She knew the reason. Every weekend Koenig came home from Berlin there had been long meetings in the study with military friends and colleagues. She knew most of them, but they came dressed in civilian clothes and barely acknowledged her. Koenig’s mood darkened with every visit. There were times that autumn when he did not come home at weekends at all.
When she called his office the following week, she was told he was away – on manoeuvres or on a staff training course. She suspected these were lies, a cover for something else. He was having an affair, probably with the English bitch. They had hardly made it a secret the last time she came to stay with that strange husband of hers. She had accepted it because there was little she could do about it.
But there was something else going on, something that frightened her. Munich had brought peace to the country and yet Koenig had damned the negotiations as a farce. That was why she wanted family around her at Christmas, a warm and comforting blanket of people to remind her that there was some normality in life. They would have Christmas with as much of the family as they could squeeze into the eight rooms of the hunting lodge.
21
Bonner arrived at the Salon laden with several bulging shopping bags. He was in civilian clothes as usual on such nights. Only Heydrich chose to wear full Gestapo uniform when calling on Kitty Schmidt. He was greeted at the door and escorted to the bar, where a seat had been reserved. He unpacked several boxes of chocolates and miniature cognac bottles – gifts for the girls, he explained.
He placed a wooden box on the bar, ordered a vodka martini and looked around. The tables were full and the bar was thronged two or three deep. Every girl in the house seemed to be on duty that night, but there was no sign of Sara.
There was the usual mix of uniformed military, mostly army, and civilians. Among them he spotted Carl Goerdeler, sitting at a table with other civil servants, Bonner supposed. Goerdeler was a former big city mayor and a noted economist. He had never appeared on any list of regime officials who used the Salon. He was said to be a financial wizard and a member of the party, but not political. Interesting, thought Bonner. He would check on the man tomorrow.
He scanned the room again and saw a familiar face at the back by the window, sitting alone on a table for two – white-haired, shaggy locks tumbling over his collar, dressed like a tramp. Even across a crowded room, Bonner could see the British agent was drunk. He had been seen there before, and Bonner wondered what a man of his tastes was doing in the Salon. He would hardly be there for pleasure.
Several people slapped Bonner heartily on the back, wishing him seasonal greetings. They were mostly from the army but one or two were Abwehr intelligence who seemed to know him. He returned the greetings and watched them shoulder their way through the crowd. They were sitting on Goerdeler’s table, he noted.
Bonner slipped a hand under his jacket to adjust the belt holster. All the back-slapping had shifted his new Walther. He wondered whether he should unpack his gift for Sara and let it stand on the bar, then thought the better of it. Some oaf would knock it over.
And there she was beside him, moving into a seat that had been vacated by a drunken colonel in the artillery at Kitty’s orders. She had a glass of white wine and raised it to him.
“Merry Christmas,” she said.
“And to you.” He pushed over the wooden box.
Sara untied the ribbons, flipped the latch on the box and took out the hourglass. She gave a little gasp as she set it down.
“This is for me?”
“Yes. Turn it upside down.”
Sara turned the glass and watched as the coloured sands began to trickle through the narrow glass neck. On either side, drinkers at the bar craned their heads to watch.
Halliday stood up at his table, peering over the crowd at the bar. He had seen Goerdeler and the Canaris crowd, and that was all he needed to know. The conspirators were still talking to each other. Meeting so openly in a Gestapo brothel was probably a smart move. Good camouflage.
He saw the coloured hourglass on the bar and recognised Bonner from photographs on file. The Gestapo officer seemed to have given one of the house girls an hourglass. She was the dark-haired one he had seen in the Salon before. Very odd, but stranger things had happened in the place. He headed for the door. He had to be at the railway station to meet his new colleague early the next morning.
Sara held the hourglass carefully in her hands as she and Bonner edged through the crowd to the fanlight door. She had wanted to stop the sand clock and start it again so that she could watch it properly, but Bonner had been in a hurry as usual. The Pink Room was crowded and there were few carnations left in the bowl. They walked down the corridor to the staircase at the end and up to the best room in the house.
It was only a week since she had entertained the Russian there. Now she had to do the same for a senior Gestapo officer: Bonner, the man who had ruled her life for two years, the man who had beaten her. Bonner, the man who had given her a Christmas present, and for whom she was now to be a festive gift for the night.
The hourglass was beautiful; she had never seen anything like it. Sara turned it upside down and carefully placed it on the table by the bed. She watched the sand begin its sixty-minute journey and looked around the room. Kitty Schmidt had excelled herself. On a table, there was caviar, champagne on ice and plates of cold lobster. They hadn’t given caviar or lobster to the Russian, she remembered. Poor man. He must have had a terrible hangover the next morning.
She watched the sand as Bonner threw off his clothes. First red, then yellow, then green flowed through the neck – rainbow colours to track the thin thread of time.
Bonner sat down on the bed and looked around with approval. This was going to be a night to remember. He could see Sara was happy to be with him. She had liked her present. She was a professional, as he was. This was what he wanted and she was happy to provide it. Both would make sure that Heydrich never found out. She certainly wouldn’t tell him. He would probably have her killed. In fact, there was no probability about it. He would definitely have her killed. That was Heydrich’s way. That psychotic violin player saw the world as a spider sees its web. She would just be another fly caught in the silky gossamer threads that he wove to trap his victims. That was the insane thing about Heydrich. He regarded a whore like Sara as his personal property, yet he ran a brothel where she was reserved for very important people. Well, he was one of those now, and to hell with Heydrich.
Bonner had been asleep for several hours when Sara woke him. He was lying on his front and felt her hands gently massage his neck and shoulders. He squinted at his watch. It was six in the morning. He turned his head and saw she was naked. He tried to remember the night before. It had been quite a performance. Now she was starting again, the hands moving down his back, stroking, kneading, bringing him slowly to life. His head ached and he felt thirsty, but he wouldn’t tell her to stop, not just yet. This was his Christmas present.
Something cold and hard pressed against his neck. The first in a crowded jumble of thoughts told him she was using an ice pack to wake him. No, it was the cold barrel of a gun. His gun. His new Walther P38. He began to turn, levering himself upright. There was a click and then another. He flung himself around, grabbing for the gun. She was staring at him with a wild look in those blue eyes, pulling the trigger again and again. His new P38 was aimed at his chest. The little bitch was trying to kill him. With an unloaded gun. He had taken the magazine out. Thank God for Heydrich’s attention to detail.
She threw the weapon at him. He instinctively ducked. The gun thudded into the bedhead. Now he was going to kill her. Heydrich should have done it long ago. Jewish traitress, assassin, whore. She thought she could give him the fuck of a lifetime and then turn his own gun on him. She would die slowly. He would do it himself in one of the execution rooms. He would get Hilde to watch. She would learn new ways of making a human die slowly and in agony. The thought warmed him as he clambered from the bed. He didn’t see the hour
glass scything towards him. It slashed into his face and neck. He dimly saw her face twisted in hatred and felt a terrible pain as he slumped back, blood spurting over his body in shiny red arcs.
Sara stood over him, heard his last gargled words, watched as he clutched his neck with one hand while the other flailed at her. She picked up the jagged remnants of the hourglass and rammed it into his neck, twisting hard. More blood spurted out, choking a last scream. She saw his eyes rise into his head and watched the body shake violently in its death throes, then slump back. Blood and coloured sand smeared his face and ran in rivulets down his chest.
She stepped back, looking down at the blood that covered her arms and stomach. She had anticipated that and had remained naked for the final act in the drama she had so carefully plotted. True, she had not counted on an unloaded gun – but everything else had gone as planned. She had worked through the timetable with a precision that would have impressed the man she had just murdered.
Sara showered and, fifteen minutes later, closed and locked the door of the Salon’s honeymoon suite. She made sure the “Do Not Disturb” sign was in place. No one would dare enter that room and interrupt a senior Gestapo officer at play. Not for hours. Not even Kitty.
She walked through the empty main room and let herself out. She knew there would be nobody around. The cleaners did not start until nine. It was still dark, but there was plenty of traffic on the street. Her heart was pounding, yet she felt calm. The amount of blood had been a surprise. There had been so much of it. And the gun. The bastard hadn’t put the magazine in. It hadn’t mattered. She had done what she had to do. He had made a terrible noise with that final choking scream, but the rooms were totally soundproof. All she had to do now was follow the plan. She would catch a tram and go straight the Ostbahnhof. She would take no luggage to the station, only her handbag, with make-up, a comb, a bar of chocolate, money and the British travel permit.
The first train to Duisburg left at seven fifteen. It was an express and would take three hours. She would change for the cross-border train to Rotterdam. Then a bus ride to the Hook of Holland, a bus that stopped everywhere and took hours. That didn’t matter. She would be much safer on that bus than hanging around the ferry terminal waiting to board the night boat to Harwich in England.
She told herself that her travel permit would allow her to leave the country without a problem. They would see she was a Jew from her name, but that would not matter. She was travelling on an official English temporary passport valid until 22 December. Anyway, she reflected, official policy was to expel Jews, not keep them in the country.
Then again, that might not apply to a woman who had just murdered a Gestapo officer. Sara smiled at her grim little joke. When would they find out? He had probably told his wife he was away at a conference. His office would not worry unduly for several hours. It was Christmastime and even Gestapo officers were not expected to keep office hours.
She had worked it all out so carefully. She would be across the border and into Holland by noon. She would still not be safe. She had heard many conversations in the Salon about German agents operating in Holland. She would only feel safe when she boarded the evening ferry from the Hook of Holland. She had deliberately chosen a complicated route to make pursuit much more difficult. No one would think she was going to the Hook of Holland. Ferries from that port crossed the North Sea to Harwich, on the east coast of England. A train to Rotterdam and a ferry across the Channel to Dover would be a much more obvious choice. Her ferry to Harwich would leave at nine thirty in the evening and arrive the next morning at six-thirty. It was a Dutch ship, the SS Batavia. She knew what she would do when the ship cleared the international three-mile limit. She would sit down and cry.
Sara reached the Ostbahnhof at just after seven. There were uniformed police on the station concourse, but no more than usual, she told herself. At the barrier, she handed the inspector her one-way ticket. He punched a hole in it and handed it back without a word. She boarded the train, choosing a compartment that was already almost full. As the train pulled out, she watched Berlin slipping away, the city centre sliding into the suburbs, the suburbs into industrial wasteland. She would never see the city again. She leant back and breathed a long sigh. Duisburg was the next stop, a station that was the hub for all long-distance rail traffic in northern Germany. There would be a forty-five-minute wait for the connecting train to Rotterdam.
If they were looking for her, that is where they would be. Customs officials would examine the luggage of passengers on the cross-border train at Duisburg and there would be passport checks at the border itself. They would ask her why she was leaving the country and where she was going. She had her story carefully prepared. She was a student returning to London, where she lived with her parents. She had been at the world-famous language school in Berlin learning German. Where had she stayed? In a hostel near the Gendarmenmarkt. Why did she want to learn German? Because it was the most cultured language in Europe and she wished to teach that language to students in England. She had worked out the answers to every question they might ask her. She had planned for this day ever since that night with the Russian.
As the train cleared the city and picked up speed in open country, Sara looked around at her fellow passengers. It was early in the morning and most seemed asleep. For some reason, she felt she was being watched, but she told herself this was understandable paranoia. She had just murdered a man; not just anybody but a senior Gestapo officer. With that thought in her head, she began to tremble uncontrollably. She felt sick and hurried to the lavatory. She was violently ill. She threw water in her face and looked in the mirror. A haggard, sleepless face looked back. She was in shock, she told herself. She slapped her face hard on both cheeks. She stopped shaking.
At Duisburg, Sara and other passengers joining the Rotterdam train were directed to a reserved waiting room. Customs officials entered and asked if anyone had anything to declare. It was a cursory visit, but they were followed by several police officers.
Kitty Schmidt arrived at the Salon at ten thirty that morning, slightly later than usual. She had done some Christmas shopping and went straight to her office, put the bags down and began to check the takings of the night before. There was thirty thousand marks in notes of various denominations in the safe, their best night of the festive season. She was counting the money when a woman cleaner appeared in the door and muttered something about the best room in the house. She appeared frightened.
Kitty took the master key and followed the cleaner. On the carpet below the door to the room was a fresh red stain that appeared to have oozed out of the room itself. Kitty bent and touched the stain with her finger. It was not wine, as she had thought; it was blood, wet, red blood. Kitty told the cleaner to tidy another room and opened the door of the honeymoon suite.
She stepped inside and closed the door quickly behind her. There was a sickly smell in the room. Bonner was lying with bedsheets covering his lower body and congealed blood and sand across much of his torso. His face was frozen in a grotesque parody of a medieval gargoyle, mouth open and blood-smeared teeth in a rictus grin. The sight and smell of the dead man made her retch.
Kitty Schmidt knew at once what had happened and what she had to do. The Jewish girl had murdered a senior Gestapo officer. And she, Kitty Schmidt, mistress of the most infamous brothel in Europe, had to leave the country. Now. She went straight back to the office, scooped up the cash and told the cleaner to go home. She knew her life and that of anyone who worked at the Salon would be very short once the Gestapo found out what had happened.
The railway crossing at the Dutch border with Germany was only a few hundred yards from the main road between the two countries. Convoys of vehicles, lorries, buses and horse-drawn carts were waiting at the frontier in lines that stretched back along the road as far as Sara could see.
The train had stopped to allow the frontier police to board and examine all passports. Sara could hear them moving down the carriage, f
lipping open documents, asking questions. She concentrated on the chaos of traffic at the road frontier.
A woman beside her followed her gaze and said, “The Dutch government closed the frontier to all road traffic yesterday.”
“Why?”
“Too many Jews wanting to get out. Many leave their transport and try walking through the woods at night. The Germans shoot a lot of them, apparently.”
Sara turned away to find a passport-control officer looking down at her. His uniform was new and he was young, hardly more than a schoolboy. He had a pistol in a holster on his belt. Sara tried not to look at it. Hanging from a lanyard around his neck was a stamp. In one hand he held a clipboard file.
She handed him the travel permit. He opened it carefully, spread it on his clipboard and examined it. He said nothing, but she watched his eyes moving back and forth across the document. She thought of time trickling through the hourglass in coloured sand. She wondered if they had found him yet.
“English?” the official said.
“Yes. Going home.”
It was only later, when the train was well on its way to Rotterdam, that Sara realised that the parents of that youth must have arranged his job with the frontier police, to avoid conscription. It was a reserved occupation and they were probably a decent family living close to the border who knew what strings to pull to keep their son out of the army.
He had placed that precious piece of paper on his clipboard and stamped it vigorously, then returned it to her with a smile. She had been lucky, just as she had been with that beautiful hourglass Bonner had given her. She began shaking again and clutched her arms around herself to control the trembling. It was almost one o’clock and she had eaten only an apple all day. She would get a sandwich at Rotterdam and some coffee. She was free, almost safe, and soon she would be a long way from Berlin.
Midnight in Berlin Page 31