Estocada

by Graham Hurley

  At the old man’s insistence, they took the lift down to the lobby. Once they were out of the hotel, Tam refused to move another step unless the old man told him where they were going. Traffic at this time of night was light and the pavement was empty apart from a handful of pedestrians hurrying home from the darkened offices along Wilhelmstrasse.

  The old man looked him up and down in the cold throw of the street lights.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he repeated. ‘You’ve met Wilhelm Friedrich and you’re asking me a question like that?’ He shook his head and began to waddle away down the pavement in the direction of the Reich Chancellery. He looked, if anything, disappointed.

  Tam watched him for a moment and then set off in pursuit. Then he became aware of a car drawing up beside him. It was black, new-looking. The rear door opened and he had time to glimpse the face in the back. Schultz.

  ‘Get in.’ Schultz might have been smiling. ‘The old man doesn’t expect a tip.’

  They drove for perhaps half an hour, maybe more. Schultz offered a gruff apology for what he called ‘the comedy’ at the Altmark. Like many of the hotels and pension that housed foreign nationals, it was under surveillance. The Gestapo had far too big a budget for their own good. How they ever found time to cross-file all their raw intelligence was beyond him. Maybe one day Uncle Heinrich would run out of shelf space and then Germany might breathe a little easier.

  ‘You didn’t want to come to the hotel yourself?’ Tam asked.

  ‘Of course not. Why make things any easier for those bastards?’

  Schultz sat back on the plump leather seat, his legs crossed, his thick fingers drumming on his knees, musing on the way layer after layer of bureaucracy had turned Berlin into a swamp. We Germans are obsessed by paperwork, he said. Write something down, a name, a date, an accusation, anything, and we think we’ve done a good day’s work. Not true. Not true at all. If you want the truth, he said, we’re nothing but native bearers paying tribute to the scum in power.

  The scum in power? Tam wanted more, a readier clue to whatever awaited him next, but when he took advantage of a moment of silence and enquired where they might be going, Schultz put a cautionary hand on his knee.

  ‘Trust me,’ he said again. ‘Why are you English so impatient?’

  Their destination lay in an area of woodland outside the city. The villa loomed in the darkness, no lights in any of the windows. Tam got out of the car. A dog on a chain stirred and began to bark. A wind had appeared from nowhere, sighing amongst the branches overhead, and beyond the trees he caught a glimpse of moonlight on water.

  Schultz seemed to be waiting for someone. At length the front door opened and the figure of a woman appeared.

  ‘Wilhelm?’

  The woman stood aside and Schultz led Tam into the house. The interior had the stillness and the smell of a museum. An assortment of oils on the wall featured a mixture of battle scenes and formal military portraits. A grim-faced general looked sternly down from the landing at the top of a flight of stairs. In the painting he was flanked by twin regimental standards and a hunting dog lay curled at his feet. Beside the painting hung a pair of crossed swords with an inscribed brass plate below. No swastikas anywhere.

  The door at the end of the corridor lay slightly ajar. Schultz knocked twice and waited. At length a voice ordered him to come in. Schultz stepped back and gestured for Tam to enter, closing the door behind them

  ‘Mein General, Herr Moncrieff. From England.’

  The figure behind the desk didn’t move. Late middle-aged, Tam thought. A face hollowed out by too little sleep. Buttons loosened on his grey tunic. Watchful eyes.

  ‘Beck.’ He introduced himself, then nodded at the empty chair in front of the desk. ‘Please sit down. You want something to drink?’

  Tam shook his head, politely declined, but the General had already despatched Schultz in search of a bottle. His manicured finger was still anchored on a line of the document spread before him and he returned to whatever he’d been doing, reaching for a pen when he’d got to the bottom of the page.

  Beck.

  Tam recognised the name. Bella had mentioned it at the restaurant, one of the highlights of Embassy gossip over the past week or so. Until very recently, this man had been Chief of Staff of the German Army, a position of unrivalled power. Then, quite suddenly, he’d resigned and the shock was compounded by the fact that nobody appeared to know why. Old school, Bella had said. Ex-cavalry man but never had any problem with the Nazis. In fact, he was always pushing for an army even bigger than the one Hitler wanted. In short, a real warrior.

  Schultz was back with a bottle of French brandy. Beck inspected it at arm’s length and then told Schultz to find some glasses. This wasn’t his house, he explained to Tam. It belonged to a friend who was sadly indisposed but just now it offered a little welcome privacy.

  ‘You live where, Herr Moncrieff?’

  ‘Scotland.’

  ‘I like Scotland. I like the cold. Even your rain I can put up with.’

  Schultz had charged the glasses. He passed them round. Then he proposed a toast.

  ‘To our English friends, Herr General.’

  Beck stared at the glass and muttered something Tam didn’t catch. Then he was looking Tam in the eye.

  ‘In London they called our Foreign Minister “Brickendrop”. Is that true?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is.’

  ‘And what does Brickendrop mean?’

  ‘It means that he offended people. In many ways he was an embarrassment.’

  ‘Because he didn’t understand the English?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But no one understands the English. Ever. Isn’t that true? Isn’t that what history tells us?’

  Tam was fumbling for an answer. Beck spared him the effort.

  ‘In this instance I grant you the English are right. Ribbentrop is a fool. Under the circumstances Brickendrop is kind. I’ve heard much worse.’ He at last took a sip from his glass and then turned to Schultz. ‘You’ve heard about Adam? The West Wall?’ Schultz shook his head. ‘There was some ruckus yesterday in one of the tunnels. He had words with our leader. The deadlines are impossible and Adam knows it. The triumph of the will is a pretty phrase but it doesn’t pour concrete any quicker. You agree, Mr Moncrieff?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Very wise. That puts you in the same camp as General Adam. That man is a fine soldier and probably an even better engineer. He faces two challenges, Mr Moncrieff. One is getting his damn wall in proper shape. The other is Hitler. As I understand it, his big mistake yesterday was voicing his doubts in public. In this regime you do that only once. But General Adam, God help him, takes no notice.’

  Schultz asked what had happened. Beck’s eye drifted back to the document on the desk. His finger found the quote he wanted.

  ‘General Adam has expressed a personal opinion, once again, about his wall. If we march against the Czechs next month, and the French arrive in earnest, you know how long he thinks his sandcastle will keep them out?’

  ‘No, Mein General.’

  ‘No time at all. From this, gentlemen, we can deduce three things. One is that he’s probably right. The second is that Hitler will take no notice. And the third is that dear General Adam’s days in uniform are undoubtedly numbered. If he’s lucky, Hitler will put him out to pasture like an old horse. Otherwise his children will be looking for a new papa by Christmas. Personally, I applaud the man. He has courage. We all have courage. But courage may not be enough. Why not? Because telling the truth in this regime has a habit of making a man an orphan. You awake one morning, and you look around, and quite suddenly there is no one. Absolutely no one.’

  He tipped his head and gazed up at the ceiling. Schultz cleared his throat.

  ‘Not quite true, Mein General. As we both know.’

  Beck fixed him with a long stare. Finally, he nodded. This, he said dismissively, was a conversation for another time and place. Just now
he wanted Herr Moncrieff to have no illusions about the difficulties that patriots, men of good faith, faced in Hitler’s Germany. A Panzer tank ran on gasoline. The Fatherland ran on naked fear. Hence the Gestapo. Hence the concentration camps like Dachau. And hence the insane race to plunge Europe back into war.

  ‘It can’t happen, Herr Moncrieff. We have to put a stop to it.’

  ‘War?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Against the Czechs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because the French will march?’

  ‘Yes, and you too I daresay. Do you want that? Do the French want that? Can we afford that? At the moment? Here and now? No, no and again no.’

  Tam watched his fist descending softly on to the desk. Afford that was the key. Beck wasn’t taking some Quaker pledge against the very idea of war. On the contrary, he was simply postponing any invasion until the odds looked a great deal better.

  ‘So when do you anticipate marching?’ Tam enquired.

  ‘I’ve no idea. The future looks after itself.’

  ‘But you don’t rule it out?’

  ‘Of course not. We’re not fools. We’re not Ribbentrop. We rule out nothing.’

  Beck pushed his chair away from the desk and then stood up. He was taller than Tam had anticipated and command was something he was plainly used to. He toyed with his glass for a moment, eyeing Tam.

  ‘One question, Mr Moncrieff. Just one. And I’d be obliged for a simple answer. Wilhelm tells me you’ve been in the Sudetenland. I’ve seen intelligence that suggests you paid their fortifications a visit. You’ll tell me that their army is first class and that their defences in the west will give us a very big headache. I know that already. Which is another reason our leader should be giving General Adam the benefit of the doubt.’

  ‘And the question?’

  ‘The question is this. It’s very simple. If our leader has his way, if we move against the Czechs, will the English march?’

  ‘I’m not a politician.’

  ‘I understand that. I also understand that you have the ear of people who matter. Your answer, please. A yes or a no will be sufficient.’

  Tam nodded. So simple, he thought. All this way, all this effort. Just for a single word. Was he qualified to provide any kind of answer? He didn’t care. Would this martinet hold him to account if he got it wrong? He hadn’t the slightest idea. But at last his small role in this huge drama was swimming into focus.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  18

  PRENZLAUER BERG, BERLIN, 29 AUGUST 1938

  Dieter Merz had got Sol Fiedler’s address from Beata. Take the tram to Prenzlauer Berg, she’d told him. Get off at Torstrasse. Cross the road by the traffic lights and look for a pastry shop on the corner. If you want to make a friend for life, then take Sol’s wife one of their Franzbrötchen. If you want two friends for life, ask the woman who runs the shop for a couple of Pfannkuchen. Sol says he’ll kill for a doughnut. Marta believes him and ties him to the bed when she’s got some in the oven. That much cream isn’t good for any man, she insists. What’s so great about having a husband who dies on you?

  The apartment block lay behind the arterial road that ran north-east out of the city. Dieter got off the tram and crossed at the lights. The pastry shop was closed, the blinds lowered. Dieter peered at the handwritten notice carefully taped to the door. Frau Blicken and her family were enjoying a well-earned holiday out on the Baltic Coast. Back for the start of September.

  Dieter spotted a bar on the side road that led away from the traffic lights. Flurries of rain had been blowing in the wind, pebbling the windows of the tram, but now the sun was out again. According to Beata, Sol normally left the Institute at five. Allow half an hour for the journey home, and a little time to embrace his wife and take off his shoes, and Dieter would be wise not to appear until six. Dieter checked his watch. He had forty minutes in hand.

  The bar was dark after the brightness of the street. Dieter asked for a glass of bock and found himself a table. The bar was filling up fast, a mix of students and workers from the nearby furniture factory. With the scent of newly sawn pinewood came the clack-clack of dominoes and the comforting conversational hum of a day’s work put to bed.

  Dieter sipped at his beer. Watching Hitler in the tunnel, being so close, had affected him in ways he’d never anticipated. In one sense, as he’d tried to explain to Keiko last night, the whole thing had felt so mundane. Hitler was an ordinary man, for God’s sake. Not much to look at, odd haircut, receding chin, funny little moustache, two arms, two legs, the usual ration. Yet in spite of this there was something else lurking inside him, something the colour of the blackest night you could ever imagine, something an earlier age might have blamed on the devil. In front of Dieter’s eyes, he’d changed, become possessed, become someone, something else.

  Being in the tunnel hadn’t helped. He remembered the dim lighting and the way the voice with its peasant Austrian vowels had bounced back and forth, echo on echo until it emptied itself of all meaning and left nothing but an overwhelming sense of rage.

  Rage. Dieter recognised the actor in Hitler, understood the way he wound himself up like a spring, waiting for some internal curtain to rise, eager for the moment when he could launch himself on an audience of tens of thousands or on some luckless individual like General Adam. All this made perfect sense. This was the way Hitler could hold an entire nation in the palm of his hand, this was the stuff of spell-casting and magic. But what he’d seen yesterday, down in the tunnels beneath Hitler’s fabled Wall, told him something else. That the magic was dark. And that the way ahead might not be quite what the bulk of his countrymen were so eagerly expecting. Which brought him to Sol Fiedler and the telling little incident, infinitely sad, at Beata’s wedding.

  Everyone knew about the Jews. You couldn’t avoid realising how tough life had become for these people but he’d been shocked by how easy it was to look the other way. Some Untermensch of a storm trooper kicking the shit out of a couple of kikes who dared to answer back? The crudest insults daubed on the door of a tailor’s shop? Yellow-starred kids, political innocents, hand in hand with their harassed mums? Images like these had become part of the streetscape of every German town but these people were on the very edges of the nation’s life and until he’d met Sol at the wedding he hadn’t realised how it must feel to be at the receiving end of one of the nastier consequences of Germany’s rebirth.

  Ribbentrop had been wrong, he’d told Keiko. It wasn’t his wedding, his property, his day. He’d absolutely no right to lord it over other people, to play God with a fellow guest who happened to be Jewish. Keiko, for a while, had tried to defend her client. She said he wasn’t very bright. She thought he never really understood the consequences of his actions. That’s why he was in such trouble in his head, in his heart, in his soul. The man was a muddle, a mess, a tangle of contradictions that probably went back to his childhood. Keiko understood all that because she’d once found herself in a similar place. And that’s why she was doing her best to put him right.

  Last night, in bed, Dieter had laughed in her face. The gesture was unpardonable and he’d apologised at once, but the thought that reiki could turn Joachim von Ribbentrop into a human being was optimism of the richest kind. The man’s twisted, he told her, just like so many of them. You’re probably right. Life must have been unkind to them in one way or another but should an entire nation suffer the consequences? These people are midgets, he’d told her. Dwarfs. Grotesques. Gargoyles. Goering with his fancy uniforms. Himmler with his growing empire of concentration camps. Ribbentrop with his rich wife. And now the Führer himself. A collection of echoes with a terrifying void behind the blackness of his eyes.

  Sol again, riding his bicycle into the same darkness, leaving the champagne and the laughter and the soft evening light behind him as he wobbled off on his ancient bike. God knows what would happen afterwards but these were the first people to suffer, the first victims to taste what pr
obably lay in wait. Dieter reached for his glass and swallowed the last of the beer. At the very least, he owed the man an apology.

  *

  On the corner of the street where the Fiedlers lived, a gypsy was selling heather. She was old, slightly bent, claw fingers, milky eyes. She pressed three sprigs into Dieter’s hand and helped herself to a one RM note when he got out his wallet. They’ll bring you luck, she said, turning her back when he enquired about change.

  The lobby of the apartment block was spotless. Dieter counted eighteen numbered boxes for mail and there was a wooden chair with a plump, new-looking cushion for anyone who wanted to rest before tackling the stairs. A recess at the back of the lobby contained four bicycles. Dieter gazed at them a moment, trying to remember which one was Sol’s.

  His apartment was on the third floor. The smell of cooking hung in the warm air and Dieter caught the murmur of wireless sets as he passed door after door. At this time of the evening, people appeared to listen to music rather than the interminable announcements from the Ministry of Propaganda, and Dieter was reminded of a conversation he’d half-overheard just now in the bar. The Czechs beating up those idiots in the Sudeten? How much do they pay Goebbels to invent this rubbish?

  The Fiedlers’ apartment lay at the end of the corridor. No music. Dieter tapped lightly on the door. At length it opened to reveal a woman in her early forties. She was small and thin, almost bird-like. She was wearing a grey cardigan that she might have knitted herself and her feet were enveloped in a pair of slippers that were far too big. The sight of a stranger at her door plainly alarmed her.

  Dieter had started to explain about Beata and the wedding, when Sol appeared behind her. He recognised Dieter at once. He was very welcome. Supper was already on the table but there was plenty extra for a guest. Beef goulash the way the Magyars made it in Budapest. Marta’s speciality.

  Dieter was already on the point of leaving but Sol held the door wide open, insisting that he come in. The apartment was small and over-furnished, heavy walnut bookcases, a marble-topped dresser and a table laid for two. Dieter recognised a woman’s touch in the careful arrangement of knick-knacks on the dresser but what struck him most of all was a wooden perch standing beside the window. On the perch, king of this tiny living room, was a stuffed parrot.