The feeling persisted that someone was following her. She got up and walked the length of the carriage. Seats were two abreast on either side of the corridor. She recognised no one. People glanced at her and turned back to their newspapers or the window. She told herself not to be silly.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon when the train reached Rotterdam. The passengers flooded onto the platform, only to be shepherded into a long hall with queues leading up to two desks manned by Dutch frontier police. Here passports were stamped after lengthy enquiries about the final destination. Her temporary passport carried no Jewish identification, but the name was enough. Where had she been born, what was her occupation, where was she going, why had she left?
The questions went on for almost an hour. Several officers examined her English documentation in turn, each muttering something to the other as the document was handed over. She could see they were frightened. They have closed their borders to fleeing Jews because they do not want to provoke Germany, she thought. Hitler wants to expel an entire race of his own people and no one wants to take them, for fear of harbouring opposition to the mighty Third Reich. And now the Dutch are helping the Germans shoot anyone trying to cross the closed frontier at night.
It was dark when they returned her travel document and let her go. She caught the bus to the Hook of Holland with only minutes to spare. She still had not eaten. They had given her nothing more than a glass of water in that little back room in the passport office where all those frightened men tried to decide whether to put a German Jewess with English papers back on the train across the border to Germany.
She had a meal at last at a harbourside café. The SS Batavia loomed over the quayside, its black-painted bow, white superstructure and single funnel illuminated by floodlights. The hull was rusty, paint flaked from the deck housing and the portholes were smeared with encrusted salt. It was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen.
Sara forked a dish of pasta and tomato sauce into her mouth, refusing to take her eyes off this wondrous vessel. It was eight o’clock and they would board in an hour. She ordered a bottle of Heineken beer and drank thirstily.
The sailors told her the crossing was a good one for a night in midwinter, but to Sara it seemed that the ship and its passengers were unlikely to survive to reach the English coast. The Batavia heaved and groaned, sliding down one huge wave before wearily clambering up the next. Every now and then, the ship rolled sideways, the twin masts dipping perilously close to the waves. Sara sat in the upper lounge, wrapped in a blanket, miserably waiting for seasickness to drive her yet again to the lavatory.
Even then, feeling as close to death as a perfectly healthy human being can do, she knew she was being watched. Someone was following her. She had seen the dark blue hat with the feather of a game bird on the train from Berlin, hadn’t she? And the woman with the crocodile-skin handbag, had she been on the bus from Rotterdam? Then there was the man with polished shoes and an umbrella – had he been on the Rotterdam train, or had he got on at the Ostbahnhof? She had no evidence and had seen nothing to support her paranoia beyond her intuition. But she just knew.
The Batavia docked at six the next morning in Harwich. A salty rain slanted in from the sea, driven by a wind that whipped spume from the wave tops. The dockside cranes, wharves and terminal sheds were shrouded in a thick grey mist that defied daylight.
Everywhere she looked she saw the same dark grey, only a shade lighter than black. Even the faces of the porters, the dockers and the passport officials looked grey. God must have created a special hue of grey in his celestial paintbox for this island nation, she thought. She looked back at the ship that had carried her to freedom. It was no longer the glamorous vessel she had seen the night before. The Batavia looked like an old dog that had come in from the rain and was about to shake itself dry.
She bought a copy of The Times at the station. “Tuesday, December 20th 1938, price 2d,” it said on the front. She was going to read every word, from the advertisements on the front page to the sports news at the back. She was going to learn everything she could about her new homeland. England was going to be her refuge, her harbour, her haven. She said a silent prayer to thank her father for his foresight in making his children learn the language of Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens. That is how he described it. No other nation on earth ever had such cultural heroes, he said, not even the Greeks. She would find a job and start again.
On the train to Liverpool Street Station in London, she sipped a cup of weak milky tea and repeated her destination to herself: Liverpool Street Station, Liverpool Street Station, Liverpool Street Station. The wheels on the track picked up the refrain and whispered it back to her. She was safe, she was free, she was going to Liverpool Street Station in London. She began to read The Times. There was a full page of personal advertisements on the front. A widow, through great misfortune, was forced to ask for a loan of £300. She offered references as to her good character. The Hon. Mrs F. Gore wished to make it clear that the photograph of herself in the window of a shop in Bond Street had been used without permission.
She turned inside to find that the classified advertisements continued over two further pages. Turning page after page of dense text, she came to Imperial and Foreign News on page 13. Sara half expected to see a report from Berlin of a grisly nightclub murder. Instead, a correspondent reported in a single column that Field Marshal Göring was holding talks with wealthier members of the Jewish community in Germany to speed Jewish emigration. The story said that the government hoped to complete its anti-Jewish policy by persuading Western nations to take the remaining six hundred thousand Jews in Germany over the next two years.
Over the page, Sara read that there was no sign of any change in the severe cold that had brought widespread snow to eastern and central England. The temperature at Kew Gardens in London had fallen to 26 degrees Fahrenheit. Frozen points meant delays to many rail services, especially on east-coast routes to Liverpool Street.
She began to feel better. Now at last she could tell herself she was free. She had escaped. She wondered about Kitty and the other girls in the Salon, then pushed the thought away. Finally, she allowed herself to confront the guilt that had followed her every step of the way from the Salon to that rust-bucket port in England. Her brother Joseph. What would they do to him in vengeance? She knew he would have urged her to escape; she could almost hear him pleading with her to flee, to escape any way she could. She had told herself there was nothing more they could do to him, even if he was alive.
She took comfort in the thought that he had been killed long ago, that Bonner had merely been lying, as Macrae had said. She hoped that was true, although the voice of intuition told her it was not so. Her guilt was still there. Maybe that was why she had felt followed and watched. Maybe it was her conscience that had dogged her steps all the way from Berlin.
Liverpool Street Station looked rather like the cargo port she had left two hours earlier. The same fortress-grey colour everywhere. The same grey faces, only here they were hurrying to buses, taxis, and down into the tube station. It was very cold and it was snowing. The pavements outside were awash with slush. She suddenly felt famished. What little she had eaten in the last twenty-four hours had vanished over the rail of the Batavia.
Across the road, she saw a welcoming splash of colour in the murk. The word “Café” was spelt out in large letters illuminated in yellow lights. A tropical palm tree formed the letter “C”. Inside, in a thick fug of smoke, she saw people eating, drinking tea and smoking. She found a seat in the corner. Yes, she would have a proper English breakfast – bacon, eggs, sausage, tomato and fried bread.
She looked up at the counter to signal a waitress. A middle-aged man in a white raincoat smiled at her. He was carrying two cups of tea on a tray. He walked over and sat down at her table without saying a word. The bulbous veined nose and the locks of white greasy hair that fell over his collar were vaguely familiar.
Before she could s
ay anything, he said, “Welcome to England. I have some friends who would like to talk to you.”
22
Sara was exhausted and hardly able to move when they picked her up from the café and drove her away. She had developed a hacking cough on the boat that made her chest ache. She felt filthy, unwashed, and wanted nothing more than a hot bath, some clean pyjamas and to be allowed to sleep for days. Later, they said, later. First, we want to talk to you. They took her to a large house somewhere near Big Ben. She knew that, because she could hear the booming bongs of the hourly chimes very clearly. She was taken to an airy room at the top of the house, with a basin, a narrow metal frame bed and a view over the trees of a garden square. A matronly middle-aged woman ran her a hot bath, then gave her some clean underwear and a mug of tea while the men waited in the car outside. They drove her to an anonymous building in Westminster and led her to a small office, where she remained until they took her to the hospital.
The man and the woman were kind, polite, but very insistent. They wanted to know every detail of her life and especially her time at the Salon. When she begged and pleaded for information about her brother, they said that would come later. They wanted to know about Reinhard Heydrich, Joachim Bonner and the Salon’s other customers, as they politely called them. She was careful not to mention Macrae, although they never asked whether any of the Salon’s guests were English. They seemed obsessed with Heydrich, his personal habits, what he asked her to do in the rooms, how he ran the brothel and what happened to the films and the tapes.
The interrogators showed no emotion as they probed every detail of her life. She gave them a full account of her time growing up in Hamburg and how her brother had been drawn into the resistance. Their only interest in Joseph was how he had been used to blackmail her into working at the Salon. When questions arose about the sexual practices she had been required to perform, the man left the room and the woman wrote down the details. Sara noticed her hand shook slightly as she did so.
When she casually mentioned the Russian special guest at the Salon, they became particularly interested. They took details of his appearance and later asked her to look at a series of grainy, badly focused photographs. They showed a succession of Russian military men, bulky figures in ill-fitting uniforms with peaked caps, all facing the camera in rows. She quickly picked him out, and they seemed happy. She had asked them who he was but was told not to worry about it.
It was not until late on the first day that she told them she had murdered Bonner. That surprised them. They looked at each other in shock. She liked that. It gave her back a semblance of the control that she had lost when they took her away from the café. They asked endless questions about the murder and could not understand how she had used an hourglass to kill him.
It was on the second day of questioning that Sara heard someone else in the room answering for her. The voice was clear and the answers absolutely accurate. She looked around but there was no one there. She felt as if she was looking into a goldfish bowl and seeing herself swimming inside. She turned to her interrogators and asked who else had been in the room. They told her gently that the voice had been her own.
She began to cry and shake, and did not stop until a nurse in the hospital gave her an injection. Her nightmares collided with each other, each one replacing the last, until they merged into a kaleidoscope of fearful images: Joseph spread-eagled against the barbed wire of a camp fence, his head garlanded with a crown of thorns; Bonner smiling at her, then vomiting sand from his mouth; Joseph and Bonner together; and then Heydrich, thin lips twisted into a smile, the whip in his hand, beckoning to her.
They told her later that she had screamed in her sleep. She had slept for thirty-six hours.
They took her from the hospital to the house by the river and there she discovered what had been denied her all her life – the kindness of strangers. The same woman who had first looked after her turned out to be the mother of two teenage children. Her husband was a government official. Christmas was only a few days away and the house was decorated with coloured paper chains and balls of fluffy cotton wool stuck to every window. She ate with the family and quickly got to know the two children, a boy and girl of thirteen and fourteen.
Their mother took Sara shopping for clothes and personal items at a large department store in Sloane Square on her first Saturday morning. That afternoon, she was taken to see some of the sights of London: Trafalgar Square, Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace. It was Christmas Eve and the tour ended with lunch at a tearoom called Lyons Corner House. Sara wrote the name down, just as she recorded everything she saw and did, in a diary. It wasn’t a real diary, just a notebook in which she used a page a day to describe her life in London. She was given books and magazines to read and treats like bars of chocolate. The kindness of these people felt like a warm bed on a cold night.
There were eight for drinks but only seven for dinner at the Macraes’ house on Christmas Eve. Halliday had arrived first, apologising for the fact that he could not stay for dinner but knowing perfectly well that his invitation had been couched in such a way as to make it clear he was not expected do so. He didn’t mind. He was tired. He had arrived back from London that morning and wanted nothing more than the comfort of his own apartment, a decent coal fire and a bottle of whisky. The brim of his hat was thick with snow and the white raincoat looked soaked through. Macrae took him to the drawing room, deliberately not asking about the sudden trip to London.
David and Amanda Buckland arrived next with a babble of Christmas greetings and remarks about the terrible weather and the snow and the lack of taxis and how they missed Christmas at home. Macrae guided them upstairs, where Halliday was standing in front of the fire with a balloon of brandy in his hand.
No sooner had he given the Bucklands flutes of champagne than the doorbell rang again. Primrose shouted something from the kitchen. Macrae went down to open the door to William and Theresa Shirer.
They were all standing around the fire when Primrose appeared, wearing a white apron and carrying plates of olives and crackers spread generously with pâté. She took off her apron and greeted everyone with little kisses on the cheek.
“Sorry, dinner is going to be late – what have you all been talking about?” she said.
“The weather,” said Buckland.
“They say it is going to snow for another week,” said his wife.
“It is worse in Vienna,” said Theresa. “Twelve inches at the airport.”
Primrose took a glass of champagne and laughed.
“Well, there’s a surprise. It’s snowing at Christmas in Berlin.” She turned to Shirer. “William, you know everything; tell us what’s really happening; not the boring old stuff in the papers. Rumour, intrigue dark secrets – something to make us draw closer to the fire.”
Shirer sipped his champagne and looked at Halliday, who looked back and smiled. He would know, thought Shirer.
“I hear, and this is only a rumour but my sources are confident of the information, that a senior Gestapo officer has been found murdered in the Salon,” he said.
There was a pause as everyone looked at the American.
“What is the Salon?” asked Primrose.
“A Venus trap,” said Halliday, “run by the Nazis for the pleasure of their High Command and unwary foreigners.”
“I thought a Venus trap was a nasty flower that caught insects?” said Primrose, her eyebrows arching.
“A perfect description of the establishment,” said Halliday. “The Salon is a brothel masquerading as a high-class bar and restaurant. And you say there has been a murder there?”
Halliday had turned to Shirer. Yes, he definitely knows, thought the American. It would be strange if he didn’t.
“Apparently. A few days ago. The place is closed.”
“What’s happened to the girls there?” Macrae said. “I mean, was one of them involved?”
He had recovered himself, but only just. Halliday saw Primrose glance at her h
usband with a slight frown. He had decided not to tell Macrae, but it was going to be very difficult.
“I am told the girls vanished, as you might expect,” he said. “It was a Gestapo brothel and they would not have looked kindly on the murder of one of their own there.”
“You know the whole story, then?” asked Shirer.
“I have heard what you have, and probably from the same source. But it seems to be true.”
“It hardly matters. I can’t touch it. I’d never get it past the censor,” said Shirer.
“Who was he, do we know?” asked Amanda Buckland.
“Very senior. One of Reinhard Heydrich’s top men,” said Halliday.
Shirer looked at him admiringly. He knew the whole story and probably had the name of the victim. That was what you paid spooks for.
“You haven’t got his name, have you?” asked Shirer.
“He is right at the top. Or was.”
“And?” said Shirer.
“And it’s Christmas. I think I can allow myself another glass of whisky,” said Halliday.
“So what will they do, the Gestapo, I mean?” asked Macrae.
“They won’t do anything,” said Halliday. “Goebbels is involved and he is going to hush the whole thing up. They are not even going to announce the death. It is a huge embarrassment. But Goebbels loves it because he can get one up on Heydrich. They hate each other.”
Primrose came over to Halliday and put her arm through his.
“You are a very clever man, Mr Halliday, and I don’t think you have anywhere half as entertaining to go tonight. Won’t you stay for dinner – please?”
Midnight in Berlin Page 32