The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  “Tom is an authentic American hero,” Dulles said at that first meeting. “If anyone can end the long reign of Democratic misrule, it’s he. Vir horae. The man of the hour!” He lifted his glass in a toast. Dewey held up his glass as well. A toast to himself. A full smile exposed the space between his front teeth and made his young face seem almost adolescent. His eyes glowed. With what? Ambition? Scotch? Amid the crowded, stuffy ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel, he remained cool and self-assured, off by himself, pinnacled on some dim and distant peak.

  Donovan’s secretary was in front of his desk. He hadn’t heard her return. She placed a letter on his desk. It was postmarked London. “A Mr. Anderson is requesting a meeting with you. He claims you know him.” She left without another word, her pique unspoken but palpable.

  He recognized the name immediately, though Anderson thought he wouldn’t: “Perhaps you don’t remember me, but . . .” It was either a typical example of British self-deprecation or more likely the reflexive cover of a professional intelligence officer, in which capacity he was serving when Donovan first met him, near the end of the war. The two weeks of instruction had come as a much-welcomed respite from the trenches. Though it was the early autumn of 1918 and the war’s end was less than two months away, the Allies seemed a long way from decisive victory, with the Germans, sensing their backs were to the wall, still fighting like demons. The American officers were told they’d been selected for special training in “advanced field tactics.”

  When they arrived at the chateau where they were quartered, it was revealed they’d been chosen for schooling by the intelligence service of the British Army. “The British are the best in the world at such things,” said the divisional commander, Douglas MacArthur, who made a brief appearance. “Consider yourselves honored.”

  Major Ian Anderson was in charge. He instructed them not only in debriefing German prisoners, extracting valuable bits of truth from the deliberate lies and confused misreporting, but also in searching out the disgruntled prisoners who, with proper encouragement, would tell everything they knew and might even inform on their fellow prisoners and provide added information. “The whole genius of any proper intelligence operation,” he said, “is in spinning a web of relationships that gives you entry to the minds and souls of your opponents.” He made a point of eating each night with Donovan and bringing along a bottle of port, which his American companion never touched.

  On their last evening together, Anderson was blunt. “The Hindenburg Line is guarded on its flanks by the Michael, Wotan, Hermann and Kriemhilde lines, all of them baptized with good Wagnerian names and properly symbolic of the bloodbath that will occur when we storm them.” Anderson was sure the Allies would eventually triumph but less sure of what would follow. “Once upon a time, Donovan, I was a history professor by trade, and there’s no greater barrier to ordinary human happiness than exposure to too much history. That’s why you Americans are so optimistic. Europe has so much history crammed into so small a space, and you have so little in so large.”

  Anderson finished the bottle of port that last evening. He recounted his experience at the Somme two years before, when he’d been shot and gassed. “It was done like an assembly line,” he said. “Row after row cut to pieces. Two hundred battalions, 100,000 men thrown against the German position. We weren’t so much soldiers as part of a new manufacturing process, industrialized murder. 20,000 killed and 40,000 wounded that first day, ground up with machine guns and high explosives, hung up on barbed wire, smothered with gas.”

  “Perhaps we’ve made war too terrible to fight.”

  “History says otherwise.” Anderson slurred his words. “We’ve turned science to the service of mass murder. We’ve yet to see what final place it will lead us.”

  In his letter, Anderson rambled on for several paragraphs about his present travels in Europe as a freelance journalist. Again, Donovan thought he was either being typically British, expressing the national passion for commenting on the manners and customs of the world, or reinforcing his false credentials. At last Anderson got to the point, or what he pretended was the point: “I would be grateful for the opportunity to interview you for an article I’m writing on the exploits of the American Expeditionary Force in the Great War.”

  There’d always been something odd about Anderson, not merely eccentric, but an air of the mystical and exotic. Perhaps he’d been raised in India or some other part of the empire where he’d been touched by the beliefs of the East. It was known to happen among Brits far from home. Whatever Anderson’s reason for coming, Donovan looked forward to seeing him again. They had the bond of having served together in the war, a tie that neither distance nor time could erase. He scribbled a note instructing his secretary to schedule a meeting the next month, when he returned from one of his periodic visits with the firm’s banking and industrial clients in Chicago and Detroit, a solid corps of orthodox Republicans more eager to discuss politics than business, and how best to drive “that man”—some were so filled with loathing for Franklin Roosevelt they carefully avoided using his name—from the White House before he involved the country in another war; or used such a crisis to do the unthinkable, an act without precedent in the history of the Republic, and seek a third term.

  3

  Doctor I. is among the minority excluded from participation in the new Germany. A woman of delicate beauty, an accomplished medical specialist, former resident of a prestigious research institution as well as wife of a physician who is a decorated war veteran, Doctor I. is a Jew. Though living close to the bustle and excitement of Berlin, she rarely pays a visit to town. Instead, she spends most of her days in a villa, in the bosky suburb of Wannsee, where she and her husband reside. Even in private, she hesitates to criticize the actions of the National Socialist regime. “Germany is entitled to whatever form of government it wishes,” she says. Her only desire is to leave, which, she explains, has been temporarily complicated by her former political associations with the now-banned Communist Party. Strolling in her garden, amid the chill of an autumn-laden evening mist, she pulls her sweater close around her thin frame. “Ideally,” she says, “if things had turned out differently, I couldn’t imagine leaving Berlin. But all I wish today is to go to a city such as New York and resume my research undisturbed.” Doctor I. shivers slightly and continues her walk, into the night, into the fog.

  —IAN ANDERSON, Travels in the New Germany

  ABWEHR HEADQUARTERS, BERLIN

  FACED WITH THE drudgery of reports and requisitions, Canaris grew drowsy. Lately, he’d found it easier to sleep in the day. The night before, Erika awoke and saw him sitting in the chair, staring at her. She sputtered a reproach. Willi, come to bed. It’s already so late. He lay down beside her for what seemed an interminable time before he felt himself drifting off. He hoped he wouldn’t have one of his nightmares and disturb her with his fitful muttering and crying.

  He told Gresser to hold his calls. He pulled the curtains shut, the new ones issued in case of air raids, and lay on the couch. The breeze he’d felt during his walk on the Embankment pushed the curtains and momentarily held them apart. A shaft of light fell across his desk and touched the gold cigarette lighter Erika gave him for their first anniversary. Engraved beneath the date of their wedding was Wie geht’s? A private joke. How’s it going? That first night of their honeymoon, almost twenty years ago, in the old inn on the Baltic, they barely slept, talking and making love till dawn, and didn’t leave their room until lunch the next day. The old waiter winked at them, said with a knowing grin, Wie geht’s? They all laughed, even Erika, her face red with embarrassment.

  The lighter glistened in the light, until the curtain fluttered back in place. The room was dark again. In the quiet after their very first lovemaking, Erika whispered, “Will, we are each other’s destiny. It’s written in the stars.” He refrained from saying what he thought. The stars have no power over us. Distant suns, useful for navigation. That’s all. The rest is romantic claptrap
. Superstition. The curtains parted once again and a beam struck the lighter as before, making it shine. Like a star. The previous March, on the day of the national celebration of the annexation of Austria, at the reception in the Chancellery, the room exploded in cheers when the Führer entered. He surveyed the crowd coldly and moved deliberately toward the corner where Canaris stood. He extended his hand. “Admiral,” he said, “I have learned the greatest truth the gods can teach. My destiny is out of human hands. It is written in the stars!”

  How dim and distant that constellation had once appeared, and how suddenly it flared across the heavens. Several months before Hindenburg, war hero turned dottering octogenarian, made Hitler chancellor, the commander in chief of the navy gathered his aides and reported on the meeting that the leadership of the armed forces had with President Hindenburg. “The President assured us that he would never make that rabble-rousing outlander a cabinet minister, never mind chancellor,” the commander said. “And let me tell you, gentlemen, the thudding of hands on that conference table left no doubt of where the military stands.”

  On January 30, 1933, the morning of the day Hindenburg did what he said he would never do and asked Hitler to form a coalition government, Canaris surreptitiously disembarked from his post aboard the battleship Schlesien, which was carrying out gunnery exercises in Kiel Bay, and traveled in mufti to rendezvous at the Hotel Adlon, in Berlin, with a friend in the naval ministry who was highly sympathetic to Hitler’s ambitions. “The oldtimers are hopeless,” the friend scoffed when Canaris repeated what the commander said. “They’re still waiting for the Kaiser to return. The rest of us are more than willing to give Hitler a chance. God knows, he can’t be worse than what we’ve had.” He took a cube of sugar and placed it in the middle of the table. He banged it with his spoon. “Hitler is the anvil on which the Reds will be pounded into powder.” He scooped up the pieces with the spoon and dropped them in his coffee. “And as long as he respects and serves the wishes of the armed forces, we should have no problems.” He stirred his coffee and sipped. “Just right,” he said.

  In the flyleaf of the Bible his parents had given him the morning he left for the naval academy, Canaris had scribbled a note to himself. What men wish to believe, no matter how absurd, they will allow nothing to stand in the way of their belief. It was a student’s declaration of independence, made in the heat of having read Zarathustra, a sneer at absurdities enshrined at the heart of all formal religions. Over time, he’d lost his taste for Nietzsche and come to value the worth of Christianity as a bulwark against anarchy and communism. Erika was a sincere believer. After their marriage, he occasionally accompanied her to church. She sang the hymns with great skill and feeling. Once at the Easter service that took place after Erika’s first miscarriage, during the choral celebration, her belief in the myth of a crucified and resurrected god carried her away. Her beaming, raptured face was streaked with tears. “Heal me, My Savior,” she whispered, “heal me.”

  Erika never shared his growing faith that the National Socialists represented the best hope for restoring Germany’s military strength and national greatness. She had a special disdain for the rowdy street fighting spearheaded by the SA and the loose talk among the radicals about forcing a “showdown” with the Christian churches. But that night, five years before, when Hitler was sworn in as chancellor, as they stood together in the Pariser Platz and watched the immense parade of torch-bearing Brown Shirts on their way to hail Germany’s new leader, her face had the same look as in church, an overpowering joy and hopefulness. For the first time, he too knew how it was possible to be so elated, so filled with hope, tears became unstoppable.

  For weeks following, magazines and rotogravures were filled with photographs of the procession. Göbbels, the new Reich Minister of Propaganda, even restaged the event so it could be properly lit for filming. But neither photographs nor newsreels nor reenactments could touch the emotions in those streets, the spontaneous singing, a three-dimensional formation of light flowing like an incandescent river, the decade-and-a-half nightmare of humiliation being washed away, shock of defeat, harsh peace, reparations, coups and uprisings, devastating inflation, the decadent republic, a rage for novelties and self-indulgence followed by the cold bath of the Depression, idle men and hollow-eyed children lined up for soup, paralyzed, ineffectual politicians mouthing endless platitudes, arrogant seditious Reds promising revolution, blood running in the streets—over, at last! Heal us, our Savior, heal us.

  On a wet, late-February afternoon, his car stopped by a large crowd, Canaris watched through his windshield as throngs of wind-whipped Social Democrats left an anti-Hitler rally in the Lustgarten. A solitary policeman halted them to let the traffic pass. Canaris glimpsed them in his rear-view mirror as he pulled away. Sodden and dispirited, beaten by more than weather, beaten by history, they slouched into the winter dusk. Good riddance, he thought, to the mob that had deserted Germany and its Kaiser in their hour of greatest need, to the rabble that made a mockery of military discipline and overthrew centuries of tradition, to the democratic dreamers who cooked up the Weimar Republic and tried to win the respect of the Great Powers by playing the role of model pupil, thus ensuring their contempt.

  Erika came home one afternoon shaken and pale. She and a friend had been lunching at a restaurant in the Alexanderplatz when the Brown Shirts had pulled a workingman off a tram, handcuffed him, and kicked him to death in full view of everyone. “We watched through the window. I pleaded with the maître’d to call the police. ‘Madame,’ he said, ‘the Brown Shirts are the police.’” The incident in the Alexanderplatz was no aberration. The Brown Shirts broke into homes, flats, cafés, pulled people out of schools, theaters, factories, pushed, punched, whipped them, dragged them off to impromptu detention centers throughout the city. At the Naval Club, Canaris joined several other officers for a drink. Among them was a rigid, old Prussian who complained about the public disorder and the flouting of legal regulations by the supporters of the new government. “Well, I suppose you can’t clean out a sewer without causing a stink,” Canaris said. The table of officers laughed and even the Prussian nodded in agreement.

  Canaris accepted an invitation from his friend in the naval ministry to accompany him to the ceremony scheduled for the Garrison Church in Potsdam the next day. Among the last to squeeze their way in, they stood in the back, by the door that led to the choir loft. President Hindenburg and Chancellor Hitler entered together. Bedecked in full military regalia, the old Field Marshal walked with the stiff, jerky gait of a marionette. Hitler seemed visibly uncomfortable in striped pants and formal coat. They processed up the aisle, beneath the battle flags dating back to Frederick the Great’s Silesian campaign, the groom of the old Germany and the bride of the new. They bowed before the altarpiece, with its martial and triumphant Christ. The audience rose in unison, unprompted, to sing the national anthem. Hitler spoke of national unity. There were no gutter theatrics. When the ceremony was almost over, the commandant left to join the naval guard of honor outside the Church. He winked at Canaris and banged his right fist into his left palm, like a hammer on an anvil. “Mark my words,” he mouthed.

  In the days that followed, the commandant’s prediction was not only fulfilled but exceeded. The National Socialists became both hammer and anvil. A spontaneous adventure in rampant revenge and score-settling was quickly transformed into an efficient apparatus of state power. The burning of the Reichstag, an alleged act of Communist arson, resulted in the passage of the Enabling Act. The Chancellor was granted extra-legal powers. Two days after the ceremony in the Garrison Church, the members of the Reichstag convened in the Kroll Opera House, the wet, charred odor of their former home hanging in the air, and in effect voted themselves out of existence. On Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, not far from the Reichschancellery, Hermann Göring took over the premises of the School of Applied Arts and installed the offices of the Secret State Police, the Gestapo. In Bavaria, Heinrich Himmler was made police chief. An un
used munitions factory at Dachau, on the outskirts of Munich, opened as a temporary detention center and then became a permanent concentration camp under the supervision of Himmler’s SS, a prototype for the other camps that were being opened. No sooner had the Reds been squelched than Hitler turned on the SA, his own Brown Shirts, cracking down on the wild men who threatened to take over the army, attack the church, and pillage the wealthy. Pretending to have only recently been made aware of SA leader Ernst Röhm’s flagrant homosexuality, Hitler used it as a pretext to have Röhm summarily executed and his circle of SA comrades purged.

  The reports of the successful moves against the SA gave special attention to Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s deputy. Erika cut out a glowing profile of him from a newspaper and left it on Canaris’s desk. The face in the picture was the same smooth, creaseless one he remembered from the training cruiser Berlin, the sharp-featured cadet with the half-hooded, almost Asiatic eyes and slender hands, who made few friends and spent most of his time practicing his fencing. Canaris rarely spoke with the cadets. But once or twice, while standing on the bridge, he had noticed Cadet Heydrich staring at him with that same watchful, haughty gaze he trained on his fencing opponents as he donned his mask and prepared to humiliate them, as he invariably did.

  It wasn’t until they had finished a three-month training cruise and were back on land that he got to know Heydrich better. Cadet Heydrich showed up on a Sunday morning. Canaris was in his robe and slippers. Erika was getting ready to go to church. He was taken aback by this uninvited visit at his home by so junior a subordinate. Heydrich spoke some inane pleasantries, then said, “I’m told your wife is an accomplished musician.” Canaris’s surprise gave way to indignation. When had a cadet ever gone so far as to make an inquiry about an officer’s wife? He was about to give this upstart a suitable tongue-lashing when he heard Erika behind him. She was dressed for church. “Wilhelm,” she said, “don’t be so rude. Please, invite our young guest in!”