‘If I didn’t, I’d be imprisoned – or even shot.’
‘That may be true, Ernst. But you don’t accept it just because of that. Now you actually believe in it.’
‘I believe in the Führer. He may not always be right, but he knows the end justifies the means – and I also believe that.’
‘That's despicable,’ Ingrid said.
Ernst simply shrugged. This argument could lead them nowhere. Each time they met it was the same, always ending in an argument, and already he yearned to be back at Kummersdorf, keeping his eye on John Wilson. The American fascinated him – even frightened him a little. He was sixty-six years old, yet looked fifteen years younger, and his eyes, which were still bright with intelligence, were also as cold as ice. Ernst thought him slightly inhuman, a man divorced from normal emotions, but one whose genius, allied to obsession, was producing remarkable results in the hangars of Kummersdorf. In fact, the dream of a saucer-shaped aircraft was coming closer each day...
‘What are you thinking?’ Ingrid asked him.
‘Nothing,’ he replied, unable to discuss the American or Projekt Saucer.
‘You’re certainly not thinking of me or the children – that much I can tell.’
‘Please, Ingrid, stop this.’
‘Why? I’m enjoying it! I can tell by the dreamy look in your eyes that we're not in your thoughts.’
‘You’re trying to pick a fight.’
‘It keeps me awake, darling. I need something to keep me awake while you sit there in front of me, hardly looking at me, probably yearning to be with your virtuous comrades and the whores you all play with.’
‘Ingrid!’
‘I know, Ernst! I know everything! Do you think I'm a fool? Did you really think I didn’t know that when you were supposed to be sleeping in the barracks, you were getting drunk with your SS friends and probably picking up the whores in the Motzstrasse? Do you think I’m dumb, Ernst?’
‘That isn’t true at all!’ he lied, shocked and angry that she had guessed what he was up to.
‘Of course it’s true, Ernst!’ Her green eyes were bright with rage. That’s why you’re away from home so often. That’s why you stay out half the night and come home exhausted. Those whores are in your clothes. They’re in the pores of your skin. You can’t wash the smell of them away, so don’t try anymore. I don’t want your damned denials, Ernst. I just want the truth.’
Why didn’t he tell her? Get this marriage over and done with... Because SS men didn’t get divorced and have successful careers.
‘Do we have to discuss this now, Ingrid? Can’t it wait for a better time?’
‘What better time? There is no better time. I wanted to get this off my chest, which is why I asked you to meet me here.’
‘All right. So you’ve got it off your chest. Can we now change the subject?’
‘No. That’s not all I wanted to say. I also wanted to tell you that your work appals me, your promiscuity humiliates me, and that if we must live together like this, let’s quietly live separate lives.’
‘We already do, Ingrid. You haven’t let me touch you for months. I think that’s separate enough. And it certainly explains why the whores you mention now seem so attractive.’ And he couldn't help smiling when he said it, taking pleasure from vengeance.
Surprisingly, she returned his smile with one of her own.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you find them attractive. That means you won’t be too upset when I confess that I’ve been seeing another man for a while now. A nice man, ten years older than you, but so much kinder, more decent. I just thought you should know.’
Ernst burned hot and cold, felt his whole body stiffening, and had to fight to control the racing of his heart, a suffocating mixture of rage and humiliation. He wanted to kill her.
‘Why did you want me to know?’ he managed to ask.
‘Because I’ve lived for too long with the knowledge of your philandering and now I want it out in the open.’
‘You want revenge.’
‘I’ve already had that, Ernst. That’s how my affair started – though it isn’t why it continued. I just came to care deeply for my lover and I won’t keep him hidden.’
Ernst had to resist the urge to slap her face.
‘You want a separation?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she replied.
‘You can’t have one,’ he told her. ‘The SS doesn’t approve of divorce, so I won’t even consider it. And if you try to go ahead with it, the SS will ensure that the children are handed over to me. Are you willing to pay that price?’
She looked at him with hatred. ‘No, Ernst, I’m not. You know I’d never give up the children.’
‘Then the marriage continues.’
‘I won’t give up my lover.’
‘And I won’t give up my whores. Let’s just live our separate lives, while living together, and keep our mouths shut.’
The gleam of hatred receded, but her gaze remained antagonistic. ‘I don’t think we can do that,’ she said.
‘Perhaps not normally,’ he responded, ‘but I also had something to tell you – and clearly, in the light of this conversation, it’s come at the right time.’
‘Oh? What?’
He could not resist swelling slightly with pride. ‘Reichsführer Himmler has plans for a special expeditionary force to travel by boat to the Antarctic early next year and has personally requested that I go with it.’
‘The... Antarctic?’
‘Yes.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘He didn’t say,’ Ernst replied honestly, though he knew that the expedition was in some way related to Projekt Saucer. ‘He only said that he’d be pleased if I volunteered, which of course I did instantly. Now, Ingrid, you and I can live our separate lives without too much pain – at least for a few months.’
He sat back in his chair and gazed steadily at her, finding it easier to hide his rage and humiliation behind a display of pride. Ingrid studied him at length, clearly not sure if she should be pleased or not, then she nodded in a thoughtful, accepting manner and said, ‘Yes. I think that will be good for both of us. It’s has come at the right time.’
Ernst sighed and sipped some beer, thinking of how the blood from wounded emotions could be so easily mopped up... Yet even as that cynicism gripped him, he saw Ingrid’s tears.
She sniffed, but failed to hold the tears back, so wiped them away with her hand and shook her head sadly. ‘What happened, Ernst?’
The question drove a stake through his heart, and he writhed with the pain of it. He knew what had happened – Adolf Hitler – but he couldn’t admit that now. The love they had shared had been destroyed by his devotion to duty... or, more accurately, by his fear of the consequences of disobedience. Now, when he saw Ingrid’s tearful eyes, he understood that he was giving away what he valued the most: her love and his pride.
‘Nothing in particular,’ he lied, debasing himself even more. ‘We just drifted apart. Let’s say we both grew up.’
She quivered as if whipped, but then managed to control herself. ‘I have to leave now,’ she said in a distracted, conversational manner, ‘and collect the children from my mother’s. Can I take it you’ll be home tonight for dinner?’
‘No,’ Ernst said, watching her dry her eyes and stifling his pain, ‘I don’t think I will be. Now that we’re leading separate lives, I see no point in lying.’
Ingrid smiled bitterly and nodded, then wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Are you leaving now as well?’ she asked, standing up and glancing out at the wintry sunshine over the busy corner of the Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden.
‘I have five minutes to spare,’ he replied, ‘so I’ll just finish my beer.’
‘Just one, I hope,’ she said without thinking.
‘Yes, Ingrid,’ he replied automatically. ‘Just one, then I’m leaving.’
She leaned down to kiss him frigidly on the cheek, then waved good-bye and w
alked out.
How pretty she still is, Ernst thought helplessly, as he watched her departing through the dense crowds, looking elegant in her furcollared, belted coat and broad-brimmed hat. How very attractive!
Then, with a grief that lacerated him, he ordered another beer.
The day became confused after that. Feeling cold after his second beer, he decided to have a cognac and drank it while brooding about Ingrid and life’s disappointments. Ingrid was disappointed with him and he felt the same about life in general, and when he thought about that, after having another brandy, he could only think of the American, Wilson, in the hangar at Kummersdorf, creating the kind of aircraft that he, Ernst, had once dreamed about as a student at the Institute of Technology, when he and Ingrid were still in love.
He thought a lot about Wilson. The American fascinated him. He was an old man, a very old man, kept alive by his faith.
Yes: faith – what Ernst had once possessed but lost – and because of that, the American was working miracles while Ernst could simply observe him. He felt sick just to think of it.
He not only feared the odd American, but also what he was building.
A miraculous, saucer-shaped aircraft.
A terrible weapon.
Filled with an awe and resentment exaggerated by drunkenness, Ernst, who had been given the afternoon off, had too many brandies, then went to meet his SS comrades in a Tanzbar recommended by Franck Ritter. Coloured lights bled through smoke, a cabaret band was playing, and two almost naked girls were performing an erotic dance with umbrellas. Sitting at a table near the wall at the back of the room, Willi Brandt was drinking a stein of beer and gloomily watching the dancing girls while Franck Ritter, resplendent in his SS uniform, was fondling the gaudily dressed transvestite sitting beside him. Ernst joined them at the table, had another few drinks, compared notes with Brandt on the various erotic acts on the stage, then left in disgust when the insatiable Ritter led the giggling transvestite into the toilets.
‘The élite of the New Order!’ Ernst exclaimed histrionically. ‘Is this what we’ve come to?’
He and Brandt embarked on a tour of familiar haunts, but ended up, as usual, in the White Mouse in the Franz
ö sischestrasse in time for Brigette’s evening performance. The revue bar was packed with uniformed officers of the Reichswehr and SS, plus fat-bellied businessmen and their whores, and they roared their approval and gave the Nazi salute when Brigette came on stage, naked except for a steelstudded, black-leather halter and gleaming jackboots, with a peaked military cap slanted rakishly over red hair and her tongue licking brightly painted, pouting lips.
She was grinding her hips lasciviously and cracking a bullwhip over the naked spine of the man who was crawling across the stage on hands and knees. Brigette sat on his back, riding him like a horse, and she kept cracking the bullwhip and gyrating upon him until, when he was prostrate beneath her, she slowly, seductively removed her steelstudded, leather halter and let him reach up to her...
It was a crude, erotic performance, arousing the audience to feverpitch, and though Ernst was disgusted and drank far too much brandy, he too was aroused by what he saw and could not wait to have her.
He had her soon enough, an hour later, in her apartment, when she teased and tormented him, whispering ‘My pretty boy! My sweet lieutenant!’ and sent him into spasms of relief and bottomless shame. With her diabolical artistry, her finely controlled sense of debauchery, she helped him forget Ingrid, the loss of his career, the frustration and fear that he always felt at Kummersdorf when he saw Wilson working. He took Brigette like a savage, was in turn devoured by her, felt exultation and grief as he shuddered and spent himself, then rolled off her and thought of the Antarctic with unbridled longing.
He could hide from himself there.
CHAPTER TWELVE ‘Good afternoon, Herr Wilson,’ Himmler said in his frostily polite manner. ‘I’m sorry to have had to bring you all this way, but I have good reason for doing so.’
‘Naturally, Reichsf ührer,’ Wilson said, taking the wooden chair at the other side of Himmler’s desk in his room in the Pension Moritz and glancing out at the soaring, snow-covered Austrian Alps. He had been dragged out of bed that morning, flown from Berlin to Munich, put on a train to Salzburg, then brought here, to the picturesque village of Berchtesgaden, in a jeep driven by a blond SS moron. Himmler enjoyed pulling such surprises, but Wilson was not amused.
‘Can I order you some herbal tea, Herr Wilson?’ ‘Thank you for considering my tastes, Reichsf ührer, but I’ve already had my morning tea and I don’t drink after breakfast.’
Himmler seemed mildly amused. ‘I know that you’re careful about what you eat and drink,’ he said. ‘This may explain why, for a sixtysix-year-old man, you look remarkably youthful. In fact, you still only look about fifty, which is truly amazing.’
‘Coming from you, Reichsführer, I take that as a compliment. It’s true that I’m careful about what I eat and drink. I also believe that most people do too much of both, so I’m frugal even with what I permit myself.’
‘Do you take vitamins?’ Himmler asked with sombre interest.
‘Yes. I’ve done so all my life. I eat and drink the minimum, take vitamins every day, and meditate whenever I get the chance. In this way I’ve managed to hold off the aging process, though it must come eventually.’
‘And then?’
‘I’m sure that with your continued backing of the SS medical experiments, we’ll soon find surgical remedies for the aging process – and when we do, I’ll be one of the first to make use of them.’
‘That would be a great gamble, Herr Wilson.’
‘Not at my age,’ Wilson replied.
Himmler smiled, then clasped his hands under his chin and said, ‘You believe in the Superman, Herr Wilson?’
Wilson knew just whom he was dealing with – an insane visionary
– but he also knew what he personally wanted, and when he saw the priestly madness in Himmler’s eyes, he was convinced he could have it.
‘I believe that man’s destiny is to evolve into the Superman,’ he said truthfully, though not without regard for Himmler’s ego, ‘but that we humans, if not constrained by wasteful emotions, can hasten that process.’
Himmler nodded approvingly. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I believe in this also. We cannot let sentiment stand in the way of progress. We must eradicate man’s imperfections and, if necessary, create the New Man from the bones of the old. We must cleanse the earth by purifying the blood. We must exterminate the Jews and the infirm and maladjusted, use the lesser races as slaves to the Reich, creating a race of pure Nordics. History will exonerate us. What we do, we do for progress. We are changing the course of history and aiding evolution – and when we die, as surely we must, our achievements will live on. You and I understand this.’
‘Yes, Reichsführer,’ Wilson said, not interested in the Aryan race, but willing to use Himmler and his ilk to create his world of pure science, which is all he now lived for.
Perverse? Most certainly – though he could live with that truth. All across Berlin, in the Reich’s most august offices, were the other high priests of the demonic New Order: Hermann Goring, Joseph Goebbels, Rudolph Hess, Martin Bormann – alcoholics, drug addicts, occultists, and degenerates – the very epitome of that gross irrationalism which Wilson so much abhorred. There too the Gestapo butchers, the drilled ranks of the SS, and all the torture and murder that went on every day in the basements. Wilson had to accept it. Science could not moralize. Those irrational brutes were no more than the means to achieving his ends. Progress needs its trampled bones. Death gives way to more life. Evolution knows neither right nor wrong and transcends ephemeral matters. So, he would work with them. In doing that, he could use them. And glancing out at the snowy slopes, then returning his gaze to Himmler, he felt nothing but hope for the future, the glow of fulfilment.
‘Why did you wish to see me, Reichsführer?’
‘I wish t
o take you on a little walk that I think will be instructive to you. But first, I would like to be informed about the progress of Projekt Saucer.’
‘Now that the rocket teams have left for Peenemünde and we can use their facilities, we’re making quicker, more definite progress. As you know, I decided to stop work on the larger flying saucer prototype and instead concentrate all our efforts on making a miniature version of it, which can be used as an anti-aircraft weapon. The final drawings for that smaller saucer will soon be completed – in the next week or so.’
‘Good,’ Himmler said. ‘And you think this smaller version will actually fly?’
‘I know it will,’ Wilson said firmly.
‘What kind of anti-aircraft weapon will it be?’
‘As a miniature version of the larger prototype, it’ll be a small, flat, circular flying machine, powered by a turbojet engine. It can be used as an anti-radar device that, by flying in the vicinity of an aircraft in flight, will over-ionize the atmosphere surrounding it and, by so doing, subject its radar to the adverse action of powerful electrostatic fields and electromagnetic impulses.’
‘And if it works – ’
‘It will, Reichsfiihrer.’
‘ – you can then construct a larger version without fear of it failing.’
‘Exactly, Reichsführer.’
‘And who contributed most to this final design? You, or the officer nominally in charge of Projekt Saucer: Flugkapitän Schriever?’
Wilson thought carefully before answering.
He was aware that his greatest innovations were likely to be stolen from him and passed on to the rocket scientists now at Peenemünde and other, even more secret SS research establishments. He understood, also, that Rudolph Schriever, who had more arrogance than scientific talent, was spying on him for Himmler and would, while doing so, also try to take credit for his achievements. For this reason, while pretending to be open with Schriever and his fellow engineers, Wilson had actually showed them only selected parts of his great work
INCEPTION (Projekt Saucer, Book 1) Page 13