Flight from Berlin

by David John

  ‘Just one minute—’

  ‘Won’t be long.’

  She got out quickly, case first, and pulled the valise after her just as he made an ungentlemanly lunge for it.

  Bowler Hat Man turned in the driver’s seat behind the glass partition, but the car was parked against the wall. He lurched across the front seat to the passenger door.

  Eleanor ran for it—back down the narrow lane she’d come from, where the car couldn’t follow. Behind her a car door slammed and footsteps came after her—in a real sprint. The valise and case didn’t seem so light anymore. Only a few yards ahead: the corner of the lane. She reached it, hearing the driver’s breath behind her, turned the corner, and saw the busy street at the end. She saw a red double-decker and a policeman go past on a bicycle. She didn’t stop running until she reached the kerb.

  A pillar with a golden flame was straight ahead of her. Streetcars whirred past. One stopped to let people off, the clippie calling ‘Monument,’ and she hopped on, sweating and cursing. Looking back to the entrance of Idol Lane, she saw Bowler Hat Man standing still, looking at the tram, trying to find her in the window.

  Moments later she got off near London Bridge and hailed a cab.

  ‘Croydon Airfield’ she said, collapsing low onto the backseat. ‘And quickly, please.’

  For a long while she had her face buried in her hands. That wasn’t my fault. After a time she found herself staring at the cookie-cutter houses passing on the Brighton Road, gardens neat and colourful, and she marvelled at the twists her life had taken.

  An hour and a half later she climbed the steps into the Imperial Airways de Havilland Express to Berlin. She opened the valise on the empty seat beside her as the propellers began to turn, took out the diplomatic bag with the cash, and crammed into it the genuine, complete, bona fide List Dossier.

  The Hotel Mertens was a three-storey white box with a glassed-over patio restaurant to one side. In its front two poplar trees had curved with a prevailing wind to point west, like index fingers. Like a warning to turn back, Denham thought. A gravel forecourt opened directly onto the main road into Venhoven. The only other building nearby was a large filling station where a line of heavy goods trucks waited to refuel as they entered or left Germany. From there the road led straight up to the frontier, where they could see the wooden Dutch customs house with its smoking chimney, and behind that the German border crossing with a black-, red-, and white-striped barrier and damp flags fluttering.

  A yawning girl showed them upstairs to their rooms, which were spartan and worn, with a smell of rain and manure blowing in through open windows. Denham told Friedl he was going to get a few hours’ sleep. Then he turned back to the girl, who was about to descend the stairs.

  ‘Does the hotel have a safe?’

  She showed him an ancient strongbox in the cupboard of a small, shabby office next to the restaurant. Quickly he checked the satchel’s contents before depositing it: £50 in sterling in a large wad, and nearly 400 Dutch guilders for any expenses; his passport, vehicle documents, return ferry tickets, and finally Willi Greiser’s Sippenbuch, his honorary SS identification. Along with the engraved pocket watch Eleanor had found this item in one of Denham’s jackets on the floor of his ransacked apartment.

  He looked again at the languid mug shot—the slightly hooded eyes, the duelling scar down one cheek—and his lips turned up in a half smile. It wasn’t an item he had any use for, and he wasn’t sure why he’d even brought it. But somehow, having it with him signified, preserved, his upper hand.

  From outside came the low growl of a motorbike, and moments later the girl was handing him a parcel from London. With perfect timing, the bogus dossier had arrived.

  Chapter Forty-five

  ‘Just imagine,’ Martha said with a smirk, ‘having to explain the affairs of my poor heart to Washington, who naturally suspect Bolshevik infiltration.’ She linked her arm in Eleanor’s. ‘No, Daddy wasn’t best pleased. Mother’s putting her brave face on it, though.’

  She was wearing a smart dun-coloured hat with a long feather poking from the top, which, when she turned her head, occasionally caught Eleanor right under the nose. They were watching Martha’s fiancé proffering a peanut to a Barbary sheep.

  ‘Isn’t he divine?’ She had barely contained the squeal in her voice since meeting Eleanor at the airport.

  ‘He’s certainly outgoing,’ Eleanor said with a sporting nod of her head.

  The sheep turned its nose away and scampered up the crag to join the rest of its ginger flock.

  ‘I hear all what you say,’ the man said, turning to them and popping the peanut into his mouth. He was tall, brown-haired, and boyish, with Tartar eyes, broad cheeks faintly pitted, and a gap-tooth smile that had a certain charm. He wore a suit of some indeterminate fabric.

  ‘I’m also Boris’s English teacher,’ Martha said, pinching him.

  ‘Yes, and when are you going to Moscow for learning Russian? Then I am teaching you lesson.’ He gave a loud laugh and put an arm around both of them. Eleanor caught a sweet hint of alcohol on his breath.

  ‘Have you set a date?’ she asked.

  Martha’s smile wavered. ‘Actually, Boris still needs Stalin’s permission to marry . . . We’re waiting. Oh, here’s the lions’ house. I wonder what time they’re fed.’

  Boris whispered something in her ear, and she slapped him playfully across the chin. Eleanor looked at them with a pang of concern. Somehow, she saw some of her own past mistakes foreshadowed in Martha’s little adventure. I hope you know what you’re doing, she thought.

  It was the first of May, and the day was warm and muggy. The cottonwoods and acacias of the zoo, filled with the screams of tropical birds, made her feel they were strolling through some lush estate in New Orleans. The place was quiet, near closing time. Nannies pushing prams; a few soldiers on leave taking photographs; couples walking dogs.

  ‘If you think we’re being shadowed, we are,’ Martha said with an amused savoir faire. ‘But at least we can talk freely here. Daddy has all his important conversations at the zoo. You’ll have to be careful what you say at the party later.’

  Ambassador Dodd had told Eleanor, in a loud stage whisper during her last visit, that the house and embassy were wired by the SD—along with every other ambassador’s residence—with listening devices in the telephones and light switches.

  ‘I’ll confine my remarks to the weather and the price of gas,’ she said.

  Denham dozed on an overspringy bed. He had finally slipped into sleep, when he was jolted awake by the rattling of the windowpane and the wind whistling around the eaves of the exposed building. It was 1:00 p.m. on his wristwatch. Midday in London.

  He lay on his back for a while with his hands behind his head, thinking of Eleanor, and Evans.

  It’s done.

  He got up. From the window he saw the gravel forecourt still deserted apart from the Morris Oxford. An enormous goods truck rumbled up the road towards the frontier of the Reich. He saw the girl carrying in a potted tree from the steps and the gale catching her skirts and apron, ballooning them up like a jellyfish around her thighs. The poplar trees groaned and thrashed in the wind, sending leaves and twigs flying against the window.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Eager to know Eleanor’s impressions of her fiancé now that they were alone, and to hear all about Eleanor’s own marriage plans, Martha insisted they dine in style at the Café Kempinski on the Ku’damm. ‘Darling, the street’s Europe’s largest coffee shop,’ she said. ‘It’s where one goes to be seen.’ There was an infectious gaiety about her. Martha was in love, and it was making her generous.

&n
bsp; By 6:00 p.m. the place was crowded with chattering ladies showing their purchases from the KaDeWe department store and office workers in suits. There were a couple of blue Luftwaffe uniforms, and a party of three SS bandsmen drinking tall, frothing beers.

  A waiter showed them to a table, and Martha had begun translating the plats du jour for Eleanor when their attention was caught by a stentorian voice addressing the maître d’. To the poor headwaiter’s mortification, a tall, portly man in a suit from the 1920s was jabbing his thumb towards the party of SS bandsmen, the wattles under his white goatee shaking. He had drawn the eyes of everyone in the café and didn’t seem to care.

  Martha leaned towards Eleanor. ‘He said, “Seat me as far as possible from those gangsters.” ’

  In a flurry of semaphore among the waiters the man was ushered with swift discretion to the table next to theirs, where he struggled to fit his heft into the cramped wicker chair. The buttons on his ash-smudged waistcoat snagged against the table’s edge, and his long legs and orange brogues had to stick out into the aisle, where they formed a formidable obstacle. When he was finally installed he snipped the end off an enormous Cohiba cigar and signalled the waiter for a light.

  ‘Sofort, Herr Doktor Eckener.’

  Eleanor looked at the man, whose large head was in profile next to her. ‘You’re Hugo Eckener,’ she said.

  He turned to her with a weary look. ‘Madam,’ he said in English. One eye was flinty and piercing; the other seemed to wander lazily. He gave her a grumpy smile. ‘Forgive me for not recalling your face. Have I had the pleasure?’

  ‘No, sir,’ she said, offering him a light, ‘it’s just that I’ve heard so much about you from someone you know well—Richard Denham.’

  Eckener’s gruffness seemed to dissipate with the puffs of cigar smoke, and he raised his eyebrows in apology. ‘You’re a friend of his?’

  ‘I’m engaged to him.’

  ‘Engaged! My dear lady.’ The old man’s jumble of courtesies and congratulations were more than the confined space allowed, and he almost knocked the table over. Eleanor introduced Martha, and a bottle of Henkell was ordered.

  ‘Richard did say that you speak your mind,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘Ach, these criminals would have locked me up long ago if they’d had the guts,’ he said. ‘I apologise. My meeting at the Air Ministry this afternoon put me in an ill temper. Göring rebuked me for never giving the Deutsche Grüss. I said to him, “When I wake up each day I don’t say ‘Heil Hitler’ to my wife. I say ‘Good morning.’ ” ’

  Several diners turned again to stare at him.

  A cork twisted and popped; glasses were filled, and Eckener proposed a toast to the happiness of Eleanor’s marriage, and Martha’s. ‘It would give me the greatest pleasure to entertain you in comfort and style on board a Zeppelin,’ he added, explaining that he was staying one night in Berlin at the Hotel Kempinski, before heading to the new international airship terminal at Frankfurt for the first transatlantic flight of the season to New York.

  ‘By airship to New York,’ Martha said in a sigh.

  Denham ordered a white beer to wash down the bread, smoked ham, and a great wedge of Leerdammer. Friedl asked for a Coca-Cola. News from the radio in the hotel café could only just be heard over the howls of the gale that battered the building, making the windows tremble and the ceiling groan, as if the room were gasping for air. Rain began to lash the glass roof like falling gravel, and the elderly proprietor who served them kept glancing up, fearing leaks. ‘Severe weather warning on the radio,’ he said, wiping his hands on his apron. ‘Storm blowing in from the Atlantic.’

  Friedl had been subdued ever since they’d left London.

  ‘Do you think we’re doing the right thing?’ he said at last. ‘I can’t help thinking we’re missing a . . . historic opportunity.’

  Denham raised his eyebrows. Since taking possession of the List Dossier, he thought he’d had a surfeit of historic opportunities.

  ‘I mean giving it to the British SIS is one thing,’ Friedl said, ‘but they’ll use it to bargain, won’t they. Calm down and stop your aggression, they’ll say, because we’ve got the proof in a dossier.’

  ‘You mean they won’t destroy him?’ Denham said, taking a swig of beer. ‘That’s Realpolitik. The way the world goes.’

  Friedl only seemed more agitated. ‘You know I’m classed as a Volksschädlinge in Germany, a pest registered with the police? He has to be exposed.’

  ‘He will be. The world will learn the truth in the end, and history will judge. In the meantime, peace in Europe.’

  Friedl sighed and looked out at an empty landscape blurred by moving curtains of rain. ‘I suppose I should be relieved, for my own sake. Men like me . . . I’m hardly helping our cause by naming this monstrous freak as one of my own. What an irony . . .’

  Denham looked at him with sympathy. ‘You’re angry. But you escaped. Soon you’ll be in America and you’ll put it all behind you . . .’

  A bell was ringing in another room.

  ‘Mr Denham?’ said the proprietor from the door. ‘There’s a telephone call for you.’

  Denham followed the proprietor into the small hotel office and was handed the mouthpiece and receiver.

  ‘This is Rausch,’ said an iron voice.

  ‘Yes, Rausch.’

  ‘You have it?’

  ‘I have it,’ Denham said. ‘Will you be here tomorrow as arranged?’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  There was a click and then a dead line.

  Denham leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. Everything is under control.

  But the storm was starting to worry him.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Eleanor waited until dark before pushing her way unseen into the Liebermanns’ garden in Grunewald. It was fortunate that she remembered this gate in the wall, flaking and ivy covered from disuse; the main entrance to the house was most probably under police watch, and she wasn’t going to take a risk finding out.

  At the embassy party Ambassador Dodd had drily proposed a toast to the engaged couple; the Russians reciprocated with gusto, and she’d slipped out of the room just as glasses were clinking and the orchestra started playing. With luck, she’d be back before anyone noticed she was missing.

  Outside was a parked convoy of Russian-built embassy cars and limousines, their drivers standing about smoking, and a single waiting taxi. She was heading straight for it when Martha’s voice stopped her cold.

  ‘Where on earth are you going?’

  Damn it.

  The shorter woman was standing under the lighted front porch, a full flute of champagne in her hand. Her sparkling earrings and long, pale blue gown brought out her prettiness, Eleanor thought, like a prom queen.

  ‘Just going to get cigarettes,’ Eleanor said, wincing at how unconvincing that sounded.

  ‘What?’

  She turned and continued towards the taxi.

  ‘Wait, you can’t simply vanish off into Berlin—’

  Once inside the Liebermanns’ grounds, she saw at once from the long grass, the cracked, dry fountain, and the leaves and branches ungathered from winter how the family’s circumstances had changed.

  There were no lights in the Gothic turrets of the house, and the curtains had not been drawn. Boats moored at the jetty rattled softly. She skirted around some mossy paving to the building’s other side and saw a solitary light coming from the lower ground floor. Carefully descending the stone steps and peering through the window she saw Ilse Liebermann sitting at a long kitchen table with family photographs spread out before her. She was fingering the pearls of a necklace around her neck, her face partly obscured by the cloud of silver hair.

  Eleanor wondered whether she should ring the front doorbell, but she didn’t want to frighten the woman. In the end she elected simply t
o tap on the kitchen window, calling gently, ‘Frau Liebermann, it’s Eleanor Emerson.’

  Ilse looked up with a start, and Eleanor pushed her face to the glass so that the old woman could see who it was. She got up stiffly and opened the kitchen’s garden door.

  ‘Fräulein Eleanor?’ she said, still startled.

  Eleanor put her arms around the old woman and embraced her. ‘I’ve come to see that you’re ready for your journey tomorrow. Have you heard from Hannah?’

  The woman’s forehead creased into puzzled lines. ‘Yes, my dear. I mean no. Thank you.’ She had a question forming, but said, ‘Come upstairs and see Jakob. You’re very welcome here.’

  She switched on a light and led Eleanor up the stairs to the grand sitting room, where Hannah had given the interview last summer.

  ‘Jaku, we have a visitor,’ Ilse called.

  Eleanor thought this must be a different room. Its walls were bare, and a vase of dried flowers stood where the dream blue horses had galloped over the mantelpiece. Then she noticed, with a feeling of depression, the geometric outlines of soot on the wallpaper where the collection had hung. Jakob Liebermann was sitting on the divan surrounded by piles of documents, which he was scrutinising, pencil in hand, through wire eyeglasses. The yellow light from a table lamp illuminated one side of his face, where the port-wine stain marked his hollow cheek.

  The old man put his papers down and struggled to his feet. ‘I am exceedingly surprised and delighted to see you, Fräulein Eleanor,’ he said in his deep, resonating voice, and took both her hands in his. ‘Though it is not at all safe for you to be here. What brings you back?’

  He went to pour them all a cognac from the walnut drinks cabinet. They were both looking gaunt and pale, Eleanor thought.

  ‘I wanted to see that you’re ready for your long journey to the border,’ Eleanor said.

  Jakob put down the bottle and gave her a quizzical look. ‘How is it you know about that?’ he asked.