Their ill-treatment had intensified, with carefully organised street beatings, confiscation of property, public abuse of their womenfolk. Despite all that, far too many clung to the country they had lived in for centuries. Heydrich had demanded an answer to the problem in meeting after meeting with his senior staff. How are we going to get rid of this scum floating on the clear waters of our Aryan race? Everyone suspected that Heydrich himself had formulated answers but was seeking ideas that might match his own so that he could present the Führer with an agreed Gestapo solution to the problem.
There were vague reports that a number of two-ton commercial lorries capable of carrying thirty to forty people at a time had been fitted with new sides and canopies to make them airtight. Tubes had been designed to clamp over the exhaust pipes and inject the poisonous carbon monoxide into the interior. There were said to have been successful tests on sheep and pigs, which had died within minutes of being gassed. Those were the rumours, but even in Gestapo headquarters few believed that Heydrich would go that far.
The solution to the Jewish Problem was to strip them of their property and valuables and expel them en masse. That seemed to be the consensus among his colleagues, but Bonner was not so sure. When it came to the Jewish question, nothing was beyond the Obergruppenführer of the Gestapo and the SS. Hitler did not call him a man with an iron heart for nothing. Thinking of Heydrich reminded Bonner that he had received no recent reports from the Salon. It was a project in which the Gestapo boss took a close interest. He pressed the bell to call Hilde.
The humiliation of the British prime minister began the moment his plane landed at Munich airport on the morning of 15 September. He was met by the foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, a man who had openly declared his hostility to Britain and its empire. The limp handshake, the cursory greeting, the lack of any diplomatic nicety told their own story. Chamberlain and his ambassador were driven to the railway station for a three-hour journey to the small town of Berchtesgaden in the Alps. On the journey, the train passed several troop trains full of cheering soldiers – a deliberate reminder of the war that was waiting in the wings of the meeting with the chancellor that day.
The prime minister and a small party of officials were given just thirty minutes at a local hotel before a fleet of cars took them on the short drive up winding roads to the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat.
The Führer was waiting at the top of a steep flight of steps. The greeting was carefully orchestrated. Hitler, in uniform and wearing his peaked army hat, leant down with an outstretched arm to shake the hand of the prime minister, who was forced to look up at him from the bottom of the steps. Chamberlain too was smiling, but he looked old and tired, a compliant figure come to beg for peace from a young warlord.
The cameras flashed, capturing the moment on film and photograph. The results were flown to Berlin, where they were shown in cinema newsreels to crowded audiences that night. The next morning’s papers across Europe all carried the same photograph of a beaming Führer, the swastika armband prominent on left arm, the Iron Cross glinting, looking down on his elderly guest.
“It’s an absolute bloody disaster and, you know something, it’s going to get a whole lot worse.”
Halliday raised his glass and accepted another generous measure of whisky. He looked around the guests seated in the sitting room of the Shirers’ Berlin apartment. Noel Macrae was there with Primrose, Percy Black from the US embassy with his wife Joan. William Shirer was in the kitchen fixing a special dish from Cedar Rapids in Iowa, where he had spent his childhood. Every now and then there was a crash from the kitchen followed by the sound of muffled curses. The dinner had been a long time coming and Theresa Shirer had spent almost an hour pouring drinks, apologising for the delay and darting into the kitchen to help her husband. It was her first dinner party in their new home, and her husband had warned her that their English guests were heavy drinkers.
“Does William want any help?” asked Primrose.
“He’s trying to cook a pork dish with apples that his mother used to make and I am afraid he’s having trouble remembering the recipe. It shouldn’t be long.”
“We can always eat out, if that helps,” said Halliday. He was hungry and never saw the point in eating late.
“No, no, I am sure he won’t be long,” said Theresa, leaving the room.
There was a silence during which a whispered argument in the kitchen became embarrassingly audible. The guests resumed their conversation but in rather louder tones to cover the growing volume of argument in the kitchen.
“I don’t know why you’re all so critical. He’s trying to prevent a war; surely that’s an honourable thing for a politician to do? Anyway, he’s our prime minister – shouldn’t we support him?” Primrose looked at Halliday, framing her question with a frown.
“He’s prostrating himself before a man who is bent on war. Our prime minister is an embarrassment, frankly.”
“That’s a bit steep, Roger,” said Primrose. She liked Halliday because, like most women who met him, she thought his chaotic clothes, his destructive alcoholism and the brilliant mind of an intelligence agent were masks to conceal a wayward child looking for his mother. She also felt protective towards a man forced by moral convention to conceal his sexuality.
She turned to her husband. “What do you think, Noel?”
Before Macrae could reply there was another crash from the kitchen. Shirer emerged, sweaty-faced and wearing a smeared apron. The strong odour of burnt meat followed him into the room. He ripped off his apron, went to the sideboard, poured himself a drink.
“Every night back home my mother would cook strips of pork layered with apples and surrounded by caramelized onions, carrots and corn. A classic Cedar Rapids dish,” he said. “She taught me how to cook it, and damn me if I haven’t forgotten. I am sorry, folks, we’ll have to eat out.”
They were both drunk when they undressed for bed that night. Macrae watched as Primrose struggled out of her clothes, flinging them across the room at a wicker laundry basket before collapsing into bed.
The dinner had been a pointless affair when they had finally found a restaurant with a table for seven. Theresa Shirer kept apologising to no one in particular while trying to explain that her husband should have cooked a deep pan pizza, which would have been easy because she had the pastry bases in the freezer.
No one listened. Shirer had launched into a long conversation with Percy Black about the isolationist movement in America and the New Deal politics of Roosevelt’s second administration. Halliday had fallen into a drunken stupor at the table and left before the first course had arrived. Primrose had talked to Joan Black about the Aztec ruins in Mexico, which they had both visited when students.
Mrs Black had said, “Mexico is little more than a bandit country now. Hard to think how they could have produced such beauty – I mean all those pyramids, temples and stepped terraces.”
Primrose said, “That’s the trouble with genius, it doesn’t get passed down – look at Shakespeare.”
Mrs Black had seemed puzzled by this remark, and Macrae saw that Primrose herself was surprised by what she had said.
“I don’t know much about Shakespeare,” said Mrs Black. “Did he have children?”
Primrose laughed and said, “I’m talking rubbish. He had a boy called Hamnet but I think he died when young. Have we ordered, by the way?”
After Halliday’s departure Macrae had found himself isolated from these conversations. He sat back, letting his mind drift. He had not heard from Koenig since their brief encounter at Nuremberg earlier in the week. Chamberlain had returned to London after three hours of talks with Hitler, to consult the cabinet. The next meeting was scheduled to take place at Bad Godesberg on the Rhine in a week’s time. No one knew what had been discussed or agreed between the leaders, but the peace diplomacy led by Britain and supported by France was gaining momentum. A provocative deployment of the fleet off the German coast was out of the quest
ion.
Somewhere in this tangle of diplomacy and deceit, Colonel Florian Koenig and his co-conspirators were making fresh plans – or perhaps they had decided to abandon the whole risky venture. Either way, he knew Koenig would feel betrayed by the British – Perfidious Albion all over again.
Primrose was lying on the bed wearing only a light dressing gown. Her eyes were closed, but he knew she was not asleep.
“I need to talk to Florian,” he said. “Have you seen him lately?”
Primrose opened her eyes.
“No, why would I?” she said, staring at the ceiling.
“I thought you two had become quite friendly,” said Macrae.
They paused, husband and wife gauging the direction of a conversation that could either lead to another violent exchange or wither into silence. It was late, they had drunk too much as usual and neither wanted to confront a truth evident to both.
“Why would I see him before you do?”
“I don’t know. I’m just saying I need to speak to him. It’s important.”
They left it like that, her infidelity acknowledged but ignored, his the greater deceit. He knew that, for Primrose, Koenig was an adventure, an antidote to the boredom of Berlin, an escape from the tedium of the marriage bed.
He found it extraordinary that his wife should be bored in a city where great issues of war and peace were being decided, where anyone with the faintest interest in human psychology could witness intelligent, ambitious men from decent professional families utterly corrupted by power and drunk on dreams of national redemption from the shame of the past.
Some of the greatest Catholic families of Germany had lost sons to the Nazi Party, young men equipped by school and church with a coat of a moral armour that had been corroded by the ideology of racial nationalism. How could anyone not be interested in seeing this tapestry of evil being woven right in front of them? Yet Primrose clearly yearned to be back home in England, far from the mindless conversational pleasantries of the diplomatic round of drinks and dinners, and far from the swastikas and the jackboots.
How easily we lie to ourselves, Macrae thought; because that wasn’t true, was it? His wife yearned not for England but to be with her lover, the colonel who was trying to plot the downfall of the Third Reich. That was where she wanted to be, in his arms, in his bed, her heart thudding, her sweat cooling on his skin, inhaling the exotic scent of a man destined for martyrdom.
16
Bonner asked the driver to drop him off half a mile from the Salon and then walked fast down late-evening streets. He was angry but he didn’t want to show it when he reached the club. He wanted to control himself, because that was the only way to be in control. Lose your temper and you lose control – a very old police maxim that he had been taught in training school back in the days after the war, when police work was a straightforward job of tracking down anarchists and communists.
There had certainly been enough of them scurrying around like rats after the war. In those days the job was simple. You were given a name and address and told to make an arrest, then follow through with an interrogation, to make sure the criminal went to court with sufficient evidence against him to secure a conviction. When things went wrong in the interrogation – and they did – you opened the manhole cover in the street behind police headquarters and dropped the body into the sewage system. The system was simple, and it worked because everyone did as they were told. But it wasn’t working now.
He pushed past the woman on the Salon’s door, eliciting a stern rebuke. Even Gestapo officers were supposed to wait for a moment before the woman nodded approval.
He saw Sara immediately at the bar. She had her back to him and was talking to Kitty Schmidt. He allowed a woman to take his coat and walked over. Kitty turned and smiled. Sara stared ahead.
“Gruppenführer Bonner, we haven’t seen you for a long time,” said Kitty Schmidt. “What will you have?”
“I need a room,” he said, nodding to the fanlight door. “And send me a bottle of whisky.”
He took Sara by the arm, swinging her around so that she was forced to face him.
“And you’ll join me,” he said. “We have business to discuss.”
“Are you sure?” she said.
He tightened his grip on her arm, squeezing hard.
“Yes,” he hissed. “I am very sure.”
Sara looked at Kitty, who nodded and said, “Room fourteen.”
They went through the fanlight door and past several girls talking to men in the Pink Room. Sara hurried down the corridor, conscious that Bonner was walking immediately behind her, almost literally breathing down her neck. She knew he was angry and she knew why.
Once in the room, Bonner grabbed her by both shoulders and threw her onto the bed. She bounced back immediately and came at him, swinging tightly clenched fists. He grasped an arm, twisted her round and slammed her against the wall. He leant into her neck.
“Where are the tapes, the recordings, the photographs?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He pulled her back and slammed her head into the wall again.
“Yes, you do. The Englishman, he was here. You were with him. In the room. You were talking to him at the bar. I’ve heard he had his hands all over you. You took him here. I want to know what happened.”
“Nothing happened. He wanted to talk about his wife. They all do.”
“Why were the tapes turned off?”
“I don’t know. Probably a technical problem. It happens all the time.”
“You’re lying!”
He spun her round, twisted her dress in his fist and slapped her hard with the back of his hand.
“Get your clothes off.”
Sara wiped blood and snot from her nose.
“Fuck off.”
He pulled her back, ripping the dress again. She tried to knee him in the groin and bite his arm. He slapped her hard twice with the open palm and back of his hand, bringing more blood from her nose and mouth. He stepped back.
“I said, take your clothes off.”
She stood up. There were tears in the dark eyes, and beneath streaks of blood her face was the colour of paper. She was shaking as she undressed. Bonner reminded himself that he had intended to keep calm and not lose his temper. Still, a little slapping would hardly harm the girl. She needed it. She was an arrogant bitch. There was something about her he couldn’t fathom, a look of contempt in her eyes suggesting that she was his superior. He watched her undress until her clothes were on the floor, then pushed her back on the bed.
“I want to know what happened,” he said.
“Fucking bastard,” she said. “What have you done to my brother?”
“Your brother is a piece of shit. What happened with the Englishman?”
“He wouldn’t take the pills.”
“Liar.”
“He watched his drink. He’s a diplomat. They’re trained.”
“You had him here in this room and you just talked about his wife? For Christ’s sake, what have you got between your legs? You think it’s private? It’s not. It’s mine, ours, it belongs to the party and you use it when we tell you to.”
“Is that what I am going to say to Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich? That my cunt is yours, too? I wonder what he’ll think of that!”
She sat up on the bed, laid both hands on her pubic mound and smiled at him through the tears, the snot and the blood on her face. Bonner knew he had lost. He had been a fool. Sara Sternschein might bed and betray important foreigners in these rooms, but that was business. When it came to the party, or more specifically the Gestapo, she was Reinhard Heydrich’s Jewish whore, and his alone.
There was a knock on the door. Bonner looked through the spyhole and opened it. Someone passed him a tray with a bottle of scotch, two glasses and a jug of water. He poured a large measure for both of them. For a moment, he thought she was going to throw it back in his face.
He got a white fluff
y dressing gown from the back of the door and threw it at her. He took out a cigarette case and offered her one. It was forbidden to smoke in the rooms. She got up, put on the dressing gown and used it to wipe blood from her face. She drank the whisky and accepted the cigarette. They were both playing a game, he thought, but she was well ahead of him.
“It is Heydrich who wants the Englishman,” he said quietly. “That’s why it’s important.”
“I know my brother is dead. That’s what’s important.”
He wondered who had told her that. An informant in the police, a client here at the salon? Interesting, because it wasn’t true.
“Your brother is alive,” he said. “He is back in Buchenwald. He tried to escape. He’s a smart boy. He almost got over the wire, but they caught him. He’s going to cooperate with us. You should be pleased.”
In fact, Joseph Sternschein had been badly beaten, put against a wall and shot – but they’d used blanks. It was an old trick. They wanted to break him, turn him and use him as a double.
“You’re lying. I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t care what you believe.”
“I want to see a letter from him.”
“You think I’m a fucking postman? Here, look at this.”
He fumbled in his wallet and produced a small photo of good quality taken with a professional camera. There was Joseph, frail, thin, his ribs showing, a scar down one side of his face, cheeks hollowed out, looking like an old man. He was holding a copy of Der Bild. She could not see the date, but the front cover was dominated by a picture of Hitler at the Nuremberg rally. That had been only last week.
“When was this taken?” she whispered.
Midnight in Berlin Page 24