by Wilbur Smith
‘Stay calm,’ she said. ‘Breathe evenly through your nose. That way you won’t suffocate.’
She turned to Gerhard and Ferdi.
‘I know what we have to do.’
‘Are you sure I can’t give you any money?’ Gerhard asked, as they dropped Ferdi off at Friedrichshafen Stadt station. ‘You’ve taken a great risk to help us.’
The one-armed watchman grinned.
‘Most fun I’ve had in years. Besides –’ he tapped his small, battered suitcase – ‘there’s nothing in here but money. Years of back pay.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve not had anything to spend it on but grub, a little booze and tobacco.’
‘And you’re certain your sister won’t mind taking you in?’
‘We’re family. What choice does she have?’
‘Goodbye, then,’ Saffron said, giving him a peck on the cheek. ‘And good luck.’
‘Remember,’ Gerhard said, ‘if you ever want to come back, I’ll make sure you still have a job waiting for you at the Motor Works.’
Ferdi lifted his hand in salute. ‘Thank you sir . . . ma’am.’
He turned and went off to catch the Stuttgart train.
‘You won’t be able to give him a job if you sell the company,’ Saffron said to Gerhard as they watched Ferdi make his way across the station concourse.
‘I’ll have a clause written into the sale contract,’ he replied. ‘I mean it.’
‘I know you do.’ She looked up at her husband. ‘I love you very much.’
‘And I love you too, my darling. Now, let’s find Frau Sperling.’
There was a line of phone booths near the station entrance, each with a local directory, and there was only one K. Sperling in the book. Saffron made the call, reasoning that it would feel less threatening to Katya Sperling if she heard a woman’s voice.
It worked. Katya agreed to meet them at a café near her apartment block.
‘But I can’t stay long. My eldest can look after her brother and sister. But she’s only twelve, so I’ll need to get back.’
Katya had once been an attractive woman: the kind a dashing pilot would pick as his wife. But six years as a single mother had put lines on her face, bags under her pale blue eyes and grey in her brown hair.
‘Berni used to talk about you a lot, sir,’ she said. ‘I remember we went to the cinema one week and there was a newsreel about the fighter ace who had shot down so many Russian planes.’ She gave a sad smile as she looked at Saffron. ‘Your husband was so handsome in his flying gear, ma’am. All the girls were swooning, like he was a film star. Berni said to me, “I helped teach that man to fly.”’
‘That’s true,’ Gerhard agreed. ‘He’s a good man.’
‘Was,’ said Katya. ‘I know he’s dead. He must be. He wouldn’t have gone six years without getting in touch with me and the kids. Not my Berni.’
‘He might not be able to,’ Saffron said. ‘If he’s in hiding somewhere.’
‘He’d have found a way. He told me he would. Before he left, that last time, he said, “I have to fly the count out of here, but when this damn war is over, I’ll send for you all, I swear.” And he meant it. I know.’
‘Did he tell you where he was going?’
‘No . . .’
Saffron’s spirits fell. But Katya went on.
‘Not exactly. But he said that the count had managed to get hold of a wonder-machine that no British or American plane could ever catch. And he told me, “Look at an atlas and ask yourself, where can I find safety in a single flight? That is where we will be.”’
‘Did he mean Switzerland?’ Saffron asked.
‘No, I don’t think so. He had already gone there, a short while earlier, but in the normal company plane. Why would he need a wonder-machine, just to cross the Bodensee?’
That confirms what Ferdi said about Chessi’s escape, Saffron thought.
Katya said, ‘There’s something else, you know, that Berni used to tell me. The count used to talk about you, sir . . . and you, ma’am. They weren’t nice, the things he said. He wanted to hurt you both.’ She looked at Saffron and Gerhard in turn, then said, ‘So you’re planning to find him?’
Gerhard shrugged.
‘When you do,’ Katya Sperling said, ‘make him pay for what he’s done. He took my man away from me and left my children without a father. I want him to burn in hell.’
‘I understand,’ said Saffron. ‘Really . . . I do.’
‘There you are, sir,’ said the Schloss Meerbach’s chauffeur, opening the garage doors. ‘I knew you’d come back one day, so I’ve made sure to keep her in perfect working order. Good as new, she is.’
‘Ahh, well done, Heini,’ said Gerhard in a tone of appreciation, as he ran his hand along the gleaming scarlet bodywork of his pre-war Mercedes 540K cabriolet. The bonnet stretched out in front of the windscreen, flanked by the unbroken swoops of gloriously curvaceous metal that flowed over the front wheel, down below the doors and up over the rear.
‘Brings back memories, doesn’t it, darling?’ he said.
‘Mmm . . .’
Saffron had wrapped a silk scarf around her neck to cover the strangulation marks that were now turning a vivid shade of purple and black. It hurt her to swallow and her breathing felt constricted. Her mind, though, was not on those relatively minor discomforts, but on that first night together in St Moritz. All these years later, her body still came alive at the thought of their first kiss, the first touch of his naked body against hers, the first time that they had made love.
Saffron permitted herself a brief moment of self-indulgence, then brought her mind back to the here and now. She and Gerhard had not yet discussed what had happened between her and Werner in the abandoned hangar. They shared a war veteran’s distaste for revisiting past battles. She had survived. Werner was incapacitated. For now, at least, no more need be said.
Gerhard was focused on his car.
‘Is there any petrol in the tank?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes, sir,’ Heini answered. ‘Filled her up myself this morning. Knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away from her.’
‘You know me too well!’ Gerhard fished in his pocket for a key and gave it to Heini. ‘This belongs to our hire car. Could you please take it back to Munich Airport in the morning?’
‘Certainly, sir.’
‘Excellent.’ Gerhard extracted two fifty-Deutschmark notes from his wallet and handed them over. ‘This should cover the balance of the bill and your train ticket home.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Heini beamed. By his reckoning there was more than enough here for the bill, a first-class ticket and a decent meal washed down by a couple of foaming steins at the Löwenbräukeller in Munich along the way. Tomorrow promised to be a fine day out.
Half an hour later, Gerhard’s Mercedes was growling softly along the three-kilometre drive that led to the public highway, waiting for the chance to be let loose and roar. Saffron was relaxing in the passenger seat. She had passed the first two years of the war as a driver-mechanic and would have had no difficulty in controlling a machine as big and powerful as the 540. But now it was right that Gerhard was at the wheel. It restored the balance between them.
‘When are you going to tell me where we’re going?’ she asked.
‘I’m not. It’s a surprise.’
‘You realise that’s a high-risk strategy with a girl like me? You know, the type that actually likes to know what she’s doing.’
‘Then it’s a risk I’ll have to take.’
‘You seem oddly unbothered by the prospect of making me very cross.’
‘Perhaps that’s because I won’t.’
‘You’re making me quite cross already.’
‘I think you’re doing that all by yourself.’ Gerhard rested a hand on her thigh. ‘Don’t worry. This is a nice surprise. I promise.’
‘Hmm . . .’
The sun was beginning to set as they crossed the border, and it was
almost dark by the time they stopped for dinner at a roadside restaurant south of Bad Ragaz. By then they had been over all the information they had gathered during the day, concluding with Berni Sperling’s last words to his wife: that he was going ‘somewhere I can find safety in a single flight’.
‘Do you agree with Katya that it can’t have been Switzerland?’ Saffron asked.
‘Ja, I do,’ Gerhard replied. ‘There are plenty of ways to get from our side of the Bodensee to Switzerland without attracting attention, why take a jet plane? It would be simpler to row across.’
‘So what’s left? Virtually all of northern Europe was in Allied hands by the end of April ’45. Sweden was neutral . . .’
‘But so far as we know, Konrad was in Berlin up to the last weeks. He wouldn’t go all the way south to the Motor Works, only to turn back again and fly over the American, Russian and British forces. I don’t care how fast his plane was, that’s a crazy risk.’
‘And the Swedes would hardly have welcomed him with open arms. Yes, they gave the Nazis’ iron ore, but they didn’t want to be a haven for war criminals. Everyone knew about the camps by then. SS officers were humanity’s enemy.’
‘It would have to be somewhere that still had a government sympathetic to Germany.’
‘Like Spain or Portugal,’ Saffron said. ‘They had fascist leaders. Still do, come to that.’
Gerhard gave a sigh as he shook his head at the madness of the world.
‘Franco and Salazar . . . still clinging like limpets to power.’
‘Could Konrad’s plane have got that far?’
‘I don’t know for sure – I’ve been trying to work out what it was that Ferdi saw. I know the Luftwaffe had two companies developing multi-jet bombers during the war – Heinkel and Arado. I think only the Arado ever took to the air.’
‘Can you remember its range?’
‘Less than the big Allied bombers, that’s for sure. Jets use up a lot of fuel and the Arado wasn’t as big as one of your Lancasters, or a Flying Fortress. They could fly three or even four thousand kilometres. The Arado couldn’t get nearly as far.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, maybe fifteen hundred kilometres, something like that.’
‘How far would that get Konrad?’
‘From the Motor Works? Hold on, I can’t work this out and drive . . .’
Gerhard pulled the car to a halt by the side of the road and closed his eyes, imagining his way across the map from southern Germany to the Iberian Peninsula.
He nodded and said, ‘If the plane was an Arado, with the range I’m estimating, Sperling could get to north-east Spain – the coast of Catalonia.’
‘Which would have been safe,’ Saffron said.
‘Absolutely.’ Gerhard started up the engine and pulled onto the road as he added, ‘And the good news from his point of view is that the journey would have taken him over the northernmost area of Italy, which was still in German hands up to the very last days. He’d fly across the western Mediterranean, where there would have been light Allied naval and air force presence. All their effort was being focused on the push to Berlin.’
‘If he got to Spain, he could have stayed there, or gone on to Portugal, or to South America. He could be absolutely anywhere. Damn! We aren’t any closer to him than we were to begin with!’
‘That’s not like you,’ Gerhard said.
‘What isn’t?’
‘Letting your emotions cloud your reason. It seems to me we’re much closer. You know the Chinese proverb – a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step? We know, or can reasonably assume the first step . . . two, in fact, because we know where Francesca went. Once we have that, we can start looking for the next step, and the one after that.’
‘You’re right.’ Saffron laughed to herself. ‘Maybe I’m just hungry. I go mad if not fed at regular intervals.’
‘Then when we next see a decent-looking restaurant we’ll stop and have some dinner.’
Gerhard led Saffron into a bistro off the highway.
‘Before we eat, can I freshen up?’ she asked.
‘Of course.’
‘While I’m doing that, maybe you could put Herr Werner back in touch with his friends.’
‘Good idea,’ said Gerhard. ‘We’ve put enough distance between us and them.’
The restaurant had a payphone for its customers’ use. Gerhard called a number in Ravensburg, north of Friedrichshafen. A man answered.
‘Listen carefully,’ Gerhard said. ‘This is the lost property department. We know you are looking for something you have lost. You will find it in Workshop Seven.’
‘What are you talking about? Who are you?’
‘You heard me. Workshop Seven. Goodnight.’
Gerhard waited for Saffron and they were led to their table.
‘Did the message get through?’ she asked once they had been seated.
‘I sent it. Whether they act on it is up to them.’
They ate. Gerhard drank a glass of wine with his meal. Saffron, as the passenger, allowed herself two. Most of their conversation was the normal chit-chat of husbands and wives, as if they had made an unspoken pact to set harsh realities aside, for now at least, and act as though they were still on a pleasant European holiday. Only once did the events of the day intrude.
‘Were we right, do you think, to let Werner live?’ Saffron asked.
‘Absolutely,’ Gerhard replied. ‘It would have been murder. We’d have been no better than them.’
‘But it’s a risk. What if they work out that we’re looking for Konrad?’
‘How would they do that? Werner saw us talking to Ferdi. He doesn’t know what we were discussing and Ferdi’s no longer there, so they can’t ask him.’
‘It’s still a loose end.’
‘All right, suppose they do find out. Suppose they discover that we know about Chessi’s flight to Switzerland and Konrad’s flight to Spain, or wherever he went. Suppose they tell Konrad. So what? Now he’ll be afraid we’re coming after him. He’ll wonder whether he needs to run even further away. Good. I hope he loses a lot of sleep.’
‘You’re right,’ Saffron said. ‘Let him be the one to worry. Now, I know it’s very wicked, but I think I might have some pudding.’
Happily replete with food and wine, Saffron dozed off as Gerhard drove them on the last leg of the journey. He smiled to himself as the road signs flashed by, delighted that Saffron was missing all the clues to their destination. When they were a couple of minutes away from their arrival, he gently shook her shoulder and said, ‘Wake up.’
Saffron came to, blinking. Her throat felt sore.
‘Where are we?’ she yawned.
‘Almost there. You’ve been asleep pretty much since we left the restaurant.’
‘Oh . . .’ She looked out of the window. ‘This looks familiar, like I’ve been here, but it didn’t look like this. Does that sound completely barmy?’
‘Not at all. Last time you were here, everything was covered in snow.’
It took a second for the hint to work its way through Saffron’s sleepy brain. Then her eyes widened, a huge smile crossed her lips and she cried out, ‘St Moritz!’
‘That’s right. I took the liberty of making a call while you were packing, back at the Schloss. It’s the height of the summer season but I know the manager pretty well and—’
‘You didn’t get us a room at the Suvretta House, did you?’
A smile wreathed Gerhard’s face. The Suvretta House was where they had spent their first night together, Saffron’s first night ever with a man.
‘Actually I got us a suite. The same—’
He didn’t have to finish the sentence. Saffron gave a shriek of delight.
‘Oh, you clever man! You clever, clever, wonderful man!’ She was rapidly thinking ahead as she added, ‘I am so glad I got some sleep, because I’m going to keep you up all night.’
The four torches cut through the dust in the air of the a
bandoned workshop. It had started to rain soon after nightfall and the light sparkled on the drops falling through the gaping holes in the bomb-damaged roof. The torch beams played back and forth until one stopped and a voice cried out, ‘Over here!’
Heinrich Stark ran over to where his comrade was standing. In the torchlight he saw his VW. But where was Werner?
Stark pulled a wartime police-issue Mauser HSc pistol from his raincoat and stepped towards the car.
‘Careful,’ he said to the men on either side of him. ‘This could be a trap.’
He kept his light on the bulbous little VW. The other beams swept the air to either side.
‘Can’t see anyone,’ one of the men said.
‘Me neither,’ another replied.
‘There could be booby traps,’ warned Stark.
He had reached the car. The passenger window was slightly open. He placed the end of his torch by the gap and examined the interior. The seats were empty, there was nothing in the footwell. There appeared to be no sign of any tampering with the wiring under the dashboard.
Stark thought he heard something: a faint tapping sound.
He jerked his hand up to signal silence. The men around him stood still. Stark waited a few more seconds. He heard the noise again.
It was coming from the front of the car.
Stark went round and opened the bonnet. He shone his torch.
He had found Fritz Werner.
The former Gestapo agent was stuffed into the VW’s small luggage compartment like meat into a sausage. He was barely conscious, badly beaten and unable to tell Stark what had happened to him. Someone, presumably the count’s traitor brother, had spotted him and somehow managed to overpower him.
In Stark’s opinion it must have been an ambush. He had heard stories of Werner’s time in Smolensk. The Russian partisans had spent years trying to kill him, but he’d been too tough, too cunning and too brutal for them. It beggared belief that von Meerbach could have beaten him in a fair fight.
But what had Werner revealed to his assailants? He’d evidently provided Stark’s home telephone number. His wallet, keys and every scrap of identification were missing, so all that information was now in enemy hands. God alone knew what other secrets he had given up.