laughed. She loved the term “squeaky-creaky”. She and Koenig began to plan the order of the numbers they wished to play.
Macrae once again felt he was eavesdropping on a private conversation. He tried to talk to Gertrude about the gardens around the house and the estate beyond, but she had nothing to say on either subject and restricted herself to monosyllabic answers and the offer of more wine.
“I am sorry,” said Koenig. “We are being very rude. Gertrude dear, shall we have coffee next door?”
The next morning, Macrae and Koenig followed a gillie up into a line of hills to the north of the estate where the wounded stag had last been seen. With great pride, Koenig had shown his guest his Mauser rifle, a sporting version of the new gun that had only recently been issued to the army, he said. He loaded the magazine and snapped the bolt forward to chamber the first round, as if ready for an ambush.
Midnight in Berlin Page 10