by Wilbur Smith
If he talked to the traitor he can damn well talk to me, Stark thought. But Werner wouldn’t be able to say a word to anyone without medical attention.
He and his men dragged Werner from under the bonnet. Someone had known how to tie knots because it took them several minutes to untie the cables around their comrade’s wrists and ankles, and the one that linked them.
They placed Werner onto the back seat, where he lay, immobile and unspeaking, showing no signs of life except the occasional grimace of discomfort.
‘Oswald, you come with me,’ Stark said, picking the biggest and strongest of his men. ‘The rest of you go home. And not a word to anyone about what happened here, do you understand?’
Stark and Oswald drove to Friedrichshafen, stopping along the way to procure a bottle of cheap brandy from a bar manager who was sympathetic to their cause. They poured half the bottle over Werner. Oswald took a few hefty slugs. Stark abstained. They went to the hospital and carried Werner between them into the emergency room.
‘My friend has had a bad fall,’ Stark said. ‘I’m afraid he had drunk a great deal.’
‘He had bad news from home,’ Oswald said, breathing pungent, boozy fumes over the receptionist. ‘We were trying to comfort him.’
‘I see,’ the receptionist replied, examining the three of them with disapproving eyes. ‘And what is the injured man’s name?’
‘Schmidt.’ Stark was grateful that there was at least one thing to be gained from the theft of Werner’s personal possessions. ‘Frank Schmidt.’
‘And might I ask who you are . . . for our records?’
‘My name’s Müller and my friend is Schneider.’
He had chosen the three most common surnames in Germany. Suspicion now replaced disapproval in the receptionist’s expression.
‘Well, take a seat, Herr Müller, and the doctor will be with you shortly.’
Werner was admitted for examination. Stark and Oswald were told that their presence was no longer required. Visiting hours, they were informed, were from two in the afternoon until eight in the evening.
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ said Stark. ‘I will come back here as soon as my day’s work is done. As you can imagine, I’m very worried about my friend.’
The doctor nodded, waited until the injured man’s companions had departed and began his detailed examination of the patient. It was plain at once that the story that Herr Werner had fallen was patent nonsense.
When the patient’s clothes were removed, the stench of brandy disappeared with them. His breath did not smell of alcohol and his eyes were not bloodshot. The doctor ordered a blood test, to be on the safe side, but if he were a betting man he’d have wagered a thousand Marks that this man had not had a drop to drink that night.
The bruising on his torso might possibly have been caused by a fall, but it seemed more likely to be the result of repeated blows by a hard object. Meanwhile, the marks around his ankles and wrists were consistent with some form of ligature, used to bind his limbs very tightly. There were scraps of black thread between his teeth, suggesting that he had been gagged.
The doctor sent the patient away to be X-rayed. He took a couple of minutes to gather his thoughts. He had a patient who had clearly been the victim of assault and some form of forcible restraint. He had two men who had concocted a patently untrue story to explain their so-called friend’s wounds. Something suspicious was going on, but thankfully it was not his job to work out what it was. He walked back to the reception desk.
‘Please call the police station, Helga. Ask for the duty officer. Inform him that we have admitted a man who appears to have been the victim of a criminal assault.’
‘Is it that Herr Schmidt?’ Helga asked.
The doctor nodded.
‘I knew it,’ she said.
A look of satisfaction crossed her face as she started to dial the number.
Werner woke to discover that, in addition to his broken arm, he had severe contusions to his abdomen, a cracked vertebra in his spine, two fractured ribs and a bruised kidney. The doctor supervising his case told him he would be in hospital for at least three days, should try to get as much rest as possible for at least a week after that, preferably two or three, and should not think of going back to work until medically cleared to do so.
‘And you have some visitors,’ the doctor added, as he left Werner’s bed.
The visitors introduced themselves as police detectives. Their names went in one of Werner’s ears and out of the other. He didn’t need names because he knew their type right away. One was big with a broken nose like an old prizefighter and had a surly taciturn manner. He was the muscle. The other was more middle-class: neatly dressed, well-spoken and polite. He was the brains.
In a back alley the muscle would be the dangerous one. But in this hospital ward, with the two men pulling up wooden chairs and making themselves comfortable, the brains was the one Werner had to worry about.
‘I spoke to the doctor,’ Brains said. ‘He gave me a list of your injuries. That’s quite a beating you took. Must hurt like crazy.’
Werner said nothing. He’d interrogated people for a living. The longer they remained silent, the harder it was for the interrogator. The moment they said anything, no matter how trivial, it gave the man asking questions something to work with. Say one word and chances were, sooner or later, you’d tell them everything.
Brains was smart; he didn’t let himself be disturbed in any way. He kept talking.
‘If I were in that bed, feeling terrible, knowing someone had put me there, I’d want that person to pay for what he’d done. Don’t you want that too?’
Werner gave him nothing: not a word, not a look, not a gesture.
Muscle didn’t like it. ‘Stop pissing about. Tell us what we need to know,’ he growled.
‘Now, now, go easy on the poor fellow,’ Brains said. ‘He’s had a bad experience. And he’s the victim, not the suspect. We can’t force him to say anything.’ He looked at Werner. ‘I bet you want to tell us. My guess is you’re furious about this. A big strong man like you, lying in a hospital bed like a helpless old man. That’s got to hurt worse than your bruises . . . no? Come on, who did this?’
Brains was right: a part of Fritz Werner wanted to name von Meerbach and his damned wife. But that would mean explaining what he was doing in the old Zeppelin shed, and on whose orders. And sooner or later it would come out that the woman had been the one who beat him up, and then no one would ever respect him again.
He remained silent.
Brains shrugged. ‘Ah well, have it your way. Here, take this . . .’ He extracted a card from his pocket and put it on the side table by Werner’s bed. ‘If you ever change your mind, give me a call, eh?’
The cops got up to leave. Werner slumped back on his bed. The episode had only taken a couple of minutes, but he was exhausted.
Brains walked out of the ward, but the muscle stopped a couple of paces away from the bed, raised his head to the ceiling and sighed, ‘Ach!’ as if he’d forgotten something. He turned around and asked, ‘What’s your name?’
Werner was about to give his real name. He’d opened his mouth to speak. But he stopped himself in time.
Muscle gave him a sly grin. He pushed two fingers together, pointed them at the bed and made a shooting motion. He didn’t say ‘Got you!’ He didn’t have to. They both knew it.
The cop was holding his hat in his left hand. He flicked an imaginary speck of dust off the brim, put it on and said, ‘We’ll be seeing you.’
Heinrich Stark came in later that afternoon. He’d brought a bunch of grapes. As he was looking for somewhere to put them, he noticed the card left by the policeman.
Stark picked it up, looked at it, then sat down on one of the wooden chairs and pulled it to the bedside so he would not have to raise his voice.
‘So?’ he asked.
‘They wanted to know how I got my injuries,’ Werner replied.
‘I already
told that sour-faced old woman on the front desk. You had too much to drink. You fell over.’
‘They don’t believe you.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘Nothing. What did you think? That I’d go blabbing to the first cop I could find? Well, I didn’t. I said nothing. Literally . . . not one single word.’
‘You talked to someone else though, didn’t you? What did you tell them?’
‘I gave them a phone number. I didn’t say who it belonged to. I didn’t say what it had to do with me. Just the number . . . God in heaven, man, they were going to kill me if I didn’t give it to them!’
Stark put a finger to his mouth. ‘Shh . . .’ He leaned forward, his head so close to Werner’s that he barely had to whisper. ‘Is that how little you think of our cause, that you would betray our secrets to the enemy, to save your skin?’
‘Of course not . . . Ach!’ Werner winced. ‘I feel terrible.’
Stark was not sympathetic. ‘You’ll feel better once you’ve told me what happened. Maybe you didn’t talk to the cops, but you’ll damn well talk to me.’
Werner recounted everything that had occurred while he was in the Zeppelin shed. For the sake of his pride, he adapted his account by stating it was Gerhard von Meerbach who had attacked him.
But Werner was unwell and his mind was sluggish. He couldn’t keep his story straight as he described what Gerhard had supposedly done and Stark was suspicious.
‘You’re saying that some pilot, who never had a day’s combat training, was able to beat you up?’
Werner shrugged. ‘What can I say?’
‘Even though you were known for being the meanest, toughest bastard in Smolensk?’
‘Must be out of practice.’
‘That doesn’t sound right to me.’
‘What do you want to hear?’ Werner asked indignantly. ‘The woman did it?’
Stark did not answer. Werner was right. It was crazy to suggest a woman could have beaten him. And yet there was something about the way he had asked the question. Had he inadvertently revealed the truth?
Both men were silent. Then Stark said, ‘I’m not happy. And our superiors will be less content with your conduct. When are the medics letting you out of here?’
‘Three days.’
‘How will you get home?’
‘By bus I guess, but . . . Look, I know I messed up. But could you lend me the bus fare? Those bastards took everything.’
Stark didn’t hand over the money right away. He made a point of thinking things through before he reached for his wallet and passed over a five-Mark note.
‘Buy yourself a meal while you’re at it.’
The following morning Stark drove to the abandoned airfield, looking for Ferdinand Posch. The security guard, whom Stark regarded as no better than a drunken tramp, was nowhere to be found. The ashes of the fire outside his filthy, ramshackle hut were stone cold.
He’s done a runner, Stark thought. Presumably von Meerbach assisted him. And why would he do that unless Posch had told him something useful?
So now Stark knew that Werner had been telling the truth about at least some of what had happened when he had gone to spy on the von Meerbachs. Meanwhile, the von Meerbach traitor was surely now aware that his older brother Konrad had found sanctuary outside the Reich, and was thus almost certainly still alive.
He ordered his men to find out whatever they could about Posch’s movements, but was hardly surprised when they drew a blank. The man had been a loner, virtually an outcast. He had no friends. No one ever went out to visit him on that concrete and tarmac wilderness. Why should they know or care where he had gone?
Stark’s problem became one of damage control. His superiors would not be pleased by his inability to manage an effective surveillance operation. They would be even more agitated by the breach of the organisation’s security and the loose ends that had resulted. He needed to do something to forestall their displeasure and restore their confidence. And it only required a moment’s reflection to decide what that should be.
Two days later Werner emerged from hospital. He could walk with the aid of a stick. The bus stop was just across the road. He checked the road was clear and made his slow, shuffling, painful way across.
Fritz Werner saw the car pulling out of the parking space. He heard its tyres squeal and its engine roar as the driver floored the accelerator. He knew at once it was coming for him.
He wanted to run, or even throw himself out of the way. But his body was too weak and his mind too tired. In any case, what was the point? From the moment Stark said he was telling their superiors, Werner had known that his fate was sealed.
He stayed where he was and let the car hit him. And in the second before he died, Werner perceived the irony of his demise. In the war his enemies had never managed to kill him. In peace his friends had done it instead.
Sherlock Holmes was a popular character in Germany, and the young Heinrich Stark had devoured every story he could find about the great detective. He was familiar with Holmes’s dictum that, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’
Stark was sure that Werner had been lying when he said that Gerhard von Meerbach had beaten him up. Ferdinand Posch could not have done it because he only had one arm. That left the wife.
It was a wildly improbable proposition, to be sure. But might it be true?
For reasons of operational security, Stark was not privy to the identities of the most senior men in the Nazi veterans’ organisation. If ever he had information for his superiors, he passed it on via a contact known to him as ‘Braun’. When he delivered his report on the Werner affair, he respectfully suggested investigating Frau von Meerbach to ascertain whether she could have carried out the assault on him. If she had, she might pose as great a potential danger to them as her husband.
Braun dismissed the idea. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, man. How could a woman overpower a brute like Werner?’
‘No, I see, of course you’re right,’ Stark had replied, not wanting to anger Braun still further. ‘It was foolish of me to suggest such a thing.’
But when the meeting was over and both men had risen from the park bench, Braun went to the nearest public telephone and passed on a concise, edited version of his conversation. At the end he had assured the officer to whom he, in turn, reported that, ‘Yes, sir, I absolutely do recommend that we follow this up. In my view we should call our London contact as soon as possible . . . Yes, sir, absolutely. I’ll get on to it at once.’
When Manyoro wished to celebrate a significant family occasion, he did so at the village, atop Lonsonyo where his beloved mother had lived and practised her powers of healing and prophecy. He had taken the hut where she had lived to be his personal residence, though his decades of contact with the white man’s world were evident in the substantial wooden bed, sturdy enough to bear his considerable weight that now stood within the hut, the battery-operated radio that stood on a table beside it, the rattan garden furniture on which he liked to sit while looking out at his private, mountain-top kingdom, and the crates containing bottles of his favourite refreshment: Bass’s India Pale Ale.
Manyoro’s womenfolk had provided a magnificent feast with which to greet ‘Dr Benjamin’, as everyone now insisted on calling him. The entire clan basked in the reflected glory of his achievement. But then, when Benjamin and Manyoro sat down upon a pair of rattan chairs for a proper father-and-son conversation, the mood of the day had taken a sudden, drastic turn for the worse.
‘You are planning to marry a . . .’ Manyoro stopped, barely able to say the word. ‘Kikuyu?’
‘I am marrying the woman I love,’ Benjamin replied. ‘She is Kenyan, like me. Her tribe is an irrelevance.’
‘An irrelevance?’ Manyoro’s voice rose in outrage. ‘To you, perhaps, boy. But not to me, your mother, or our people. The Maasai people. To them it is an insult. You are slapping them in
the face.’
Benjamin took a deep breath. He knew there was no point raising his voice to his father. Not only was that disrespectful, it would ensure that the old man closed his ears to any reasonable arguments.
‘Father,’ he said. ‘You know that I love and respect you. You know that I am proud of my Maasai heritage, proud to call myself a warrior of the tribe.’
‘Then why do you betray it?’
‘Because we have to move beyond our old tribal conflicts. Don’t you see? That is how the white man keeps us down. The English say so themselves – divide and rule. We are so busy arguing between ourselves, we do not notice that the white man has stolen our land, our water, our crops, our animals – he has taken everything from us. And we do not fight him as we are too busy fighting one another.’
If Benjamin thought his words would persuade his father, he was wrong. They made matters worse.
Manyoro’s manner switched from heated anger to cold, hard silence. And that, as Benjamin had learned when he was a small boy, was always a danger sign.
‘Be careful what you say, boy,’ Manyoro warned him in a tone that was all the more intimidating for being quiet and measured. ‘You call yourself “Doctor” because of the generosity of a white man. And I owe that same man my life.’
‘Yes, of course, Father and I am very grateful, but—’
‘There is no “but”. Leon Courtney is my brother. We are free to take our cattle across this land as we have always done. When we raise cattle for him, he always pays us a fair price. The Kikuyu who tend their fields for him would say the same thing. You can go from one end of Africa to the other. You will not find anyone who lives better than we do here.’
‘Black people, maybe. But what about the whites? You say Leon Courtney is a good man. But he still owns the land and we do not.’