by Leo Kessler
‘But what if he would rather stay in the Reich?’ the Count objected, his mind racing wildly at the news. Freedom, money, and above all, excitement once more.
‘Then, sir,’ Churchill said slowly but firmly, ‘you have my permission to… kill… my son. In whatever way you please.’
CHAPTER 5
There was a long silence after the Count had finished his account of that strange midnight meeting with the English prime minister. The logs crackled and on the white steppe of a rug, the red setter twitched in dreamy doggy ecstasy. Otto sat dazed. What had impressed him more than anything else, was that the Count had reproduced all the accents. He must have worked on them for hours.
Finally Otto said, ‘You accepted?’ He couldn't help let a note of incredulity seep into his voice.
‘I am here now, aren't I,’ the Count replied modestly. He stretched out his well-cared-for hands, as if to embrace all the luxury about him. ‘The Horsemen of Saint George bought all this. The car, the chauffeur, the butler too, my boy.’
‘The Horsemen of Saint George?’
‘Yes. Gold sovereigns. They have been riding for the English these many centuries now and believe you me, Otto, they are always victorious. Money usually is.’
‘But you could have taken the money and run, Count,’ Otto protested. ‘Don’t you realise just how dangerous all this is? The Gestapo... The – ’ he stuttered to a stop. Obviously the Count didn’t.
‘Otto, I may not appear to be a very realistic person to you. I know you have been forced to have a great deal of patience with my – er, strange little ways at times. But I do attempt to keep my ear to the ground.’
‘And what does your ear tell you?’ Otto asked sarcastically, but as always sarcasm was wasted on the Count.
‘That before this year is out, America will be in the war on England’s side, and with the United States helping her, England will win. Sooner or later the Hitler regime will fall and after what I have been told of the hidden brutalities of the Reich by my London compatriots, it will be a good thing indeed.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Do you know they are making soap out of Jews in the camps?’
Otto groaned. ‘Have you just found out, Count? They’ve been slaughtering Germans too ever since 1933. Big strapping fellers, dying all of a sudden of heart attacks and the flu once they were inside the camps. But then they were only working-class blokes and nobody worries much about them, do they?’
The Count looked a little thoughtful. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right.’ Then he brightened up again. ‘But what do you think, Otto, my boy? Are you with me in this new adventure? Once we’ve helped our Mr Churchill to get rid of the evil Nazis, it’ll mean a medal for you. One you can keep, this time! You’ll be a genuine hero. Unlike your present predicament. After all we are dealing with the top people in London and they know how to look after their servants, I can assure you that, what!’ It looked like the Count was Anglicising his accent to fit his new-found character.
‘I’m a hero right now,’ Otto replied a little sourly, ‘and I can tell you it's ruddy tiring. I'm glad it's only temporary! Finally, Count, I must remind you that it always seems when we little folk deal with the top people, as you call them, that we always end up soaked through and hung out to dry.’
The Count frowned. ‘In a way I suppose you’re right. The Great Men always seem to land on their feet. Must be some sort of law of nature.’
‘Yeah, the devil always shits on the biggest heap!’ swore Otto, frustrated now.
‘Now don’t turn bitter and cynical on me, Otto. I always have been concerned greatly with your welfare, remember? And I am concerned for you now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You are a hero today, but what of tomorrow, my boy? Our authorities are, as you know, of a somewhat suspicious and pedantic nature. Sooner or later they’ll find out about you and your desertion from the Abwehr and all the rest of it. What do you think will happen then, what?’
Otto remembered the official call to his hotel room that morning and knew that the Count was right. They’d find out soon, and what then? He hardly thought it possible that they would jail a hero, but at the best, he’d find himself in uniform. He'd end up fighting for that monster in Berlin whom he had sworn, back in August 1939, he would never serve.
The Count sensed his young friend’s resistance was weakening. He continued urgently, ‘It is a tremendous challenge, an adventure, with great rewards at the end of it. Imagine, Otto, on a cold damp day like this, a villa on the Aegean! The sun, the wine,’ he hesitated momentarily, ‘the girls.’ He blushed. ‘Away from it all in a nice warm neutral country, sitting out the war until our Mr Churchill has won.’
‘Our Mr Churchill, oh shit!’ Otto mimicked the Count, then said resignedly, ‘All right, I’m with you. Now tell me, what's the situation?’
‘Marvellous! My dear chap!’ The Count bounded forward out of his chair to shake Otto's hand. On the rug the setter gave a contented sigh, and wagged its tail before settling down to a peaceful slumber. ‘I can't do it without you. You see, I need your dashing good looks.’ Before Otto could question that, the Count dashed on. ‘My man will serve lunch at two, Otto, if that is not too late for you? Good. I think I could fill you in with the details before then, eh?’
Otto couldn't help but laugh at his friend's boundless energy. ‘Fire away!’
‘This Gore-Browne chap and the rest are being kept in a small country house out in the Sachsenwald near Bismarck’s estate at Friedrichsruh. It is a suitably remote rural location and as far as I have been able to gather. It is well guarded by the local police and, naturally, by those SS dogs.’
‘Naturally.’
‘They are regarded as guests of the German government – these blasted renegades – but after all they are English and everybody knows the English are a little peculiar at the best of times. They're not to be trusted. Therefore this Joyce chap, who's in charge and now technically a German, is taking no chances. To all intents and purposes Schloss Farthheim – that’s the name of the place – is hermetically sealed off.’
Otto absorbed the information. ‘And what are these funny Tommies supposed to be doing there?’
‘Herr Joyce, this Lord Haw-Haw traitor, is supposedly training them in their future activities for the Poison-Dwarf Goebbels, writing scripts, preparing news bulletins and that sort of thing. The word is that Goebbels has given him unlimited funds because the Führer wants to talk the English into surrendering rather than being forced to take military action against them. He has other plans.’
‘What plans?’
‘That I don’t know, Otto, but there is something in the air. I can smell it. There are large troop movements taking place every day now and Germany itself, or at least this part of it, is being denuded of aircraft in spite of the danger of British bombing.’
Otto thought of all the troops he had seen at Hamburg Hauptbahnhof the evening he had arrived at the port, and told himself the Count could be right.
‘And your plan, or the lack of it?’ he joked.
The Count beamed at him. ‘It is all planned, Otto. Money opens many doors. A rather large contribution to our dear Roman Catholic Church has obtained for me a special pass. I fear the dear Monseigneur who sold it thought I needed it to shirk my duty as a loyal German and not join the forces, but the Church of Rome, despite what some people think, is a broad-minded organisation, especially if the Vatican’s coffers are filled.’
‘Come on then. Out with it, Count!’ Otto said, chivvying his friend along. ‘How you gonna get into this Schloss Farthheim place?
The Count reached down and produced a familiar sort of shovel-type old-fashioned black hat. Otto groaned inwardly.
‘As Father Flynn,’ he said, placing it on his head delicately, ‘the Pope’s own special representative from Rome – of course I’m an Irish neutral – to see and report on the lot of these unfortunate Englishmen incarcerated there.’
Otto was laughing openly now, as
the Count arranged the hat on his head and flounced around the room in it. ‘Father Flynn indeed! Some Irishman you’ll make!’
The Count turned back and looked him in the eye. ‘I speak the language, you know... Begorrah!’
Not more than twenty kilometres away from that house where the Count revealed his plans to a disbelieving Otto, another Irishman, a real one this time, was detailing some of his own to a mixed crowd of bored young and middle-aged Englishmen in the dark panelled hall of Schloss Farthheim, already derisively nicknamed, ‘the Fart Home’.
William Joyce, once of London’s Jewish East End during his days with Mosley’s fascists, spread his legs apart, thrust his thumbs in his belt, a look of absolute contempt on his razor-scarred face, and rasped in that incisive nasal voice of his, ‘Gentlemen, may I have your attention?’ He looked around at his ‘scribblers’ as he called them privately, in their leather-capped tweed jackets and unpressed grey slacks, and added, ‘If you are to serve the fascist cause, you must observe fascist discipline.’
‘Oh, put a sock in it, old chap,’ someone called out from the crowded hall.
Joyce ignored the comment. It was typical of that kind of upper-class Englishman, whose ranks he had once attempted to join, without success.
‘All of you have some talent or ability, due to your training or background. Of your own free will, without any coercion on the part of the German authorities, you have decided to place it at the disposal of the Third Reich. Good. And you may rest assured that one day our own beloved country will benefit from that ability, for it will ensure that England will enjoy the benefits of the fascist creed.’
Reggie Gore-Browne let out a jaw-aching yawn. He was a medium-sized man in his thirties, with a round unwrinkled face, balding sandy-haired head, cynical eyes heavy with old lecheries and an alertness, always ready to see in every new male contact a potential partner. From the third row, he gazed at Lord Haw-Haw. Old Joyce was laying it on thick again.
Who cared about Germany, England, or even the British Empire? It had always been there and would probably go on, long after Hitler, Joyce, his father and he were dead. It was all very tiresome.
He had thought that when he had volunteered to help them out with this silly little war of theirs, he might meet a better class of man. He was sick of sailors; greasy-haired youths who carried tins of Vaseline with them and were all too obvious; pimply, bespectacled hesitant clerks, all red-faced, clumsy and ‘what will you think of me?’ and hairy-armed butchers, who could only think in terms of rape and humiliation.
He had thought, back in Paris, he might meet a more artistic sort of person, with a bit of soul, who had been to the right sort of school and knew people ‘in town’; a kind of Somerset Maugham type. He had been disappointed.
They were all hall-baked intellectuals of one kind or another, who couldn’t even get the old John Thomas up, or lithe suburban fascists, who were terribly shocked and puritanical when one made an approach. He yawned again. It was all so frightfully, utterly boring, he couldn’t help blinking.
‘Once I defended the British Empire. I was proud of it,’ Joyce was snarling. ‘All that red on the map. One third of the world. Now, what is it? It is like the Modier Country: shabby, antiquated, bankrupt, rapidly running down like an old clockwork toy engine.’ He sucked in a deep breath, while Gore-Browne’s bored gaze turned to stare at Schmitz of the SS.
‘Now the only hope for the old country is innovation, an influx of German blood.’
Gore-Browne sucked his teeth.
‘I wouldn't mind a little influx of German blood,’ he remarked to himself, taking in Schmitz’s handsome figure in the smart black uniform. The youth had white-blond hair, candid blue eyes and a tall, intelligent forehead. He looked like a figure one might expect to meet in the Nibelungenlied, a perfect advertisement for the Germanic creed Hitler was propagating. Yet at the same time there was soul in there too, Gore-Browne decided. He was ever the closet romantic.
He could well imagine himself, at this very moment, having delightful little chats about ‘love’ and such things with him – afterwards; and there was no denying the man was virile. There’d be no trouble about the old John Thomas with him! It would all be like Isherwood and that wonderfully decadent Berlin of the pre-Nazi era, he thought. He sucked his lips and pinched his cheeks to give them some colour, beaming winningly at the SS-man.
Schmitz blushed and looked away. Aha, that's significant, Gore-Browne told himself. He is one of us. They all were, whatever their protestations about their masculinity and their perverted pretence of skirt-chasing.
Joyce was coming to the end of his regular harangue and from experience Gore-Browne knew he would be expected to contribute to the following discussion. He dismissed Schmitz from his mind for the moment. But in his heart he knew that the gorgeous German was worth a small sin. But what was that sin going to be?
CHAPTER 6
‘Schloss Farthheim!’ the Count proclaimed, as he parted the dripping bushes and the building resting on the height to their front was revealed to Otto.
The weather was bad again. The drizzle came down with grey and miserable persistence. But Otto, who had walked here down cobbled country lanes typical of Schleswig-Holstein, had been glad of the rain. It had kept the local policemen in their village offices, or more likely in the village alehouses.
They had left the big black Horch behind the Bismarck Museum on the outskirts of Friedrichsruh, the big estate granted to the man who had created the new Germany single-handedly, by a grateful nation of the previous century.
‘He shouldn’t have bothered,’ Otto had grunted when Count had told him the story.
‘Sometimes, Otto, I think you’re right,’ the Count had commented, taking his eyes off Bismarck's wax dummy inside the single-storey red-brick building – he looked like a great sad-eyed walrus, wearing a spiked helmet. ‘Perhaps the world would be a better place without a united Germany.’
Now they were moving in for ‘a spot of light reconnaissance’, as the Count had put it. Both of them were dressed in old clothes, their backs covered by wet potato sacks so that any curious policeman might take them for local farm-labourers returning home after a hard day in the fields. At least that was the Count’s plan, though Otto wondered how long he would fool anyone who had eyes in their head. It wasn’t every farm labourer who wore a monogrammed gold signet ring on his well-manicured hand and smelled delicately of expensive after-shave instead of manure. No matter, he told himself. Now we're here, we might as well get on with it.
Cautiously the two of them crept closer to the castle on the height, all mock Gothic battlements and intricate, complicated nineteenth century architecture, bent under their sacks like hunch-backed monks.
On the far side of the place there were lime trees and chestnuts, branches flying in the wind. Thinking back to his hey day of breaking and entering, Otto noted the place, telling himself that it was hidden from sight of the guards in their little red-and-white striped sentry boxes at either side of the castle entrance. He followed the Count into a copse of wet trees. This was close enough for their observations, for now they could hear snatches of a song coming from somewhere in the dilapidated battlements, patched with clumps of turf and green fern.
‘I say,’ the Count said indignantly, ‘it’s “There'll Always Be an England,” the feller has the impertinence to be singing. That from a traitor, Otto. It really is too much, what!’ Then his anger vanished as they settled down to study the place and he said, ‘Some Intelligence fellows out of the Berlin's US embassy gave me a run-down of what's what. That castle wing on the right is the canteen, in the centre is the hall used for lectures, and the wing on the left, overgrown with creeper, houses the dormitories.’
‘Well, if we can get out of the dormitory windows, it's only a short sprint to that set of limes and chestnuts, Count. Look.’
‘Brilliant, Otto. If everything goes tits-up we'll squeeze our way out of a barred window, fall a whole ten metres an
d race for the trees on our broken legs. You're here for your good looks, young man, not for your brain power.’
Otto, who had always thought he was rather well-endowed with intelligence, was quietly affronted. But then, next to the Count, his intellect was probably insignificant.
‘I wonder what it’s like in there, Otto, eh?’ the count mused. He'd obviously moved on.
‘I could tell you, Count,’ Otto said a little grimly, remembering his own imprisonment in York, ‘but I won’t. You’re too delicate. All I’ll say is this. Inside places like that, you'd become even more crazy.’
Reggie Gore-Browne lay on his bunk, arms under his head, staring gloomily at the flaking ceiling and listening idly to the chatter all around him.
Tea had been a thin peppermint brew, two slices of black bread, smeared with candle grease and ersatz plum jam, and was now finished. Instruction was over and they had a whole night to kill until Herr Joyce made his next appearance at nine o’clock the following morning. It would be, Gore-Browne told himself miserably, a long, long night.
‘My man refused to leave Paris and join me,’ the elderly queen, who had once run a gentleman only salon in the French capital, was saying in an affected falsetto. ‘The perfume I've used for years is absolutely unobtainable even on the black market and my friend, you know him Pierre, that divinely handsome apache-type – “Pepe le Moko”, I used to call him – has gone off with some Boche colonel. I really do think the war is spoiling everything, Algy.’
‘If we are not entitled to a bit of respect,’ the middle-aged freelance journalist, who affected a hacking jacket and a pipe, was grunting through puffs, ‘what are we fighting this war for? I mean I have the greatest respect for Herr Joyce, but he isn’t a real journalist, is he? People like me, who have worked for the Trib and have done a stint with the Times, don’t like to be told how to use an exclamation mark!’