The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  “You’ve read it?”

  “Of course.” The actions that had followed the annexation of Austria in March, the orgy of SS confiscation and violence directed primarily at the Jews, had become a constant theme of Oster’s visits. He had underscored parts of Colonel Hans Piekenbrock’s confidential summary so Canaris couldn’t miss them. SS Officers Kaltenbrunner, Globocnik, and Eichmann were particularly odious and brutal in their behavior. The regular army made no attempt to stop or mitigate their conduct, and in many ways abetted it. The SS and Gestapo proceeded with impunity.

  “A vile bunch.”

  “I have said all I’m going to say on the matter.” Canaris said it publicly, glass in hand, at the Naval Ball held a few days after the annexation, into a microphone: All of us are still dazzled by the experience of the great German consolidation. It exalts every heart!

  The audience answered in a single unanimous shout: Heil Hitler!

  From his first days with Military Intelligence, Oster had made it clear that he would say what was on his mind and if Canaris didn’t like it, he was welcome to dismiss or arrest him, whatever he pleased. Occasionally, he warned Oster about the tone of his remarks and the ease with which they could be misconstrued as treasonous, especially his acerbic asides on the regime’s leading personalities. It did little good. Several weeks before, he’d taken Oster with him to attend a reception for a visiting delegation of Japanese military officers in the new Reichschancellery, on the Wilhelm-strasse. It was Oster’s first visit inside the still-unfinished building, and he seemed on his best behavior, as reserved and stiffly formal as the other members of the officer corps present.

  On the way out, they walked beside the building’s architect, Albert Speer, who didn’t lose a moment in underlining how close he was to the Führer and how the Reichschancellery was just a small foretaste of their plans for rebuilding Berlin on a truly heroic scale. Oster stopped to gaze at Arno Breker’s towering bronze nudes, The Party and The Army. He pointed at their genitals. “Here we have a perfect recapitulation of your architecture, Herr Speer. Oversized but flaccid.” Oster strolled ahead and left Canaris standing with the flustered architect.

  Oster rose from the couch and prowled the room. “Sooner or later, our Austrian corporal will push too far,” Oster said. “There are no restraints. We’ll be plunged into a war we cannot win. It’s only a matter of time. Mark my words.”

  Outside, Gresser was at his desk. Figures moved past in the corridor: secretaries, orderlies, officers. Was it only a matter of time before someone overheard and repeated it to those whose business it was to nose out such sentiments? “Come,” said Canaris. “Let’s go for a stroll on the Embankment. My doctor advises I need more fresh air and exercise.” They walked to the main entrance of the War Ministry, past the busts of Moltke and Blücher, Prussia’s two great vanquishers of the French, out along the Tirpitz Embankment, beside the canal. Across the hall, stuck in a corner, was a small bust of Baron von der Goltz, Prussia’s original spymaster. He had formed what was among Europe’s first professional intelligence services at the behest of Frederick the Great, the king who’d abolished torture as an instrument of state.

  Unburdened of frigid, insistent darkness, Berlin was any city of the north awash in the high tide of spring. Oster lit a cigarette by the Embankment wall. He cupped his hands to shield the match from the breeze. Two nursemaids halted their perambulators several yards behind, leaned over to adjust the blankets covering the infants within, chatting as they did.

  “Do you know the story of the cat and the rat?” Oster said.

  “I suspect that I’ve heard every cat and rat story,” Canaris said. “Don’t tell me you have a new one.”

  “An old Swabian tale, but perhaps it will be new to you. In it, the rat succeeds in convincing the cat that he isn’t a cat at all but a rat.”

  “Stupid cat.” Canaris casually surveyed the parade of pedestrians on the Embankment. The nursemaids trailed behind.

  “Clever rat. Eloquent and impassioned, he gradually gets the cat acting like a rat. The cat starts to scurry around on its belly, lives in sewers, doesn’t clean itself, feasts on garbage, becomes one of the pack. Most wonderful of all, the cat soon realizes he doesn’t miss being a cat one bit. He feels quite free now that the burdens of independence, cleanliness, and self-respect have been lifted. He is filled with gratitude toward the rat.”

  Canaris resisted the impulse to turn and see if the nursemaids were still following. “But how do the rats feel about having a cat in their midst?”

  “Oh, after a while the cat so much enjoys the role of rat that the hair falls off his tail. His round puss narrows into a rodent’s malevolent snout. Legs shrink into rat’s stubs. He is at home with the rats and they with him. Other cats see how happy he is, how prosperous and carefree, and they join the rats.”

  “This sounds very unlike a Swabian folk tale.”

  “Truth is, an Englishman, a writer, told it to me.”

  “Since when do you associate with Englishmen or writers?”

  “A mutual acquaintance prevailed on me to see him. He needed help facilitating the departure of a Jewish doctor whose exit was complicated by her former Communist ties.”

  “You keep strange company.”

  “These are strange times. Let me finish my story. One day, the clever rat gathers together his brother rats, and the rats who once were cats, and the cats in the process of becoming rats, and tells them they can fly.”

  “They believe him?”

  “Not at first. But he reminds the rats how he’s transformed the cats and conjured away their enemy. He points out to the cats how free he’s made them. Given such success, why shouldn’t he be able to make them fly? There are still doubters, but they stay quiet and are swept along with the rest as the clever rat leads them to the highest cliff he can find. ‘Forward, my brothers!’ he cries. ‘Over the edge! Fly!’”

  “Finis, I suppose?”

  “The storyteller posited two possible endings. First, the cats and rats follow their leader over the cliff to destruction. Second, they hesitate at the edge, doubtful at last of their leader, and at that moment a conspiracy of cats still in possession of their souls deposes the clever rat.”

  “There’s a third possibility, Hans, for your storyteller to consider.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Perhaps he can fly.” Canaris had watched in person as a quarter of a million people filled the Heldenplatz, in Vienna, trampling each other to get closer to the gleaming Mercedes, a chariot from heaven, the god within once more defying the timid counsel of generals and diplomats, jumping from the cliff and landing on his feet.

  “He’s been lucky, that’s all. The next jump will very likely be from a deadly height.” Oster tossed his cigarette into the canal.

  They turned back toward the Ministry. The nursemaids went by, still in conversation. The two officers touched their caps and bid the women good morning. Each carriage contained a fat, pink-cheeked infant, small hands clutching at the air. The women nodded and pushed the carriages along the Embankment.

  “I’ve no more time to waste.” Canaris walked at a brisk pace. Oster stayed beside him but said nothing. Canaris welcomed the silence. He knew Oster would return to the discussion he was having with other officers, about what to do if the order was given to move against the Czechs. General Ludwig Beck, Chief of the General Staff, was involved. A growing conversation. That ugly, unsoldierly word: Mutiny.

  “The Czechs will fight,” Oster said. They stopped beneath the portico of the Ministry. “The British and French will stand by them. They’ve already made that clear. When the people know the days of easy conquests are over and face a war more punishing and destructive than the last, their mood will change. The cats’ hour will have come. It will be our final chance.”

  “The desire to take wishes for facts is the deadliest of all temptations for an intelligence officer,” Canaris said. He knew as well as Oster the feelers that had b
een put out to the French and British. Gördeler had carried the message to the Foreign Office in London: The only way for war to be avoided is to reject the demands being made on the Czechs. Prepare to resist. There are elements in and out of the German armed forces that are ready to seize the opportunity to put an end to the regime. A response somewhere between bewilderment and disdain. A palpable awe of the new Germany and its leader. If there were any wish to challenge him, the French and British were doing a skillful job of disguising it.

  “Sooner or later,” Oster said, “either we Germans will have the courage to turn wishes into facts or be damned by our own cowardice.”

  The nursemaids doubled back and came past the portico. The day before, during the morning ride in the Tiergarten, General Heydrich stopped his horse. Canaris stopped, too, thinking perhaps Heydrich wished to dismount and give the horses a rest. Instead, Heydrich leaned out of his saddle and said in a quiet, solemn voice, “Wilhelm, there are rumors that, if true, could implicate certain members of the officer corps in treasonous conversations. We must work together to search out and destroy such a conspiracy, if it exists. We will show no mercy to such scum, even though they wear a German uniform.” He patted Canaris’s shoulder. “We, the loyal servants of the Reich!”

  Oster lingered with another cigarette beneath the portico. Alone, Canaris mounted the stairs to his office. At the second landing, he caught a glimpse through the two-storied Palladian window of the nursemaids as they crossed the street. If surveillance had been ordered, it would probably be less clumsy and obvious. Or perhaps not. As fast as the Abwehr has grown, Himmler’s SS empire had grown far faster. At last count, Pieckenbrock’s Section I of Military Intelligence estimated that Reichsführer-SS Himmler and his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SS Security Service, or SD, employed 40,000 Gestapo men, 60,000 agents and 100,000 official informers. Along with the main concentration camps at Dachau, Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, Buchenwald, Flossenburg and Ravensbrück, they had camps under construction at Mauthausen, in newly annexed Austria.

  The night he and Erika watched the newsreel of the Führer’s entry into Vienna, they dined in a restaurant right off Potsdamer Platz. Berlin wallowed in its new prosperity. Construction scaffolds were everywhere, new automobiles, crowded stores, high-toned cafés. The restaurant was filled with handsome young officers in uniform, women in well-cut clothes, plump businessmen with UFA starlets on their arms.

  There seemed no hint of the other Berlin, the underworld of wiretaps, informers, arrests, interrogations, and internment on suspicion of disloyalty. The masses of obedient and loyal citizens had nothing to fear. But along with the carrot of Germany’s renewed strength and power was the insinuation of the stick, a self-correcting mechanism for the few who might prove too overt in their dissent, an underlying dread threaded into the neon and newly poured concrete and traffic-choked streets, medieval torture chambers housed next to movie theaters, the soundtracks loud enough to obliterate any noise that might miraculously escape the impervious prison walls.

  At first Canaris had been incredulous at the reports that Colonel Piekenbrock sent him on the self-contained network of concentration camps the SS had set up. The Stormtroopers’ assault on Reds, socialists, and radicals, the first violent outburst after the National Socialists had taken power, had been transmogrified into a permanent terror. The reports of floggings, beatings, clubbings, prisoners drowned in latrines, whipped with barbed wire, strung up on racks, their genitals crushed, seemed a preposterous rehash of the prurient novels on the Inquisitions, with their cheap, lurid paper covers, that salesmen and students bought for a few pfennigs at railway news-stands. But the consistency of the reports gradually erased any doubts about their authenticity. Theodor Eicke, once an inmate of a psychiatric clinic in which he’d been consigned to a straightjacket, was now in charge of more than 10,000 well-trained and armed SS Death’s Heads Units responsible for policing the camps. In Columbia House, the SS center on Potsdamer Platz, one of the interrogators kept a drawer full of the teeth he knocked out of detainees’ mouths.

  The nursemaids sat on a bench. They rocked their carriages back and forth. Perhaps they were intended to be noticed. A casual but deliberate warning: Admiral, no one is above suspicion. Gresser jumped to attention when Canaris re-entered his office, shoulders back, chin up, eyes ahead, the pose of a loyal and obedient subordinate.

  What were the chances, Canaris wondered, that he answered to other masters as well?

  Canaris put on the fresh shirt and undergarments that Gresser had laid out. He attended the conference on the situation in Spain, a topic that usually absorbed him, especially since the progress there was so notable, Franco’s Falangists growing stronger each day. He doodled on a pad during the presentation by the Luftwaffe officer who reported on the performance of various aircraft. He found it impossible to focus his attention on what was being said, a condition he had endured for a prolonged period over a decade ago, in the time of the Weimar Republic, when his career seemed stalled and he began an affair with a woman he’d first met as a naval cadet.

  He was certain his wife had no idea. Yet after weeks of reveling in the physical intensity of his illicit relationship, he fell in a funk that left him unable to concentrate and finally brought him to the point where he felt a vacuum had formed inside his head, a void that made thinking itself seem absurd. He went through the motions of work until thoughts of suicide drove him to see a doctor who referred him to a respected neuropathologist and psychotherapist, Doctor Manfred Stern, a half Jew married to the daughter of a minor Bavarian nobleman.

  Careful to make sure his visit took place at the doctor’s private office in the early morning hours, Canaris arrived by taxi, in civilian clothes. Doctor Stern was solicitous. He encouraged Canaris not only to describe his mental anguish but also to speak freely about his life. Canaris did so hesitantly at first, then surprised himself by going on for longer than he intended, though he left out any mention of his affair. Doctor Stern asked no questions until Canaris fell silent. “What about your wife?” he said.

  “What about her?”

  “You’ve never mentioned her.”

  “I’m here to get medicine for my nerves, not to discuss my marriage.”

  “Do you know that line from Hamlet: ‘We know what we are, but not what we may be’? Sometimes, the opposite can happen. A man loses a true sense of who he is yet feels he’s changing into something he loathes and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. It’s characteristic of over-supple minds and can induce a kind of psychic paralysis.” The doctor recommended valerian drops as a mild sedative. “This may help relieve the symptoms. If you wish to treat the cause, I’d be glad to take you on as a patient.”

  Canaris never went back. He ended the affair and threw himself into his work. The sensation of numbing distraction came back only very sporadically, as it had this afternoon. Returning to his desk, he tackled the backlog of reports and letters stacked on his writing stand where he’d left off before his nap. The clock on the mantle chimed four. Gresser reappeared to announce the arrival of the new British naval attaché. The British had their faults. Tardiness wasn’t among them. Germany’s friends in Spain and Italy could learn a lesson from them.

  The attaché had none of the silly hauteur of his predecessor. Formal but pleasant, he surveyed the office with the studied sweep of a deck officer on watch and pointed at the model of the Dresden on the mantle. “Von Spee gave us a quite a scare. I lost two close friends in 1914, at Coronel.”

  “I was the Dresden’s First Lieutenant,” Canaris said. “We were all proud to serve with Admiral von Spee.” Days so different from now, the endless Pacific sky; at night the spectacle of the Southern Cross, the pyrotechnics of shooting stars. The war was still exciting; victory still a possibility. The Dresden put into San Miguel on Michaelmas, a propitious coincidence, everyone agreed. Canaris spent several nights with the same whore, a half-Indian, half-German girl, a face so lovely he’d never seen its
equal. Soon after, the Dresden rendezvoused with von Spee’s squadron and formed a small flotilla that posed a potent threat to British shipping.

  The Royal Navy wasn’t long in coming, steaming ahead with all the cocksure arrogance for which it was famous. Von Spee waited outside the port of Coronel, in Chile, and let them run into his guns. Monmouth and Good Hope each took direct hits, erupting into the twilight with the force of volcanoes, and sank with all 1,600 sailors aboard. Von Spee directed there be no cheering. An unnecessary order. The men knew that the Royal Navy would do everything in its power to undo such an atrocious defeat, the worst in more than a century, and that the charred and broken corpses floating in the water might soon be their own.

  “The Invincible and Inflexible put an end to the Admiral’s success,” the attaché said.

  “Yes, but the Dresden got away.”

  “Quite right. It was the Glasgow that finally caught up with you and sent the Dresden to the bottom, was it not?”

  “We were hit by Glasgow, but we scuttled it ourselves and fled ashore. The crew was interned, but I was too young to waste away in such a place, with nothing more exciting to look forward to than a daily siesta. I escaped across the Andes, reached Buenos Aires, and sailed with a Chilean passport through Plymouth to Rotterdam.”

  “The one that got away!”

  “That time at least.”

  They’d watched from a nearby hill as the Dresden reared up out of the water, heaved its stern in the air and keeled over to expose the gaping, smoking, fatal wound in its starboard side. The sturdy, reliable, hardworking Dresden slipped rapidly into the green sea. An oil slick spread over the surface of the water like a blood stain. It felt as though they witnessed the death of an old and trusted mate.

  Three of the crew died from cholera while interned on the bleak island of Quiriquina. Another went mad. One slit his wrists. He was surrounded by death, certain it would come for him if he stayed, so he fled, across the Andes, death a pace or two behind. The commendation that accompanied his Iron Cross saluted his “heroic determination to rejoin the struggle for the Fatherland and fight unto the death.” But it was fear—the fear of death—that drove him to escape, not heroism.