by Chris Petit
He bandaged the cut using a clean handkerchief, pulling it tight and making a knot, reciting, ‘Left over right, right over left.’
He went to the door.
‘There, you carry my mark. Happy hunting. Take tomorrow to acquaint yourself with your new role. Think of strategies. We will meet again on Monday and begin in earnest. In the meantime, enjoy your day off.’
40
The back exit of the holding centre took Sybil out into Sophienstrasse. She was still in a state of disbelief at the events of the last thirty-six hours.
She had walked in the same way on first being taken there, through a garden gate next door to the Evangelical church. The gate was locked. The guard told her she would be given her own key, which she used to let herself out into the street that Sunday morning. She supposed it was like checking in and out of a hotel, not that she ever had, all very civilised and polite. On arrival her papers had been checked by a concierge, who showed her the register which needed signing every time she left and returned. The place was in noted contrast to the block where she had lived with her mother: clean-smelling, uncrowded, silent and still. The privilege of space, she thought.
Her single room was basically furnished but clean, with proper sheets. The first-floor common room was where meals were taken. Her companions were nine young men and three women. Everyone tried very hard to behave as though their unique situation was ordinary, but the atmosphere was brittle and Sybil supposed this was how a laboratory rat must feel: cared for, caged and inspected. People were friendly and polite in a robotic way. They said little, flicking through magazines and playing table tennis. Some were still out working. The name Stella came up and Sybil wondered if it was the dangerously beautiful Stella from fashion school.
As Sybil walked out that crisp dawn, taking her first uncertain steps down the empty street, the same question drummed in her head: how realistic was the task she had been set of trying to lure this killer? Not at all. It would be only a matter of days before Gersten made her hunt down other fugitives like the rest of them.
At the same time she felt giddy at the prospect of seeing Lore.
As she walked on, gaining confidence, seeing everything with fresh eyes, a part of her she didn’t much like told her the whole thing could be seen as an unexpected relief in a horrible way. The pressure of survival had been removed. She could move freely. She could still see Lore, if they were careful. She didn’t have to fear patrols.
They were bound to pack her off in the end along with the rest, she was under no illusion about that. But in the meantime, because of her specific task, the question of betrayal was neither here nor there.
She had wanted to ask whether any of the catchers didn’t come back at night, whether they jumped off bridges or drowned themselves in lakes or just started running and didn’t stop until they died from exhaustion. But she could answer the question herself. Only those with a taste for compromise had been chosen.
Gersten had said to her, not unkindly, ‘It’s you and me now.’
After Torstrasse, Invalidenstrasse and Alt Moabit, over the river and down Franklinstrasse and across the canal and down to Hardenbergstrasse, past old haunts from student days; some of the cafés gone, some still there. She thought of Kranzler’s white chairs and summer drinks. In the window of a closed restaurant she read an ominous sign: ‘I charged extortionate prices which is why I am in a concentration camp now.’
The sight of her reflection in shop windows made her wish she were someone else. She had never done that before, not even at her lowest. Turn right down the Ku’damm and she could be with Lore in twenty minutes. Instead she turned left, back through the Tiergarten. The bare branches of the few trees left reminded her of lung diagrams in biology classes. She tried to imagine her breathing stopped. Seeing how most things broke down, it seemed a miracle the heart lasted as long as it did.
Would she remain Sybil Todermann until the moment of extinction, or become lost in the larger universal pain?
Men in wheelchairs were being pushed with a mournful air. No one looked happy. There were fewer dogs and kids. She talked briefly with one dog owner, an old woman standing idle while the dog rooted around pointlessly. It was the first time she had talked to anyone in her new role.
She rode trams, standing on the cold, open platform, watching the receding street. She took buses. She got on trains at random, making an effort to run up the stairs, despite her aching legs. She stared blatantly, hoping to be denounced, so she could show her new card, with a frozen smile. Before she had always felt horribly conspicuous. Protected now, she may as well have been invisible.
Somewhere along the way she became aware of the tall young man behind her. Was she being followed? She saw him again at Bahnhof Zoo in the arcade, a space mainly given over to limbless veterans, who weren’t supposed to beg but no one stopped them. A patrol passed and Sybil instinctively held her breath before remembering the card in her pocket. Outside she did a swift U-turn, as if she had forgotten something, and nearly bumped into him. His hat hid most of the white hair.
Her first reaction was anger that Gersten thought she could not be trusted. She realised she had seen the young man before, standing in the crowd in Rosenstrasse, as it was getting dark, before her arrest.
He knew he had been spotted but continued to tail her, looking sheepish. She was reminded of times when men had followed her in the street, plucking up the courage to approach.
They were spared the embarrassment of standing next to each other at tram stops because the streets had become crowded with workers returning from night shifts. At one point Sybil thought she had lost him when he failed to get on because of the squash. She loitered in Nollendorfplatz to see if he turned up. Sure enough, he stepped down from the next tram as the clock struck. Sybil wondered how she would get through the rest of the day.
At the Bollenmüller she was served by the same waitress with greasy hair and had to send back her omelette because the white was uncooked. Like a thrifty little hausfrau she paid out of her per diem, collected and signed for that morning in the cubbyhole by the back door where she checked in and out.
Sybil entertained the ridiculous notion of summoning the young man loitering outside and offering him a cup of tea and a truce for the day, so they would spend the afternoon as if life were ordinary, before formally shaking hands and departing.
At Brunnenstrasse she got on a train and got off as the doors closed, crossed the platform and jumped on one as it left in the opposite direction. She saw the man stranded on the platform. Feeling a rush of excitement, she resisted the temptation to wave.
After one stop she turned round and returned to Brunnenstrasse and walked to the Jewish hospital, where she found Franz in the day room. She knew he hung out there when off duty because he didn’t like where he lived. He had told her pointedly it was usually possible to find a bed with one of the nurses, and the kitchen was generous with its handouts.
He gave her a crooked smile.
She had come to see if he was safe after not turning up the other day. She could tell he was hoping she had really come back because she wanted to resume their relationship.
She said nothing of Gersten, made out she was still underground and was desperate for papers. It was impossible for her to stay where she was.
Playing along, he said he would see what he could do.
‘Can you protect me? I can’t afford to wait.’ Suppressing a spasm of revulsion, she forced herself to put her hand on his arm and say, ‘Whatever it takes. I see that now.’
Part of her was thinking if Gersten ever made her a catcher she would settle the score by turning in Franz. Another part of her said Franz was her likeliest lead to the man she was looking for. She was sure he knew much more than he let on.
She had no clues to the identity of her quarry or his whereabouts. He could be underground or he could be sitting in the next room at the hospital. He seemed to have a freedom of movement. Gersten said he liked dancing and ha
d been to the place on Auguststrasse. What was she supposed to do? Get a job as a waitress? Enrol for dancing lessons? On the other hand, it was a shrinking world. He liked girls. He liked dancing. The chances were he was the same age as her or not much older. Perhaps she had known him through college, as part of that large, party crowd. They’d stuck together. She had the strongest image of sitting with Franz in a café and the same way they had of warming their hands on their tea mugs. It even crossed her mind the person she had been sent to find was in fact Franz.
After the hospital she didn’t spot the young man and took the train back to Charlottenburg and went to the Ufa-Palast in Hardenbergstrasse, not bothering to check what she was going to see.
Schlegel watched her go into the crowded cinema for the matinee of the big new colour film that had opened that week, which Otto Keleman had missed the press show for because they were getting drunk. Schlegel thought about going in but fantasy was not to his taste. He asked the cashier when the programme finished. It sounded improbably long, with well over two hours still to go. Maybe he would come back and see what Sybil did after the film. His feet ached. With nothing better to do, he went to a café over the road and sat reading a newspaper and watching the sparse Sunday traffic.
It had been easy enough to track Sybil’s whereabouts as it was known that Gersten’s catchers all lodged in the same building, around the corner from where Schlegel lived. That was Morgen’s idea.
He had cursed himself for losing her in Brunnenstrasse, hung around on the platform not knowing what to do, then spotted her ten minutes later when she came back and didn’t see him. After that he had hung back and got better. Neither of them was a professional. She didn’t look around any more, thinking she had lost him. After waiting at the hospital, he followed her back, taking the precaution of not getting in the same carriage.
He was starting to doze when he saw Sybil walk briskly out of the cinema with a young woman. He hurriedly paid and followed. The light was going. They seemed tense. Schlegel didn’t know the companion. He could just make them out as they walked arm-in-arm, their strides matching, heads close.
They kissed when they thought no one was looking. From the way Sybil cupped the back of her companion’s head it had to be proper open-mouthed kissing. They acted more like a real couple than many ordinary ones.
The cinema must have been a fallback arrangement in case they became separated, Schlegel told himself, staring, not wishing to but incapable of averting his eyes. When they went into one of the few cafés still open he took up a position in a doorway across the road and watched them holding hands in a way that didn’t draw attention. When the companion seemed to look straight at him he stood very still and thought about the distance between them, the traffic and the fading light.
They weren’t hard to keep up with as he followed them to the Ku’damm and down a long, straight street to the left with no turnings, past a big church, and down to Hochmeisterplatz where they entered a building that Schlegel recognised as the block where Francis Alwynd lived, and realised they must be his stowaways.
‘This is my friend August. He’s a policeman,’ said Alwynd with typical tactlessness.
Schlegel thought the two women put on a brave show, considering.
They made excruciatingly awkward conversation while Alwynd fiddled in the kitchen making tea. As was the way now, neither woman was introduced nor volunteered her name. Schlegel asked what they did. Sybil’s companion said she was a translator and photographer. Sybil said she was a clothes designer.
Schlegel thought carefully before he said, ‘I know, I have seen some.’
When Sybil paled visibly he wanted to say he was trying to show he was not hostile and she was wrong to assume otherwise.
The two women prattled on about the film they had just seen, talking to each other rather than him. What a spectacle! Such fantastic colour!
Schlegel realised she must think he had been sent by Gersten.
Sybil said, ‘We haven’t seen you here before.’
‘In fact I was last week. We had hoped you might join us.’
‘Well, here we are,’ said the companion facetiously.
Alwynd walked into the room with a tray, saying, ‘Tea and sudden death.’
He turned to Sybil and asked in his appalling German if she would be mother.
Alwynd sat back, beamed and said, ‘Mea culpa,’ looking not in the slightest remorseful.
Schlegel suspected Alwynd enjoyed making drama from other people’s lives.
Alwynd finally said, ‘Francis may have dropped a bit of a clanger. I was in my cups the other night and told August I might be harbouring a couple of runaways.’
Sybil didn’t understand as they were speaking English. Her companion looked shocked. Schlegel told Sybil what Alwynd had said and she gave a small scream and ran from the room, followed by the other woman.
‘It makes no difference to me,’ said Alwynd airily. ‘They should know that, but at the same time it’s not safe here in the long run because the Foreign Office is always sticking its nose in my affairs.’
He stood up. ‘Better go and make my peace.’
He strolled off towards the back of the apartment, apparently unconcerned about the damage he could cause, calling over his shoulder, ‘I presume you aren’t here to arrest them.’
Schlegel felt a fool for compromising everyone. Alwynd always pleaded exemption through ignorance. Schlegel could see him announcing in his faux naive way he thought everything was above board because he had a friend who was a policeman.
They trooped back in. Sybil looked miserable. Her companion gave Schlegel looks of varying hostility. Schlegel steepled his fingers and tried to appear lost in significant thought. Morgen would know how to handle the situation.
Schlegel asked to speak to Sybil in private. Alwynd was immediately interested. For her the whole thing must be like being stuck in some ghastly play. Schlegel knew she was working for the Gestapo, but Alwynd didn’t. It was possible she hadn’t got around to telling her companion. And she could of course report Alwynd, if she believed it was to her advantage.
Sybil blew her nose and stood up. Schlegel excused himself awkwardly.
They stood in the corridor. She did not wish to extend the courtesy of taking him into a room. He saw quite another side of her. Her eyes were hard with anger. At the same time she was shivering.
His rehearsed little speech vanished. When he tried to reach out to reassure she flinched. He let his hand drop.
Making an effort to overcome his hopelessness, he said, ‘I know Gersten is using you. I think you and I are looking for the same man. He is known as Grigor. His real name is Yakov Zorin.’
Seeing her reaction, he asked if she knew him. She said no but he could tell she was lying. Now was not the moment to pursue the point. First he had to try to win her trust.
‘I may be able to try to help you.’
‘May be able?’
‘Can try to help you.’
‘You have to help my friend too,’ she said quickly.
‘Of course,’ he said, knowing it was a promise he couldn’t keep. ‘What’s her name?’
Seeing her hesitate, he said it could wait.
‘Lore,’ she said.
He asked hers although he knew it.
‘Sybil,’ she said.
Was he using her as a way of getting to Grigor or did he really want to help? He was still confused by the sight of them kissing.
Alwynd, who enjoyed being crass, said, ‘Ah, the lovebirds are back. Secret or share?’
‘Oh, share,’ said Sybil. ‘Our friend here thinks he might be able to introduce me to clients who need tailoring done, which is very generous.’
Schlegel observed Lore. She must have worked out something was going on, if Sybil had failed to come home for the last two nights. She made a point of announcing she was going to rest.
Sybil left too without saying anything.
‘A bit sticky that,’ said Alwy
nd. ‘Of course the one is a hardened lesbian. It’s a pity about the other because I suspect her tastes are broader, but she seems quite besotted for the moment. How’s your sex life?’
‘Not as busy as yours I would imagine.’
‘Seek the wildness, dear boy! The men are all gone. Time to play.’ He giggled and proceeded to regale him with the ins and outs of his affairs for the next half-hour before Schlegel made his excuses and left, more confused than ever.
41
Nebe arrived five minutes early for Monday lunch at Dr Goebbels’ official residence in Hermann Goering Strasse, now stripped of much of its ornament to reflect the gravity of the situation. This was not easy as the size of the place indicated nothing but self-aggrandisement. Oriental rugs and light bulbs had been removed from corridors. Rooms were closed off to create the appropriate sense of economy. The tightened belt was Goebbels’ latest catchphrase. A modest lunch would be served. No alcohol to be offered beforehand.
It had occurred to Nebe that Goebbels was strangely powerless, although branding himself the total war man, and going to enormous lengths to get the message across to the public, whose saviour he believed he would be in the end. Nebe suspected it was smoke and mirrors. Dr Goebbels was in the business of massaging public opinion yet there was nothing he could do, even with a muzzled press, to make himself more popular, however charming his personal company.
Known as Popeye because of his taste for spinach, he was also referred to as the Lenten Dr Goebbels. Abstemiousness disguised many indulgences. A fortune was spent on clothes, the same suit never worn twice running, and a supply of handmade shirts that kept an exclusive outfitter in business for a year. Nebe knew because he used the same tailor and often had to wait because a rush job was on for the minister.
Goebbels made a point of arriving five minutes late. The journey from his office took two, for which he travelled with an armed guard in a chauffeur-driven armour-plated Mercedes.