by James Lepore
“How long will that take.”
“I will emphasize the urgency of the situation.”
“What shall I tell professor Shroeder?”
“Tell him nothing until I contact you with Bletchley’s answer. But keep him close. I believe we will be traveling on a moment’s notice.”
“And Miss Shroeder?”
“I will take care of her. And by the way, Professor, I will be extracting the amulet and the parchment as well. If there is anything to this raising-the-dead business, it is the British who will take advantage of it. No one else.”
13.
Berlin
October 6, 1938, 11:30 p.m.
“When did you first come to Berlin, Ian?”
“I stopped here in 1933 on my way home from Moscow. Hitler had just been named chancellor.”
“Why were you in Moscow?”
“Covering a trial for Reuters.”
“You were quite young, no?”
“Twenty-five.”
“What trial? I was at school then and not political at all.”
“Some Brits were accused of being spies.”
“How exciting.”
“Not for them.”
“How did you find Berlin?”
“Sickening. Hitler’s police state had begun.”
Fleming and Billie were walking along Unter den Linden, heading back to the Adlon after a quiet dinner at a small café tucked in a side street off of Freidrichstrasse. It was raining when they emerged from the restaurant, and the street and sidewalks were glistening from the pale yellow reflection of the gas lamps that lit their way. Auto and foot traffic was light, the rain having driven people inside and quieted this normally bustling part of the city. Fleming, in a dark blue suit, white dress shirt, and light blue striped bowtie, had brought an umbrella. Billie, at Fleming’s insistence, was wearing his black fedora, her highly impractical velvet pillbox hat in her coat pocket. Arm-in-arm, they were cozy under the umbrella, minding little when a sideways breeze would blow some rainwater against them.
Billie remained silent. They were walking under the densely leafed trees that gave the famous boulevard its name. At dinner she had told Fleming about her quiet, motherless childhood in Heidelberg, her uneventful college years, her devotion to her father. How did such a beautiful flower emerge from that desert? Under an especially thickly leafed tree, he brought them to a halt, and swung her gently around to face him. The occasional drop of rain that reached them pinged against the umbrella, heightening, or so it seemed to Fleming, the sense that he and Billie were a solitary pair, alone, cut off in the dark and the rain from the world’s madness.
“You never told me your secret,” he said.
“Ah, yes.” Billie had to tilt the fedora back on her head in order to look up and see him. “My secret.”
“Your secret passion.”
“I was half-hoping you wouldn’t ask and half-hoping you would.”
“I’m asking.”
“I have joined a small resistance group. At least I think it’s small. How many cells there are, I do not know.”
Resistance? Cells?
“I have compromised you. I’m sorry, but there is no one else I can talk to. I have felt so alone and my father, well, he is a dreamer.”
“Billie.”
“Yes.”
They were standing very close to each other now, their arms, except for Fleming’s umbrella arm, at their sides.
“Yes, Ian.”
“What is your cell up to?”
“We arrange to get Jews out of Germany. The ones who can’t afford the exit fees.”
“Which is most of them.”
“Yes, they are countless.”
“How?”
“There is an underground, mostly at the Dutch border. We buy British immigration commissions. They’re very expensive. We try to forge them. Ian?”
“Yes?”
“I have another reason for telling you.”
“Yes?”
“We need your help.”
“Who is we?”
“You must realize I can’t tell you that.”
“My help?”
“Yes, bringing someone out. We need your connections.”
“I have no connections.”
Silence. Her large, liquid eyes looking up into his. Gritty, brave, imploring. Who is this woman?
“Who is it?” he asked.
“Someone your government would be interested in talking to, an engineer. He is working on a coating for tanks that would repel magnetic mines.”
“His name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is he?”
“He works for Krupp in Magdaberg.”
“He wants to defect?”
“Yes. He’s a Jew, but that the Nazis do not know. If they find out he will be killed.”
At dinner, he had told Billie about his meeting with Professor Tolkien and of his encounter with the Nuremberg laws. She applauded the English don’s courage. Had she known that in one day he had uncovered the truth about her father’s work for Himmler, she would have been more impressed. But that information he could not reveal, not yet. Billie and her father were in grave danger, but he could do nothing to help them until he communicated with Bletchley House.
14.
Berlin
October 7, 1938, 1:00 a.m.
“Guten abend, Herr Fleming. Will you have your customary nightcap?”
“No, Hans, I’m not well tonight.”
“Baking soda, perhaps?”
“Yes, please.”
“Shall I send it to your room?”
“That would be best.”
Hans, the bartender at the Adlon was a Nazi-hater who had lost an eye in France in the war. His patch did not quite cover the scar tissue, but no one dared look too closely, nor did any of the SS and Gestapo officers who stopped on a regular basis to check on the doings of the foreigners at the popular hotel ever think about questioning his loyalty. He was short and stocky and had an angry cross-hatched scar on the cheek under his bad eye, but in his maroon vest, snow-white shirt, and black bowtie he exuded a menacing sort of dignity, not unlike the butlers who ran the Fleming homes in Oxfordshire and Grosvenor Square with white-gloved iron fists.
This was the first time that Fleming had used the baking soda bit, but it worked like a charm. The waiter who brought it up was Hans’ brother, also a veteran, also versed in precisely what to say. Fleming gave him a 5-Reichsmark coin as a tip, one of the recently issued ones with the Nazi eagle and swastika on one side and Von Hindenburg in profile on the other. In the center of the old field marshal’s ear was a microdot with virtually the same shiny silver surface as the newly minted coin.
When the waiter left, Fleming poured cold water from the silver carafe and mixed in the white powder. He was not sick, and Billie, asleep in his bed, was not looking, but he had been taught to follow through, to act always as if someone was looking. Taste the fucking baking soda, one of his several trainers had said, swallow it, apropos of the very drill he and Hans and his brother had just meticulously carried out. He finished the drink, then dipped the end of a linen napkin into the iced water. Slipping into bed, he propped himself on an elbow and patted the wet napkin on Billie’s forehead until her eyes came open and she smiled.
“Was I asleep?”
“Yes. I’m afraid I fed you too much champagne.”
“What time is it?”
“Oneish.”
“What? I slept for two hours?”
“Just under.”
“I’m foggy . . .”
“You look ravishing.”
Now Billie noticed that she had on one of Fleming’s pajama tops, creamy white with black pipi
ng at the cuffs and ILF embroidered in black on the pocket.
“Ian . . . ?”
“No.”
“No, what?”
“No, nothing happened. You were legless. I sent you to the loo to change. Now here we are.”
“What have you been doing?”
“Spy stuff.”
“What?”
“I’m a spy. I’ve been writing a message in code, then creating a microdot, which I’ve sent by courier pigeon to London.”
“My hero, so brave, so dashing.”
“A hell of a thing, trapping that pigeon and training it while you slept.”
“Certainly not beyond you.”
“Certainly not.”
“Are you sure you didn’t drug me? Get me out of the way? I had the strangest dreams.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“Lightning bolts in the room, several flashes of it, and men’s voices at the end of a long tunnel.”
“So it worked.”
“Worked?”
“The Mickey Finn I gave you. That’s what the Americans call it.”
“Hmmm . . .”
“It’s also a love potion.”
Fleming, smiling, ran his fingers along Billie’s brow.
“Hmmm . . .”
“How does it work?”
“A deep sleep, then one long kiss, and then it’s activated.”
“I’m feeling something already,” Billie said, looking into Fleming’s eyes, smiling herself now.
“That’s . . . well, that’s me,” Fleming said. In his pajama bottoms, he had kicked off his slippers and loosened his wing-collar shirt before lifting the coverlet and sliding in next to Billie. On his right side, he was now leaning gently into her left flank.
“I see, that is you,” Billie said.
“Shall we activate the potion?”
“Before we do, will you help me?”
“With your engineer, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not your gentleman friend I feel against my leg talking?”
“No.”
“There’s no need to activate the potion, as you say, but yes, please do.”
15.
Berlin
October 7, 1938, 7:00 a.m.
“How far down is it, do you think?” Trygg Korumak asked.
“Perhaps thirty meters,” Professor Tolkien replied. “Don’t look.”
“I thought your people have lived in the mountains for generations,” said Professor Shroeder.
“Yes,” Korumak answered, “in them, not on them.”
“Ah, another of your riddles.”
“What riddles?” Tolkien asked.
“Trygg himself is a riddle,” the German professor said, flashing a quick, wry smile. “A riddle who lives in mountains but not on them and is afraid of heights.”
“Perhaps this is a bad idea,” Tolkien said.
They were standing at the northern parapet on the roof of Professor Shroeder’s apartment building. At their backs, dawn was spreading its pink and gray glow over Berlin. Before them, across a fifteen-foot chasm, was the roof of the building next door. Seven stories below was the cement floor of the courtyard between the two buildings. A ladder lay across the chasm.
“This thing looked sturdy before we laid it down,” said Korumak, whose normally ruddy cheeks were now a pale white. “It looks like a toothpick now.”
“It’s our only chance,” said Shroeder.
“Perhaps the next building will not be so far away,” said Tolkien.
Earlier, at the west parapet, they had peered down and seen the Daimler parked in the small field at the rear of the building. At the curb in front was another Daimler, this one with a soldier in SS gray standing next to it drinking from a tin mug. Korumak, whose weakness was heights, but who apparently had many talents, had found the apartment’s hidden microphones and connected their input wires to the building’s doorbell system, which meant that whoever was listening would hear nothing but the occasional bell ringing. How much time that would buy them, they did not know. They assumed not much. They had dared not try the loud music trick again. At seven in the morning, and with all five microphones emitting only Wagner or something similar, they would have quickly been discovered.
“I’ll go first,” said Tolkien, when he realized that Shroeder and Korumak were staring at him intently, their mouths shut, waiting for him to continue. To lead them, he thought. “I’ll anchor the ladder on the other side. We did similar exercises during the war. It’s not so hard.” He spoke briskly, without hesitation, trying to exude a confidence he did not feel. He had seen the old wooden ladder sticking out from a paint-stained canvas tarp when he and Shroeder had met on the roof the evening before. Remembering the scaling and rappelling training he had done on Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, he had been the one to suggest escaping across Hermann Goering Strasse’s rooftops. Of course I was twenty-three then, he now said to himself.
“We need you, Trygg,” said Shroeder.
It was Trygg who had said that stealing a car would be easy, that most people left the key in the ignition when they parked their car, and that he could easily power the ignition without a key if necessary. They would head north, he said, in the opposite direction of Deggendorf. No one would be looking for them north of Berlin. He knew a place where they could cross quietly into Poland and from there travel south until they had to cross back again into Germany near Metten Abbey. A seven-hundred-kilometer journey, and fraught with danger, but he had friends, the little man had said, who would help them along the way. Who was this dwarf? Who were these friends? Were they a ring of car thieves? How did he know so much about electrical engineering? Tolkien felt sorry for the dwarf, who, with his bowlegs and low center of gravity, was clearly not built for gymnastics. Far from it. A fall from the ladder meant certain death. But yes, Professor Shroeder was right, they needed Korumak, they needed him badly, and for reasons that seemed both clouded in mystery and yet vitally important.
“These things are weighing heavily,” Shroeder said, brushing his fingers on his sternum. He had the amulet on a silver chain around his neck and the parchment sewn into the lining of his tweed jacket.
Hearing this, Professor Tolkien lifted the sack they had carried up with them containing the two sofa pillows that Trygg would sit on while driving, and flung it across the chasm to the roof opposite, where it landed with a quiet thud. Then, whispering to himself, hand-foot, hand-foot, he knelt on the parapet and started across.
16.
Berlin
October 7, 1938, 11:00 a.m.
Ian Fleming stood inside the front door of the Olympic Boxing Club, unfolding his umbrella, his dripping Macintosh forming puddles at his feet. He was astonished at the size of the crowd sitting on rows of benches around the center ring. One of them, front row center, he recognized as a German movie star, now brunette, but a sexy, flirtatious blond in a Hitchcock movie he had seen a dozen or so years ago in Geneva. She was smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder and chatting with a middle-aged man in a dark suit and tie sitting next to her, leaning close to the man’s ear, so as, Fleming assumed, to be heard over the general din. In the movie, she had killed Cyril Richard who had tried to rape her. With a knife. What was her name?
Hanging from the twenty-foot-high ceiling were a series of sweating, rusting parallel pipes that branched out in the middle diagonally like a metro map. Naked light bulbs hanging in wire cages lit the room, mostly illuminating the smoke from a hundred cigarettes. Leather punching bags, some for hand work, some for body work, hung from steel braces in each of the room’s four corners. A group of men, reporters he recognized, were gathered arou
nd a scale on a pedestal on the right wall, taking turns weighing themselves, joking, passing around a flask. The press, Fleming thought, my kind of people.
“That’s Anny Ondra,” said a voice behind him. “Schmeling’s wife.”
Fleming turned to see Rex Dowling, the American reporter, grinning at him, his straw-blond hair a dull brown now, and plastered to his head, a handkerchief raised to mop the rain from his face.
“I see you don’t believe in umbrellas.”
“They’re for sissies.”
Fleming smiled. He and Dowling had been playing an unacknowledged game, the English toff versus the American hayseed, since they first covered the Berlin Olympics together in 1936. “They don’t get pneumonia though,” he replied.
Dowling smiled his big, dumb, handsome smile and shrugged, saying through his teeth, “I have a message for you.”
“From whom?” The even pitch of the Englishman’s voice hid his inner concern. Dowling had also spotted Billie at the Sportpalast last week. He also stayed at the Adlon. And he had bedded half the women in the place, or so it was said.
“Your Uncle Quex.”
Fleming remained silent, absorbing this entirely unexpected answer.
“He says the sun is shining in Hyde Park.”
“That’s rare this time of year.”
“No need for an umbrella.”
Fleming now quickly eyed Dowling from head to toe. “Shall we sit,” he said. “I see two empty seats in the last row, there, near those bags.”
After they were seated, both men took out notepads and pencils. They both knew that they actually had to file stories on what had been touted as Max Schmeling’s first open-to-the-public appearance in a ring since his devastating loss to Joe Louis, the great American “Braun Bomber,” in June. He was to spar with the German amateur heavyweight champ, a young, sculpted-from-marble Aryan named Bruno Schmidt, whom the boxing-mad German people had taken to their bosom after Max’s debacle in New York. Though it was billed as a simple spar, the rumor had been spreading that Schmidt was going to fight for real, perhaps to knock the disgraced Schmeling out. Thus the large crowd of reporters, politicians, and in-favor celebrities in the room. Goebbels, who had loved Schmeling after he beat Louis in 1936, now hated him. The man had never joined the Nazi Party. His manager was a Jew. The sycophantic German haute monde crowd naturally followed suit. It had just been announced that the handsome but now former world champion would be fighting Adolf Heuser next year for the European Heavyweight title. No one cared. They wanted to see him pummeled, toppled once and for all from Germany’s boxing pinnacle.