‘But at least they’re safe, Elsie.’
Hannah started to cry, very softly. It was as much the release of tension as anything. She could have no doubt that if they’d been caught in the forest they would be dead. Elsie moved over and put her arm round her.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to – the men who were killed –’
‘I don’t even know who they were,’ said Stefan quietly. It had been his decision not to try to help Leon and Johannes. It was the right one, even though Hannah had a gun. That didn’t make it easier. He drained his glass.
The High Commissioner got up. He took the bottle of whiskey and filled all the glasses again, a lot fuller than he had filled them the first time.
‘Two men who were trying to help me,’ said Hannah, ‘the Nazis killed them. I think they’d have killed us too.’ Her tears had stopped now, but her face was grey and drawn. It was hard for her not to feel that she was responsible for what had happened to Leon and Johannes at the lodge. Stefan was less sure. He hadn’t been in Danzig long, yet he already had a sense of the risks people took, fighting the Nazis. Tonight hadn’t been about Hannah or him. He couldn’t sense any connection. They’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. They would certainly have died in the forests above Danzig if the SA men had caught up with them, but Stefan still felt as if they were just part of someone else’s mess that had to be cleaned up and tidied away.
‘We were lucky,’ Stefan said. There was nothing more to add.
The High Commissioner simply nodded. He knew how lucky.
‘You’ll both stay here tonight.’ Elsie Lester got up. ‘Right, now for that bath! And bring your drink, my dear. A whiskey and a hot tub won’t solve everything, but by God it helps.’ Hannah smiled, getting up too. She headed out, following Mrs Lester. The High Commissioner, still holding the bottle, reached out and topped up Stefan’s glass. ‘I think it might be a two-bottle job after all, Mr Gillespie.’ Then he walked across the room to a desk. He picked up the telephone and dialled.
‘I’m calling the police.’
Stefan was surprised and momentarily alarmed.
‘You’re not the first people to see a bunch of our finest Nazi thugs murdering the opposition, but it hasn’t quite been accepted as government policy yet. You need to call their bluff sometimes. The police can’t be after you for anything officially, which doesn’t mean the police aren’t involved in doing a lot of dirty work for the Nazis, because they damned well are.’
He spoke into the phone in halting German.
‘I need to speak to Oberleutnant Lange. It’s the High Commissioner.’
He turned back to Stefan. ‘But there’s enough daylight left to keep the dark at bay. At least till after the election. God only knows what will happen then. It could be that Elsie and I will be joining you on the next train out. And you really do need to get out. I’m sure you understand that. The fact that Miss Rosen is a Jew changes the way they think here now, even about foreigners. Quite apart from all the things I don’t want you to tell me about.’
He spoke into the phone again, this time in English.
‘Reinhold, how are you? I’m sorry it’s so late, but I’ve got a pair of rather dim Irish citizens, friends of friends of Elsie’s, you know the kind of thing. They’ve had some run-in with the police, a misunderstanding that’s all. Elsie seems to think they’re utterly beyond sorting it out themselves and they’ve got into a bit of a state about it all. If I can reassure them the Gestapo aren’t out scouring the city for them, it would be splendid. Yes, I’m sure they’ve much better things to scour the city for. Hang on, I’ve got the details.’ Lester pointed at the whiskey bottle. Stefan picked it up and walked across to fill his glass. The High Commissioner winked. ‘They are Stefan Gillespie and Hannah Rosen. Staying at the Danziger Hof.’ He laughed, sharing a joke. ‘There may well be something improper going on. I’ve never heard that was any great obstacle to staying at the Danziger Hof before!’
*
The next morning Stefan and Hannah were late down to breakfast. The bedrooms they had been given were next to each other, but they had used only one. They had said very little; holding each other was enough. It wasn’t an easy sleep for either of them, but it was rest. And they were safe.
When the High Commissioner had spoken to Oberleutnant Lange of the Free State Police the night before, the policeman could find no problem on the books relating to either Hannah Rosen or Stefan Gillespie. There had been some query about Fräulein Rosen’s passport, but it all seemed to be in order, even if it wasn’t the passport she arrived in the Free City with. None of which meant it wasn’t time for Hannah and Stefan to leave Danzig.
They had seen no one except a maid and the butler. The noise of the city was faint through the windows looking out on to the garden, but it was insistent. The butler hovered as he had hovered the night before, reappearing with more eggs and bacon and coffee when no more was needed, and talking about the election. He carefully avoided any political opinions but he exuded a sense of excitement and self-satisfaction that was a political opinion in itself. It was the big election; today everything wrong would be put right.
The door opened and Seán Lester came in, followed by a tall man in a dark suit and clerical collar. The butler stiffened to attention. Stefan stood up. Hannah did the same, not quite sure why she did. Lester scowled, irritated to see the butler hovering in the room, as ever, watching them.
‘You can leave all that.’
The butler picked up a plate of fried eggs and left, with a resentful scowl. The High Commissioner waited until the door had shut firmly behind him before he spoke. He was concerned and agitated this morning.
‘This is Count Edward O’Rourke, our bishop.’
The bishop nodded, not agitated, but as grim-faced as Lester. Stefan regarded the two men, remembering what he knew about Danzig now. They seemed an unlikely bulwark against Adolf Hitler. Seán Lester looked like a bank manager in a small Irish town; Edward O’Rourke looked like the town’s parish priest, round faced, with a housekeeper who fed him too well.
‘It’s a mess, a very unpleasant one.’ Lester shook his head. ‘From the sound of it I don’t suppose it’s really your mess, Gillespie, but it seems to come on your coat-tails. The priest Miss Rosen was here to talk to, Father –’
The High Commissioner stopped, looking at O’Rourke.
‘Father Byrne is dead.’ The bishop’s voice was oddly matter-of-fact. ‘The police pulled his body out of the Mottlau River early this morning. He is in the mortuary. The cause of death was drowning apparently. The police inspector at Weidengasse hasn’t said as much but the question of suicide is hanging in the air. That’s the implication anyway. I’m not sure I can rule it out, either, not after the conversation I had with Father Byrne yesterday.’
He looked from Hannah to Stefan. Neither of them was sure whether it was a look of compassion or accusation. After several seconds his gaze returned to Hannah.
‘I know the details of his relationship with your friend, Miss Field. I knew nothing about it before yesterday. There were a lot of things I didn’t know about.’ He was silent for a moment. He wasn’t thinking about Francis Byrne and Susan Field, but Francis Byrne and Hugo Keller. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know how much longer Francis could have held it all in, but your appearance started to break down the wall. And Mr Gillespie’s arrival a little later,’ he turned to Stefan, ‘well, you are a policeman, aren’t you? I imagine your approach was harder. You also knew more about him, more about what happened to Miss Field. Perhaps more than he could cope with.’
Stefan felt Hannah’s eyes on him, questioning, as O’Rourke spoke. He hadn’t told her what he knew about how Susan had died yet. He hadn’t had time. And he needed the right time too. But all she saw was that he had still been holding something back, even now, even here, after everything else.
‘The relationship between your friend and Francis belongs to them alone now I think, Miss Rosen, except to s
ay that you should not underestimate the feelings he had for her, or what he suffered because of the weakness he showed in abandoning her. It was weak; it was selfish. His death doesn’t alter that. The fact that she died in the way she did was cruel enough; the idea that she had been killed, murdered – that was more than he could face.’
There was no reason for either Hannah or Stefan to feel much for Francis Byrne. Stefan knew enough to believe he had it coming. Hannah still knew less, but knew that if the priest wasn’t responsible for Susan’s death himself his lies had protected whoever was, whether inadvertently or not. Yet as they listened to O’Rourke’s quiet voice it didn’t seem that neat.
‘How long had he been an informer?’ said Lester.
‘Long enough,’ replied the bishop. He looked at Stefan again. ‘How this man Keller found him here, I don’t know. But I do know the Nazis and their obsession with gathering information. From Dublin to Danzig isn’t so surprising. And once he’d found Francis he knew what to do with all the weakness and selfishness, the fear and guilt. He threatened to expose him and destroy him. Sadly Francis didn’t have the faith in me he should have done. Perhaps that was my fault. I was too concerned with great events to see a man in need before my eyes. He was Keller’s spy. I’m sure you have worked that out yourself. There are people who have trusted me, confided in me, whose names will be in the hands of the Gestapo and the SS.’
He was silent, knowing all too well what that could mean.
‘You see I can’t stand in the pulpit and tell people not to vote for the bastards, even if everyone knows that’s what I think. They’d want me sacked and the Church would sack me. It’s too busy making sure it’s not on the wrong side to make sure it’s on the right side. I think of Martin Luther a lot these days. Simply to stand here is perhaps all I can do. Father Byrne was a victim of his own weakness, but he was also a victim of the darkness that’s all around us now. Yet he found his way back at the end. You may not think that matters, but I’m a priest. I see it differently. Perhaps he wouldn’t have found his way without you two. Angels come in many guises, we’re told.’
As he finished he was looking at Hannah again, and she had no doubt that what she saw now was compassion. He stepped forward, taking out a letter.
‘This was in his room, Miss Rosen. He meant to send it to you. It’s addressed to your hotel.’ He turned back to Stefan. ‘I think Father Byrne went to see this man Keller. I imagine to tell him he would no longer be blackmailed. I want to know what happened. It may be that he drowned. It may be that he killed himself. If it was something else, then I probably won’t be able to do anything anyway. Earthly justice won’t be on offer. But I have another angel to serve, the recording angel. Since there isn’t a policeman I can trust, your opinion will have to do instead. Will you look at the body?’
*
The River Vistula rises in the Carpathian Mountains, over a thousand kilometres south of the Free City. It flows through the plains of Poland, past Kraków and Warsaw, and eventually issues into the Bay of Danzig and the Baltic Sea through a delta of sluggish channels and lagoons. For almost a thousand years it has been the great artery of Poland in every sense. When Poland disappeared from the map of Europe, as it did from time to time, for Poles their country was somehow still alive in the great river. In Danzig the Vistula was the Weichsel. The city ended where a branch of the Vistula, the Mottlau River, flowed out of the port and into the silted and moribund channel that was called the Dead Vistula, Die Tote Weichsel. It was here, by the seaplane station on the shore of the Dead Vistula, that the morning flight from Stockholm so narrowly missed the floating body of Father Francis Byrne. A priest who rediscovers his religion can be dangerous, not least to himself.
The body was not at the mortuary. When the bishop phoned the police station in Weidengasse, close to where Father Byrne had been found, he was told it had already been moved. Now the bishop’s car drove Stefan Gillespie and Count O’Rourke out through the gates of the High Commissioner’s residence on to Silberhütte, into Holzmarkt and Kohlenmarkt. Outside a polling station, a gang of brown-shirted SA men stood, almost blocking the entrance, checking the people going in to vote. The car continued past the Danziger Hof and into An der Reitbahn. It was only now, as he passed the building with the great dome and the Russian-looking spires, that Stefan realised it was the city’s synagogue, sitting with unintended defiance at the heart of Danzig. It wasn’t mentioned in the guide book he had looked through that first night at the hotel; it wasn’t even on the map. In front of the synagogue a group of boys in Hitler Youth uniforms held up election placards and flags. Several of them were stretching out a banner. It became legible as the bishop’s car passed. ‘Die Juden sind unser Unglück.’ The Jews are our misfortune. O’Rourke didn’t notice. He’d seen it too many times. In Vorstädtischer Graben they passed another polling station and another SA gang noting the names of the voters. It was unlikely very many of Danzig’s Jews would be pushing their way past the brown shirts to cast their votes.
As Stefan looked out at the city, Edward O’Rourke seemed to be doing the same thing, but his eyes didn’t see very much. He was weighing the consequences of what had happened. Then, quite abruptly, as they crossed the river, he started to talk about Francis Byrne. He didn’t look round. Stefan wasn’t really sure the words were addressed to him at all.
‘I met Francis at the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. They assigned him to me as a guide. He had good German and an interest in genealogy. My family fled Ireland after the battle of the Boyne. They ended up in Russia, fighting for the czars. It was the family business. My father intended me for a general but the way things have turned out in Russia I probably made a wise decision to turn my hand to something else. Francis ended up spending more time arguing about the future of the Church than looking into my family tree. We disagreed about a lot but he was very bright. I liked him. When I left, I offered him a job, if he ever wanted one. I didn’t hear from him for nearly three years, and then unexpectedly he appeared in Danzig. He wasn’t the same man though. Somehow all his vitality had gone; along with all his curiosity, all his passion. But I didn’t see how troubled he was. There is a high price to pay for that now. It was only when he came to me yesterday …’
O’Rourke stopped as suddenly as he had started, and he said no more. They drove across the river on to the Speicherinsel. In Milchkannengasse they pulled up outside Grund & Co, funeral directors.
A considerable amount of the undertaker’s art had already been expended on Father Francis Byrne. His face was an unnatural, almost clownish pink. His hair had been oiled and combed back in such neat, stiff lines that it looked like a wig. He was wearing a dark suit and clerical collar that had certainly not accompanied him into the dark waters of the Mottlau. The coffin he lay in was lined with white silk, which only accentuated the pinkness of his flesh. He looked like a mannequin from the windows of Freymann’s department store. Herr Grund scurried behind the bishop with a combination of fawning obsequiousness and ill-disguised fear. It was a privilege to have such an eminent personage on his premises, but the corpse had been brought by the Gestapo. O’Rourke bent over the body of the priest. He made the sign of the cross on his forehead and prayed silently. As he straightened up he turned to the undertaker. ‘Leave us alone, please.’ The words were said quietly and graciously. The undertaker hesitated. The bishop’s stern eyes said what his words had not. ‘Now piss off.’ The undertaker bowed, walking deferentially backwards before leaving the room.
‘Well?’
‘Apart from the fact that he’s made-up like a –’ Stefan stopped.
‘Like a madam in a whorehouse.’ O’Rourke took a handkerchief from his pocket and applied it firmly to Byrne’s face, wiping away the pink cream that had been spread and plastered into the skin. Stefan had seen policemen more squeamish with the dead. As he scraped around the eyes the skin was dark and bruised underneath. There were cuts on the cheeks as well. He pulled the upper lip away. There were b
lack gaps where teeth had been.
‘Look under his shirt.’
Stefan unbuttoned the jacket. He pulled away the shirt and collar. There were more bruises, cuts, weals. He pressed down on to the rib cage.
‘Broken ribs.’
They looked round as someone entered the room. There was a click of heels. Stefan immediately recognised his Gestapo interrogator, Klaus Rothe.
‘Kriminaloberassistent Rothe, Your Excellency.’
He stepped forward, holding out a report. As the bishop eyed him carefully the Gestapo officer looked sideways at Stefan, frowning. He was the last person he could have expected to find with the Bishop of Danzig.
‘The Kriminalkommissar extends his sympathies.’
‘And this is?’
‘The report into the accident, Your Excellency.’
‘I understand Father Byrne drowned.’
‘Correct.’
‘There was no crime then?’
‘Correct.’
‘So why is the Gestapo involved?’
It was hard for Rothe to suppress a smile as he gave what he felt was a very neat reply. ‘We take the death of a priest seriously, Your Excellency.’
‘And before he drowned, what do you think happened?’
‘Impossible to say, Your Excellency. There were no witnesses.’
‘I’m sure. And you are certain about drowning?’
‘Unfortunately, yes. There was a full medical examination.’
‘Take a look, Kriminaloberassistent.’ The bishop moved away from the coffin and gestured for the Gestapo man to step forward. He didn’t. ‘No other theories? He couldn’t have beaten himself to death by any chance?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand, Your Excellency.’
‘I’m sure you understand perfectly.’ Edward O’Rourke turned back to the coffin. He made the sign of the cross. As he left the room he screwed up the report he had just been given by Rothe and dropped it on the floor.
The Gestapo man was staring at Stefan again, about to speak.
The City of Shadows Page 29