A Prince and a Spy

by Rory Clements

  ‘Tell us more, Wilde. Tell us more about Miss Hartwell and the Athels.’

  ‘Nothing to tell. I need my bed, I’m talking too much.’

  ‘As soon as you’ve told us where she is, you’ll have your bed.’

  ‘I don’t know. She mentioned a name – Coburg – but then she was interrupted, so I know no more about him. Rudi Coburg, that was it.’

  ‘And where is he?’

  Wilde shrugged helplessly and laughed. This was all ridiculous; he just wanted his bed. Not like him to get sloshed on a couple of whiskies.

  Eaton touched Lord Templeman’s arm. ‘I don’t think he knows, Dagger. But we’ve got details of her car. I’ll get things moving on that.’

  ‘OK. And go back with the team to the Lalique house. Do another search of Harriet’s own flat in Kensington. There must be clues to other mutual acquaintances. Someone will be sheltering her.’

  ‘What about Wilde?’

  ‘Leave him with me.’

  Chapter 21

  Wilde could not have stayed awake if he wanted to. The drug that had loosened his tongue now knocked him out. Even when he was awoken an hour before dawn, he could barely get off the bed on which he had been dumped fully clothed. His head was hammering, his mouth desert dry.

  ‘Come on, Mr Wilde, time to get you out of here.’ A voice was talking to him, but who and why? Was he having a dream? Somewhere deep in his brain, he realised he had been drugged, but he had no recollection of anything else. Had they had some conversation? He knew he was at Latimer Hall, the expansive Cambridge home of Lord Templeman, and that he had been brought here by Eaton and two agents, but nothing more.

  ‘I have to sleep,’ he said, curling up like a child, the very movement sending spasms of pain through his head and neck.

  ‘No, you have to go. His Lordship’s orders.’

  Wilde groaned.

  ‘Come on.’ The man’s hands were on him now, gently coaxing. ‘Just get your shoes on, Mr Wilde, and off we go. You can go back to sleep later.’

  He moved as ordered, but he was horribly unsteady, his head swirling. Suddenly a particle of consciousness cut through the vortex of confusion and he realised that, yes, this was a good idea. Get out of this place. He had been brought here as a prisoner and drugged for some reason. Best to get away while he had the chance. Go somewhere he could sleep for twenty-four hours.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, he took a few deep breaths. He looked up without recognition into the face of the man who had woken him. He was silver-haired and wore a morning suit. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know you.’

  ‘Barker, sir, His Lordship’s valet.’

  ‘Well, Barker, just give me a few moments. I don’t suppose you have a glass of water.’

  Barker went to a basin against the wall and filled a beaker. He handed it to Wilde, who drank it down greedily.

  ‘Oh God, that’s better.’

  ‘Would you like me to help you with your shoes, sir?’

  ‘Yes, that would be a good idea. Thank you.’

  ‘My pleasure, sir. All part of the service.’

  Two minutes later, he was standing up, his hand on the bedpost to steady himself. For a few moments, he felt faint and wondered whether he might pass out. Barker took his arm. ‘Come on, sir, I’ll help you. None of my business, of course, but it rather seems as though you took a surfeit of hard liquor, Professor Wilde.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I’d offer you coffee, but the driver is waiting and His Lordship is keen that you get away in short order.’

  *

  The car, another of Templeman’s expensive models, was on the forecourt with the engine running and headlights blazing. The uniformed driver climbed out, doffed his peaked cap, opened the rear door and assisted Wilde to his seat.

  Before closing the door, the valet leant in. ‘His Lordship asked me to apologise on his behalf for the inconvenience and hopes you will understand.’

  ‘Inconvenience?’

  ‘That was his word, sir.’

  Inconvenience wasn’t the half of it. He was lifted off the streets of London, brought here against his will and then doped up to the eyeballs. He was trying to focus, to force himself into alertness, to remember what he had said and to work out exactly what was happening and what his next move should be. He wondered if this was what senility was like. A small voice within was telling him he should be furious – particularly with Eaton, with whom he had worked in the past – but for the moment all he could feel was relief that he was free of the place.

  ‘Where are we going, driver?’

  ‘I’ve had instructions, sir. Not far from here.’

  Wilde slumped back and closed his eyes. He felt the shudder of the gear being engaged, and then blacked out again.

  *

  Rudolf Coburg knew they would be hunting him. He knew that his life depended on complete isolation. He splashed cold water on the hot stones and a burst of steam enveloped him and took his breath away. Never had he experienced such intense heat. He wasn’t quite sure whether it counted as pleasure or pain, but Axel Anton had assured him it not only gave great health benefits, but was considered the height of luxury these days. ‘The Finns are very keen, Herr Coburg,’ he had said. ‘They swear it has health benefits, and I believe they may well be right.’

  At his side, he had a bottle of vodka, half empty. He had had more than enough of it, but still it was tempting. Everyone drank vodka to dull the pain – all the SS guards in the camp, all the train drivers, all the Hiwis who did the dirtiest work. Who would not want to slip away into oblivion after what they did and what they witnessed? Who could bear to live in this hideous world?

  It was dawn, the beginning of another day of hiding. He had left open the window in the night and had been tormented by midges. God, this place. Anton had sung its praises as the perfect hide-out and a place to meditate on life.

  When he couldn’t sleep, which was every night, he tried reading one of the German-language books Anton had left him, but he couldn’t concentrate. He read a paragraph, then read it again. And again. A whole page became a saga, and his mind’s eye drifted to the endless sea and the snakes sunbathing on the grey rocks. The snakes were there in his waking daylight hours, and in his mind after dark.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Axel Anton had said cheerily. ‘You’ll be left alone here. Nobody comes because they don’t like the snakes. You’ll be safe.’

  Yes, it was a lovely, peaceful little island. The cabin was splendidly appointed with a large picture window, a pleasant sitting room where he could read and a comfortable bedroom which in other days might have been the perfect place to sleep. At first Coburg had been impressed and hoped it would be therapeutic, but every day was worse than the last.

  And then there was this separate hut, the sauna, with its benches, its woodstove and its invigorating scent of pine. Surely this would soothe him into sleep? But it didn’t.

  Today he would drink no vodka, but he would keep the bottle with him like a talisman, just in case, because he couldn’t bear to have it out of his reach. Even so, it did not improve things. Vodka did not make the world less wretched. Once, in London, long before the war, he had seen Macbeth. ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep.’ He would sleep no more. Sleep had been murdered in Poland at that little railway siding near forest and farmland and a short drive from the hunting lodge with its fine food and wine and girls.

  The SS-Obersturmführer had welcomed them all most correctly, like a good Nazi. His name was Eberl. Herr Dokteur Irmfried Eberl, which was a name never to be forgotten, a name that would shame the circles of hell. He had a greasy little moustache like Hitler’s and he shook each of his guests by the hand.

  In the fields nearby, fires were burning and there was singing and the occasional pistol shot among the Hiwis, but on the ramp that served as a platform there was only the stench of faecal waste, decay and some sort of gas, the long railway train and the sound of moaning, half-human, h
alf-animal. There were, too, great piles of belongings – shoes and coats, dresses and skirts, hats and suitcases, and piles of banknotes, spectacles and jewels. Piles of everyday clothing and other effects, ten metres high. Enough to dwarf a house.

  Müller had stepped forward. ‘What you are about to see, gentlemen,’ he began, ‘is the supreme example of German efficiency, and it is a credit to all of you whose efforts in Berlin make it possible. Let me explain how it works: the journey here by train has already thinned the weeds. The strongest of those left alive will form our workforce until they, too, are pruned by disease and lack of calories. The remainder, waiting inside these cattle cars, are already too weak to resist, which makes our unpleasant task all the easier. You may find it difficult to watch at first but, in due course, you will come to realise that this is all for the Fatherland and one day you will be able to tell your grandchildren of the part you played in defending your race and advancing the Reich.’

  Coburg had stood transfixed. Horrified.

  Müller clapped his hands. ‘Now, let the show begin, Herr Dokteur Eberl.’

  The Obersturmführer barked an order. Coburg couldn’t hear what it was, but it meant something to his squadron of SS guards – the Unterscharführers – because they moved along the ramp with their leashed dogs and their Ukrainian underlings, five men taking up position in front of each wagon door, all of which were still closed, with barbed wire at the vent. With them went a larger squadron of bent men who wore prison garb. Each wagon was marked with a number in chalk – 120, 150, 180. These, Coburg now realised, were the numbers of people packed in each wagon, herded into a space designed for a few steers or oxen. They were the same numbers that appeared later on the transport paperwork at Referat IV B4.

  As one, the guards produced a key at the end of a chain attached to their belts, unlocked the wagon door, pulled it open with one hand and clutched a kerchief to their mouth with the other.

  ‘Raus! Raus! Raus! Schnell! Schnell! Schnell!’ Out! Out! Out! Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! The shouts went up even as the whips began to crack. At first there was no obvious movement, but then, a woman fell from the wagon nearest the party guests.

  Coburg recoiled. His first instinct was to go and assist the woman. But no one moved, and she simply rolled out and lay beside the track. He could tell that she was already dead and that no assistance would help, even if it were to be offered.

  Other corpses began to tumble out and then, tentatively, a few living men, women and children climbed down from their hellish wagons.

  Coburg watched. He couldn’t bear to watch, but nor could he look away. He didn’t want to meet the eyes of the others here, the men who had been laughing and drinking with him all night. He didn’t want to see their helpless horror and shame or, worse, their excitement or indifference.

  The living continued to emerge until there were hundreds of them. They were almost outnumbered by the dead. They stood hunched, clutching their valises and string-tied packs. They held their children close to their breasts or held their hands tightly.

  ‘Everyone out!’ The dogs were unleashed and leapt up into the wagons, snapping at those too ill to move, ignoring the dead. Old men and women who couldn’t move were savaged where they lay by the dogs’ ravening jaws. Others staggered and stumbled away from the dogs, trying to fend them off with their forearms or suitcases, tumbling down on to the tracks, facing the lash or the bullet even before they could pull themselves to their feet. The dogs followed them down, biting, snarling, drooling. Later, Obersturmführer Eberl confided in his guests that the dogs received immaculate care and ate the same high-quality food as their handlers. ‘I insist on it,’ he said. ‘Animal welfare standards must be maintained.’

  The white glare from the floodlights was blinding. The condemned had been in darkness so long, they could not look up and either closed or shielded their eyes.

  They were being forced to move now, driven by the Rottweilers and the whips and pistol shots towards an iron gateway, beyond which were long low barrackrooms. As they moved, their heads down, half-dead with fear and hunger and thirst, they passed the party guests without a glance.

  Rudolf Coburg wanted to vomit. The expensive contents of his stomach churned in his gullet and he fought to keep it all down. But then Eichmann, two steps away from him, did throw up and Coburg could no longer hold it in.

  ‘It’s quite natural,’ Müller said. ‘Do not be ashamed. In hospitals nurses soon learn to get over their queasiness, and so will you. Come along now, I want you to see the system that is used here. The system you gentlemen, each in your own small way, have helped to create. You must all take credit for this, and you deserve every honour. If there were an Iron Cross for your work, I would recommend you all.’

  The guests followed Müller and Eberl through the gate into the camp. The women and children were whipped to the barrackroom on the left, the men to the one on the right.

  ‘They are undressing,’ Eberl said. ‘The men will emerge first because the women will stay in their barracks and have their hair cut short – a nice style for their walk along the road to Heaven – and the hair that is removed will be sent back to Germany for the benefit of the Reich. Padding, perhaps, for comfortable slippers for our heroic submariners. There are good professional hairdressers in there, a dozen or more. The officer is kind to the women, he says, “Hurry, dear ladies, hurry to the baths while the water is still warm.” And so that takes a little longer, which is why the men go first.’ He turned to his guests. ‘Stand here and wait a few moments, gentlemen. Watch as they fold their arms about themselves to protect their modesty, even as they go to their deaths.’

  And then these pathetic people began to come out from their barracks, naked, their flesh white. Flesh like the luscious flesh of Dagmar, but a whole world away.

  It did not take long for Coburg to understand the purpose of their visit. The night had been an initiation rite. You are now one of us, and you share our shame and guilt. It was about incrimination and complicity, nothing else. You have seen it with your own eyes, you know now where the trains go and what happens to their human cargo. We’re all in it together, so don’t even think of turning on us.

  Two hours, the show had lasted. Two hours in which children, women and men had been herded into the gas rooms. Two hours of horror in which innocent people had been murdered without reason.

  He heard their screams and cries and, after half an hour, he saw their bodies dragged out with long metal hooks, searched intimately for concealed gold and gems, and flung into the pit. No longer was their flesh like Dagmar’s. This flesh was flecked with faeces and vomit. Bones were broken and twisted, bodies contorted into hellish shapes, breasts torn and bloody from the death struggle.

  Later, like an unthinking horse led by its reins, he was taken to the infirmary – the Lazarett with its red cross outside the door – and was ushered inside where there was nothing but another pit, half-full of corpses. He stood to one side with the other guests and watched as the lame and the sick, who could not walk unaided to the gas room, were carried here on stretchers to receive a bullet in the back of the neck.

  At the end the honoured guests were all given more schnapps and each was handed a gift of a precious item of jewellery, collected from the dead. ‘Something for your loved ones back home,’ Eberl told them. ‘That is the way to a pretty girl’s heart.’ Coburg, unseen, had trodden the diamond ring he was given into the mud.

  He was ashamed now of everything. Ashamed of his unquestioning loyalty to the Nazis over the past twelve years, ashamed that he had fired bullets at pictures of Jews, ashamed of being rather pleased when the Nuremberg laws were brought in to restrict Jewish rights, ashamed of the ghettos and the transports which he had helped Eichmann organise, ashamed that he had been too stupid to understand that there was no new homeland in the East for the Jews. Only death.

  Ashamed that he was an accomplice to mass murder.

  No, the word ‘ashamed’ was not enough for the dep
ravity of what he had witnessed. It was a stain on his very name. A stain that would not be washed clean, however many generations came after him.

  Here now, in this wooden hut on this little island, he threw more water on the stones, then more, until the air was burning hot. He wanted the steam to burn away the stain, to cleanse him. But he knew that 10,000 scaldings would never make him clean again.

  Chapter 22

  Wilde was curled up on the stone step outside the front door. The milkman looked at him for a few moments, then stepped past him and rang the bell. Lydia answered within a few moments. At first she saw the milkman’s irritating grin, then looked down with horror at Wilde.

  ‘Look what the cat didn’t quite bring in, Mrs Wilde,’ the milkman said, pointing at Wilde’s inert form.

  Lydia hated it when the milkman called her Mrs Wilde, because he was quite aware that she was still Miss Morris, but on this occasion she ignored him. She was more concerned by the sight of Tom lying unconscious at her feet. She immediately knelt down beside him and put the back of her hand to his brow. Finding warmth, she breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘Alive, is he, missus?’

  She ignored the milkman. ‘Tom? Please wake up, Tom.’

  He groaned.

  Johnny was now at her side. ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ he said. ‘Daddy sleep.’

  ‘Let me give you a hand, Mrs Wilde,’ the milkman said. ‘Help you carry your old man inside? Looks like he had a few too many bevies last night.’

  ‘I’ll deal with it, thank you.’ Her retort was curt, and she instantly regretted it. Whether or not she liked the confounded milkman, she had to deal with him every day.