Stefan didn’t know any of that. But if it had felt like it was all over, sitting in the Senate President’s office with Seán Lester, it didn’t seem that simple as he walked past the police guns into the cathedral that evening. He still had a job to do. He still had to get Hannah out of Danzig.
The cathedral was crowded for vespers. Over the slow reverberation of the great organ the choir sang the Magnificat. He recognised Mozart’s music, though he had last heard it when he sang in St Patrick’s at barely eleven years old. There were some things that stayed inside you. ‘Magnificat anima mea Dominum.’ My soul doth magnify the Lord. ‘Et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo.’ And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. ‘Suscepit Israel puerum suum recordatus misericordiae suae.’ He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel. Stefan looked at the Nazi uniforms scattered through the congregation around him. Beside him two men in brown shirts gazed towards the high altar, their lips moving silently, almost in unison, as rosary beads slipped through their fingers. It was not usual for the Bishop of Danzig to lead vespers, but he was here as he had been at every Mass throughout that election day. If all he could do was to stand he would stand; nothing that had happened would change his mind about doing so, not even the threat of an assassin’s bullet. When he stepped forward to speak the final prayer and bless his people there were many who spoke the words with him. ‘A cunctis nos, quaesumus, Domine, defende perculis.’ Defend us we beseech thee, O Lord, from all dangers. It was a prayer the Nazis in the cathedral heard only as familiar ritual. There were others in the congregation that evening who heard it very differently.
The cathedral cleared slowly. The men in uniform were the first to leave with their families, hurrying back into the city for the end of the election and the celebrations that would follow. The overwhelming feeling that this was their day, the day that would change everything, shone in their faces. It was what they had prayed for, standing beside those who were praying for anything but that change. Other people were slower to go, stopping to talk to friends, sitting quietly in the pews, lighting candles, standing in the quiet evening light beyond the cathedral doors. They were more reluctant to take the trams home to Oliva, Zoppot, Langfuhr, Brösen, Weichselmünde and Danzig itself, where they too would pour into the red, white and black streets to celebrate what they had prayed would not happen.
Stefan sat at the end of a pew until the cathedral was almost empty. He looked up to see a nun approaching him. She spoke to him in English.
‘Please follow me. The bishop is waiting.’
She walked to one side of the nave and opened a small door. It led out to a cloister. There was still sunlight on the tree at its centre but they were walking in deep shadow. Stefan’s feet sounded on the stone floor. Her footsteps were silent. He remembered the moment when Hannah Rosen had slapped the Mother Superior at the Convent of the Good Shepherd. It seemed a long time ago now, and it seemed as if every decision along the way had been someone else’s. Whether it was the wall around the death of Susan Field, the threat that still hung over his son, his suspension from the Gardaí, even coming to Danzig, he felt as if he had been dragged along by events he had no control over. Perhaps he’d only kidded himself it had ever been different since Maeve died. What had he done in that time? When had his decisions or his actions made anything at all happen? Hannah was the reason he was here, the only reason. He’d thought that was his decision but it wasn’t. He’d been dragged to Danzig too, to find her. And that would be over soon. They had to leave. And when it was all over they wouldn’t really talk about what they felt. He had found her again. Now she was only something else to lose.
An archway on the other side of the cloister led to a cold, stone passage. There was a row of ancient, oak doors. The nun stopped at one of them and knocked. There was a voice from inside. She opened the door and waited for Stefan to go in. He was in a bare, white-walled room. It contained little more than a bed, a small writing table and a bookcase. It was lit by a lamp on the table. The only natural light came from an iron grille high up on a wall. It reminded him of a police cell. On the bed the vestments Edward O’Rourke had been wearing at vespers had been dumped in an untidy heap. The bishop emerged through a door at the side of the cell, doing up his shirt.
‘Lester tells me I’m quite likely to survive.’
‘He seems confident enough now, sir.’
‘I suppose that’s something.’ He sat down on the bed, pushing aside the vestments to put on his shoes and socks. He looked at Stefan and smiled.
‘Thank you, Mr Gillespie.’
Stefan nodded awkwardly.
‘I’m not as nonchalant about death as I’m supposed to be in my profession, I assure you, but there are other things to think about, and other deaths too, real ones. Several people have died in all this, is that right?’
‘Yes.’ He assumed O’Rourke knew no more than that.
‘I shall pray for them all, including the ones who were involved in the plot to kill me. It doesn’t come easily, but it goes with the job. You saw the two Jewish men who were murdered? Miss Rosen explained a little. It makes sense of course. If the lie is big enough, isn’t that what they say? The desire to believe the Jews are responsible for every evil you care to mention is a madness even decent people seem unable to resist. The Church has a lot to answer for, but it’s more than that I’m afraid. Have you read Hitler’s book?’
‘No.’
‘People tell me the Jewish question is peripheral to what he believes. It’s all about a strong Germany and a good life for everyone. But that’s the self-deceit that’s required to stomach the man. They want to believe he doesn’t know what he’s saying. Read his book. His hatred of the Jews is everything. It’s all there is. It’s the rest that is peripheral, even Germany.’ As he stood, he pulled up his braces. He reached for a black jacket and put it on.
‘Let’s find Miss Rosen.’
Stefan followed the bishop back into the cold corridor.
‘The palace is being renovated at the moment. The intention is to turn part of it into a museum. Not that there’s much involved in that; it’s already a museum. I’ve never warmed to the idea of living in a museum. The sisters are letting me use a room in the convent’s guest wing. People come and go, so sometimes I’m in one cell, sometimes another. But it’s really all I need. And do you know the best thing about it? Nobody knows where I am.’
They walked along another corridor lined with doors, upstairs, along another corridor, downstairs to another one that looked identical to the first.
‘Can I ask you something about Father Byrne, Your Excellency?’
‘I don’t promise to be able to answer.’
‘He worked very closely with a priest in Ireland, Robert Fitzpatrick.’
‘I know who Monsignor Fitzpatrick is.’
‘Did he talk about him?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I’m asking because I’m a policeman.’
‘I met the monsignor only once, in Dublin in 1932, at the Eucharistic Congress. I can’t say I liked him. I like his ideas even less. God must have a reason for allowing such people before his altar. I think it’s to make sure we don’t forget who delivered Christ to the Romans for crucifixion. It doesn’t matter in the least that they were Jews; what matters is that they were priests. But much as I dislike the man’s views, why would they interest the police?’
‘Monsignor Fitzpatrick helped to provide us with a statement from Father Byrne. In it Father Byrne lied about his relationship with Susan Field, whose death is the subject of a police investigation. But then you know that.’
O’Rourke simply nodded.
‘I’m not suggesting the monsignor is in any way involved in what happened, of course, but I think he has information that could help us, that he may have been reluctant to give, because of his friendship with Father Byrne.’ He was being careful with his words. However different Edward O’Rourke was from Robert Fitzpatrick he knew that the
Church still looked after its own.
‘I think friendship would be overstating it, Sergeant Gillespie.’
‘They really had fallen out then?’
‘You seem to know that already. I’m not an easy man to interrogate. I’ll tell you what I know, because I think Francis would have wanted me to. Monsignor Fitzpatrick represents a vision of the Church that isn’t very far from the ranting of Adolf Hitler as far as I’m concerned. We’re all at the mercy of a Jewish-Communist-Capitalist-Masonic-Atheist conspiracy that has as its only aim the destruction of Christian civilisation. You’d think that kind of insanity would get pretty short shrift in the Church these days, but I’m afraid not. Having identified a phantom enemy, too many of my colleagues want to believe that our enemy’s enemy is our friend. They see democracy itself as the root of the problem and quietly, very quietly they whisper that Hitler may save us from it. They want a pope who will stand above it all and won’t point out the darkness. They want a man who will only ask what’s best for the Church when he should ask what Christ would do. The monsignor represents the noisier end of all that. Father Byrne was his protégé when I first met him. I thought he was worth more, as a man and as a priest. I couldn’t change his opinions. He was as fanatical as Fitzpatrick. It was the woman he fell in love with who took away the poison. Whatever sins he committed by loving her, I think she saved him from worse ones.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘None of that is of any use to you of course, Sergeant.’
‘No.’
‘I know Monsignor Fitzpatrick put Francis in touch with the man Keller. He did tell me that.’
‘Knowing he was an abortionist?’
‘So it seems.’ The bishop stopped at a door.
‘But why?’
‘You must ask him. In the light of what you think happened that’s your job, whether anyone else likes it or not. We all have our jobs, Stefan.’
He smiled again in a way that made Stefan feel that the bishop didn’t much like his own job very much, but that somehow that wasn’t the point. He knocked gently on the door then turned and walked away. The door opened. It was Hannah. She was laughing with relief, seeing him there now. Even though she knew he was all right she needed to see him. She needed to touch him. She pulled him into the room. It was another simple cell; the same bed, table, chair. He took her in his arms and kissed her. And he left the thought that it would soon be over between them somewhere else.
*
They spent the last night back at the Hotel Danziger Hof. It would be a noisy night in the hotel and in the Kohlenmarkt outside. The bar and the restaurant were already full of Nazi uniforms, black and brown; wives and girlfriends hung on the arms of the uniforms. Trays of beer and sekt circulated in the lobby for anyone who wanted them. It was obvious they had been circulating for some time, and since somewhere the people of Danzig would be picking up the tab for all this the waiters were as drunk as everyone else. As Hannah and Stefan stood at the reception desk two glasses of sekt were thrust into their hands. An SS officer clapped them both on the shoulders and laughed. Words were unnecessary. It was the man who had winked at Hannah that first morning. He winked again. As the hotel manager handed them the key he smiled a satisfied and supercilious smile that said, unmistakably, ‘That’ll show you, you arseholes.’ He still didn’t know who they were, but he knew they were trouble-makers and foreigners, and she was a Jewess. Still, it wouldn’t be very long now before he didn’t have to put up with Jews in his hotel.
They walked towards the staircase. Unless they wanted to join the celebrations the bedroom was the safest place. As they reached the bottom of the stairs the band in the dining room stopped playing abruptly. A ripple of excitement spread through the lobby. There was a crackle of static, very loud. People laughed and then started to grab for every drink in sight. Bottles of sekt were popping all around. There was cheering and applause. The static was coming from speakers that had been fixed to pillars all round the Danziger Hof. Then, as the manager tuned the dial on the radio behind the reception desk, there was music. A military band played. The music faded. ‘Gauleiter Forster will now read the results of the Danzig election.’ Hands shot up in salute. ‘Heil Hitler!’ And then there was an expectant silence.
Stefan and Hannah stood by the stairs, listening with everyone else. There was the rustling of papers and what sounded like a hesitant cough. The voice of the leader of Danzig’s Nazis, the protégé of Hitler, Albert Forster, was quiet and deliberate. It felt like a man who was weighing every word. ‘The full count of the votes cast in the election to Danzig’s Volkstag gives yet another victory to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, another victory for German Danzig, another step on the road to reunification with the fatherland, and another step towards –’ There was silence. Forster’s voice had become quieter as he spoke. It was hesitancy. This was not a man weighing words to find the right way to celebrate the landslide they all expected – it was a man who didn’t know what to say. ‘Towards victory! Sieg Heil!’ All around Hannah and Stefan people raised their arms again and echoed the cry of victory. But they had all heard the hesitation. There were too many victories in there somehow to believe in victory. Where was the full count they wanted to hear? Where was the ninety per cent of the votes that would sweep away the opposition and the decadent constitution of the League of Nations and the interfering Poles and the High Commissioner and let them do whatever they wished? They weren’t expecting steps; they wanted leaps.
The radio was still silent except for a crackle of static. The station wasn’t ready for such a short speech. It was quiet in the Danziger Hof too. The idea that the result was not the triumph that had been proclaimed beforehand was in every mind, but no one wanted to be the first to say it. Abruptly there was music again as a needle fell heavily on to a record. It was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In the ballroom the band took it as a cue. For a few moments Beethoven vied with ‘The Sun Has Got His Hat On’; then the radio was switched off. The buzz of conversation started up at the same time, concerned and surprised and puzzled under the safe, muffling music. Hannah and Stefan turned back to the staircase. A waiter was beside them, with an ice bucket and a bottle of champagne. He smiled a conspiratorial smile.
‘So what happened?’ asked Stefan.
‘Fifty-nine per cent.’ The waiter’s whisper was conspiratorial too; he grinned happily. ‘That’s not much more than they got in the last election.’
‘Why don’t I take that?’ Stefan picked up the bottle of champagne.
‘Help yourself. It’s their money.’
Stefan and Hannah continued up the stairs. She put her arm through his as she had that night in Grafton Street, but there was something more intimate about it now; perhaps it was because all either of them wanted to do was sleep. Downstairs the sense that everything had not gone to plan was already disappearing. Triumph was required and triumph would be delivered. Their faith was in their Führer and their day was coming. The dance floor was full; the corks were popping; everyone was singing. There was no syncopation; the rhythm was a fast, flat march. It was swaggering, insistent, joyless, brutal, mindless, remorseless, irresistible. It would carry on long into the night. ‘He’s been tanning niggers out in Timbuktu, now he’s coming back to do the same to you. So jump into your sunbath, hip-hip-hip-hooray, the sun has got his hat on and he’s coming out today!’
*
They left the next morning, on the seaplane to Kalmar and Stockholm. As there was now no one in Danzig or Berlin who had ever known anything about a plot to kill Bishop Edward O’Rourke, there was no one with any interest in either Hannah Rosen or Stefan Gillespie. But Seán Lester thought it was still better for them not to travel home through Germany. There were always lists and there were always Nazis with their own view of what working towards the Führer meant. At around the same time as they moved out on to the Dead Vistula from the seaplane station, Father Francis Byrne was being interred in the cathedral cemetery at Oliva. The bodies of Johannes Berent and Leon K
amnitzer, now surplus to requirements, were never found. They had been dumped somewhere in the forests above Danzig. Hugo Keller would find an unmarked grave in Langfuhr. The man called Karl was buried in the cemetery in Oliva too, close to Francis Byrne, after a requiem Mass at the cathedral. His family was given no explanation about where he died or why he had a bullet hole through the back of his head. Kriminaloberassistent Rothe was buried with full Party honours, and after the funeral, to mark his passing, a journalist from the Social Democrat Danziger Volstimme very carelessly fell under a tram and died. It was the least Rothe’s friends could do. The Nazis still ruled Danzig, but Lester was there too, so was O’Rourke; and somehow enough people had braved the thugs at the polling stations to keep the Free City alive for a few more years.
Now, as the Dornier Delphin lifted up from the muddy waters of the Dead Vistula and banked over Danzig, the sun was shining. Hannah and Stefan looked down. It seemed peaceful enough. But there was no peace of course, and there would be no peace to come. In less than five years Seán Lester would be gone, along with the city’s obstreperous Russian-Irish bishop. The first shots of the Second World War would be fired at the Polish fort on the Westerplatte by a German battleship in the Tote Weichsel. Most of Danzig’s Jews would have left by then; the Great Synagogue would be razed to the ground so no sign of its existence remained. Some of the Free City’s Jews would find safety, but many would simply be rounded up by the Nazis later, somewhere else in Europe, and sent to the ghettos and death camps. In less than ten years the German city of Danzig would be reduced to smouldering rubble by the guns and bombs of the Red Army. A quarter of its population would die in the battle for the city and in the forced marches and deportations that followed. No one would be very interested in mourning them. It was their war after all. And when the city was built again, German brick by German brick, it would be as the Polish city of Gda´nsk; it would only look like the German city of Danzig that once stood in exactly the same place. And the language that had filled its streets and buildings for five hundred years would disappear, along with the people who had once lived there. In all the rebuilding, though, no one would ever bother to rebuild the synagogue.
The City of Shadows Page 32